Age of Easy Money – How the Fed Changed the American Economy
For more than a decade, the Federal Reserve flooded the economy with cheap money. FRONTLINE investigates how that experiment transformed America — and what happened when it ended.
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Why you've GOTTA.WATCH it
For more than a decade after the 2008 financial crisis, the United States lived through an extraordinary economic experiment: interest rates remained exceptionally low while the Federal Reserve pumped vast amounts of money into the financial system.
FRONTLINE’s Age of Easy Money investigates how those policies transformed the American economy — fueling financial markets, encouraging borrowing and risk-taking, and contributing to a growing divide between Wall Street and Main Street.
Directed by James Jacoby, the documentary traces the story from the Great Recession through the COVID-19 pandemic and the enormous stimulus that followed. It examines how easy money gradually became the new normal — and why attempts to unwind those policies became increasingly difficult.
The film brings together current and former Federal Reserve officials, financial regulators, investors, economists and people experiencing the consequences of economic policy outside Wall Street.
Then came inflation. The Federal Reserve reversed course and began raising interest rates at the fastest pace in decades, exposing vulnerabilities that had accumulated throughout the era of cheap money. The documentary was released in March 2023 just as the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank provided a dramatic example of the strains emerging in the financial system.
Why you’ve GOTTA.WATCH it?
Interest rates, inflation and central-bank policy can sound abstract — until you see how profoundly they affect housing, markets, businesses and ordinary people. Age of Easy Money explains one of the biggest economic experiments of our time and asks what happens when the cheap-money era finally comes to an end.