Regular readers of Alt-M don't need to be told that yours truly is no fan of the Fed's gigantic credit footprint. Even before the recent crisis, he lamented both the extent to which the Fed went from merely regulating this nation's short-term money market to being its short-term money market, and the switch to an abundant reserve or "floor" operating system that made a bigger Fed footprint inevitable. By the time the Great Recession ended, the Fed's balance sheet was more than four times as large as it was in mid-2008. And now, thanks to the COVID-19 crisis, it has doubled in size yet again, to just shy of $7.6 trillion.