
The answer is pretty simple. The cost of propping up the system is greater than the profit of printing money out of thin air. After all, even the ability to create money from nothing still has to go through a process, and that process is finite. So, even if you create $200 billion and use it to buy a distressed asset that turns out to have negative value of $50 billion, you just lost $50 billion with your free money.
What this chart suggests is that the Fed is having a hard time keeping everything propped up, a much harder time that it had during the 2008 financial crisis. The AI boom helped mitigate the crisis, but that’s rapidly coming to an end.