The Marriner S. Eccles Federal Reserve Board Building in Washington, D.C. Photo by Jose Luis Magana/AP files

The United States Federal Reserve has played a central role over the past 15 years in inflating asset prices through aggressive monetary policy.

By slashing interest rates to near-zero levels and expanding its balance sheet via quantitative easing (QE), the Fed injected trillions of dollars into the financial system. This liquidity tsunami didn’t just stabilize markets; it supercharged them.

Nowhere was this more evident than in the tech sector, where companies such as Apple Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Meta Platforms Inc. used the cheap capital to innovate and give their growth a good boost via good old-fashioned financial engineering.

The buyback boom: Financial engineeri

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