The world's top central bankers have pulled out all the stops in their fight against the coronavirus fallout, taking money printing to extremes that may become the new normal long after the pandemic is over.
The tools used by the Bank of Japan, the U.S. Federal Reserve and the central banks in the eurozone differ slightly, but they mostly involve new, massive purchases of financial assets and cheap credit for banks and companies.
At their core, they all revolve around one concept: gobbling up private and public debt, which has been growing for a long time and is bound to explode as the pandemic hampers borrowers' ability to pay and bumps up government spending.