Sure, that's a question that's been asked a lot over the last decade. We saw in the 2008-09 crisis, for example, that there were large increases in debt but not necessarily in the money supply. The two can be separate things. The danger is that if the credit markets are unwilling to fund federal debt then the central bank may have to buy that debt and start to monetize it and print money to buy it. That's the risk that I think you're worried about. I don't think we're at that situation yet.
Clearly, in fact, federal government interest rates remain quite low because of the trillions of dollars that have been flowing out of stock markets, commodity markets and even private sector debt markets around the world. All that money is going to one place. People want to buy government debt, even at the ridiculously low interest rates being offered.
In the short term, there doesn't seem to be any need for monetizing debt. I think a bigger problem would not be monetizing debt, but as I mentioned in my opening remarks, we don't want credit markets that are only willing to finance federal government debt endlessly. At some point, we have to go back to funding private sector activity. It's worth noting that there's a lot of talk about how interest rates are low these days, but actually they've been rising for the private sector because people perceive that the risk in the private sector is increasing. We want to normalize that as quickly as possible.