The Fed can reduce the interest rate to zero, they can hike it up to 1 billion, but will they do it? I highly doubt it.

If they did a QE will it be effective, nope it won't be effective. See the problem with QE is that it's effective only effective when there is high market competition on the lending market.

QE basically is when the federal reserve buys toxic assets (loans that can't be repaid) from commercial banks (and those assholes who at the last minute decided to go from hedge fund to commercial around 2008 that we shant speak of) (cleaning balance sheets).

By having less toxic assets, they have more room to lend money which pays for businesses/housing/consumption.

But what we've observed is a gradual shift towards consolidation in the more recent years.

The problem with consolidation is that it funnels lending to less channels, which reduces the overall effectiveness of decreasing toxic assets.

And if you do QE, basically you're just dumping cash on banks and telling them "lend this as fast as how you used to when those other guys were with you on the market, oh and if you don't we're all fucked".

The Fed can't do very much that is legal, a lot of the problems still root to poor fiscal policy.

Which for the past several years dumbed down to has been support the "too big to fail". They made a little add-on to a budget bill that allowed for banks to deal in the same old shit again (securitizing toxic assets with prime assets again). IMO, Dodd Frank wasn't enough, Glass Steagall needs to come back, effectively locking investment banking activities away from commercial banking activities is far more safer than all this holding company "universal banking" horse shit.