The key moment in this chart is in 2008, when the red ‘All Other’ goes negative. That means that there was no money available in the private sector to fuel business activity.
From Global Macro Monitor:
If, as the President says, ‘the flow of credit is the lifeblood of our economy”, the country would have died in 2009 had not the policymakers taken the extraordinary measures they did. These charts illustrate how close we were to the abyss and should give a clearer perspective on what Bernanke & Co. were/are up against. They are heroes, in our book, for stabilizing the situation and pulling us back from the abyss.
