Fed does two primary things to regulate/stimulate the economy: - sets interest rate (how much is the loan rate that many banks will change you is the fed borrow

Fed does two primary things to regulate/stimulate the economy: - sets interest rate (how much is the loan rate that many banks will change you is the fed borrowing rate plus change) - print money aka quantitive easing or how much money to effectively give away from nothing by buying things like corporate bonds that then allows those companies to invest in ideally stimulate economic activity Since 2009, US interest rates have been rock bottom and QE largely stopped recently before COVID ended. That's because the economy was largely back on track . The Fed's plan was to start pulling the fictitious money out of the system by selling off those corporate bonds and around 2019 markets started to wobble. COVID forced everybody to print money again, but this time too much money was printed and people threw money at anything. Now that COVID isn't affecting the economy as significantly, travel, etc.. There is now out of control inflation somewhat related to supply shocks but also greatly exacerbated by cash in hand buyers looking to spend regardless of the cost. Now the fed has the opposite problem from 2009/2020 so they have to start making money more expensive again and start to extract money from the market once again. This is scaring the hell out of equity markets because there's less cheap money to help juice speculation and cheap expansion (think all the Ubers of the world who don't make enough money). Their business models start to go down south when there's no new bank to cover their largesse.