Kevin Lamarque | Reuters
On Nov. 25, 2008, the Federal Reserve launched the shot heard around the financial world.
The U.S. central bank announced it would start using digitally created money to buy mortgage debt in an effort to drive down interest rates and resuscitate a dead housing market.
Along with a series of cuts that ultimately would take short-term interest rates close to zero, the move was part of an ambitious gambit to take the country out of its worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. It quickly expanded to the purchase of government bonds in a total of three rounds that spanned six years.
Flash forward 11 years later.
The Fed's campaign of "quantitative easing," along with keeping rates historically low, coincided with the longest expansion and most robust Wall Street bull market in U.S. history. Coming at a time of prolonged gridlock in Washington, the Fed's monetary policy moves thrust it front and center as the sole provider of stimulus.
"It was the decade of the central bank," said Quincy Krosby, chief market strategist at Prudential Financial. "Stimulus was wanting, and the burden fell on the central banks to normalize the environment."
Economists can and will debate the effectiveness and the long-term consequences of all the extraordinary moves, but there can be little doubt that in the past decade, the epicenter of economic management was at the Fed, along with its sister central banks around the globe.
No collective entity had greater influence for the past 10 years over the economy and financial markets.
'The extraordinary has become ordinary'
While the desire may have been a normalization of a global economy that had been...