Different type of printing. The intervention in 2008, printed asset money (not bank liability deposits as were given out recently), and crucially used it to bu

Different type of printing. The intervention in 2008, printed asset money (not bank liability deposits as were given out recently), and crucially used it to buy a 4 trillion of bad loans from the Banking System, which were then placed in runoff (the Fed ended up making a small profit on this as it happens). Think of it as deliberately creating a loop in the monetary system to get the loans away from the banks, where the losses would crash the banking system, and into a place where they could just be quietly allowed to drain off. The money printing last year on the other hand, was a Weimar style directly into liability deposit accounts, and that has a much broader impact. To be fair about the subtleties of all this - had the banking system still relied on the old reserve based regulation as used in the 1920´s, 2008 would have triggered a hyperinflation - but as Basel capital regulation now also controls the system, that intervened to prevent a monetary spiral with more lending creation more (deposit) money.