Note, incidentally, the tiny little wiggle at the year 2000.  That represents the Y2K monetary expansion, judged huge at the time.  There are plenty of people who would argue that the Fed’s efforts to shrink the money supply afterwards—that is, Greenspan’s mopping up operation—burst the high-tech bubble, causing the last downturn.  How will the Fed mop up after this expansion?

Update:

Robinson has a followup.

Below, as Mark Steyn has noted, I provide a link to a chart demonstrating the utterly unprecedented expansion in the monetary base in which Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has engaged over the last few months. Now economist Bruce Bartlett (who is, I should note, an old friend) has written to take me to task.  It’s no good showing what Bernanke has done, Bruce suggests, without showing the problem to which he was responding.

And Bartlett attempts to channel Friedman.