The best source I've come across on central banking and monetary policy is Nomi Prins' Collusion - in particular, because it doesn't just look at the Fed, but rather the top central banks of the world, from the USA to Europe to Japan to China to Brazil. They're all linked together to some degree via currency swaps and similar mechanisms. For example:<p>""On March 9, 2015, Draghi introduced yet another QE program, the Expanded Asset Purchase Programme (EAPP). This one would buy public sector securities, too. The program consisted of a third covered bond purchase program (CBPP3), an asset-backed securities purchase program (ABSPP). and a public sector purchase program (PSPP). It could have equally decided to buy scones and jam or croissants and butter - that would have spread money more directly into the real economy, at least as far as bakers and fruit farms were concerned. These purchases of public- and private-sector securities would run E60 billion per month." p226<p>That's a fundamental point - monetary policy alone doesn't decide outcomes, it's who benefits from a given monetary policy - and that's often determined by a government's fiscal policy, which is supposedly separate from a central bank's monetary policy: again, see Prins:<p>> "But in the bank's moment of peril, the Fed unleashed a global policy of injecting fabricated money into the worldwide financial system. This flood of cheap money resulted in the subsequent issuance of trillions of dollars of debt, pushing the global level of debt to $325 trillion, more than three times global GDP. By mid 2017, the total assets held by the G3 central banks - the US Fed, the European Central Bank (ECB), and the Bank of Japan (BOJ) - through conjured-money QE programs - had hit more than $13.5 trillion. The figure was equivalent to 17 percent of currency-adjusted global GDP."<p>> "Specifically, the largest private banks, including JPMorganChase, DeutscheBank, and HSBC, that inhaled this cheap money were not required to increase their lending to the Main Street economy as a condition of the availability of that money. Instead, the banks hoarded the cash. US banks colluded with the Fed to get that cash by stashing their bonds as 'excess reserves' (more reserves for emergencies than regulations required) on the Fed's books. And, because of the Emergency Federal Stabilization Act of 2008, they recieved 0.25 percent interest per year from the Fed on those reserves, too. Wall Street used its easy access to cheap money to increase speculation in derivatives and other complex securities. <i>They used it to buy back their own shares, thus effectively manipulating their own stock - in broad daylight and with explicit approval from the Fed. In turn these banks dialed back their lending to small and midsized businesses, which hampered their growth potential.</i>"<p><a href="https://nomiprins.com/books/" rel="nofollow">https://nomiprins.com/books/</a>