These Are the Things That Correlate With the Fed's 'Easy Money'

Faced with the most severe economic downturn since the Great Depression, the U.S. Federal Reserve did the only thing it could: flood the financial system with liquidity.

The move to so-called easy money arguably saved the world from a worse fate and radically changed the economic backdrop as well as the landscape for financial markets. The monetary base, which consists of U.S. currency in circulation and reserves held at the Fed, is our chosen proxy for easy money—of all the metrics available, it's the one most directly influenced by central bank actions.