The events of the financial crisis were unprecedented in the professional life of any existing central banker. They have stretched every aspect of the major monetary authorities in the US and Europe – staff and operations, policy instruments, and indeed the role and philosophy of the central banks themselves.
Perhaps most obviously, they also stretched the balance sheets of the US Federal Reserve, European Central Bank (ECB) and Bank of England (BoE). According to BoE calculations, since September 2008 the Fed balance sheet has expanded by about 12 percentage points of US gross domestic product (GDP), the BoE’s by about 10 percentage points of UK GDP, and the ECB’s balance sheet by about eight percentage points of eurozone GDP.
