"Japan had tried something similar in the early 2000s, but on a vastly smaller scale.

"The criticism of quantitative easing was that it would lead to runaway inflation. It clearly hasn’t done that, and it just may have avoided a catastrophic deflationary spiral. The bonus for investors was a spectacular advance in the stock market.  And to the surprise of many observers, the Fed so far has been able to start turning off the spigot without making the stock market tank. 

"We might want to hold onto some of the Fed's medals until we're sure we can get off the zero-interest cloud safely, but still...

"The European Central Bank?  If the Federal Reserve gets so much credit for bringing the U.S. out of recession, give the ECB some credit for helping avert a second worldwide meltdown.  If your job is not to follow the peregrinations of the world economy, the 2011 European debt crisis may well have slipped from your mind entirely. But it was very much front and center of the news then.-con't