The key distinction is that the Fed is trading the new money for high-quality collateral. The original owners of the collateral will return the Fed's money within weeks of months in exchange for the return of the collateral.
The situation is exactly as kylebenzle inferred; the Fed is injecting new fiat money into the economy and it's going straight into the pockets of rich financial institutions which add no value whatsoever to the economy or society.
Financial institutions control who gets levered money (loans). They provide a huge value to an economy and society in a fractional reserve banking system.
You are upset about the Fed, when you should be upset about the government who controls fiscal policy. The government can provide tax holidays and other benefits more directly to people, as is their role, not the Fed.
Both the government and the Fed are to blame; one for designing the whole scheme and the other for implementing it. I'm upset about the idea that the Fed can inject money into the economy based on obscure criteria. From the perspective of an average citizen, who is legally obliged to accept Fed money in exchange for their labor, whatever set of criteria the Fed chooses is going to be inherently inadequate; the mere lack of transparency behind the Fed's operation is by itself sufficient to discredit the validity of the entire operation.
Money backed by gold was good money precisely and fundamentally because everyone understood what gold was and where it came from. Now, essentially nobody knows what fiat money is or where it comes from and yet everyone is legally obliged to accept it.
Even when "money backed by gold" was a slightly less completely inaccurate fiction than it is now, what people "knew" to be money was many, many, many different things, depending on where they were and what they did for work.
Stories like this are like religious narratives, and "money backed by gold" is like the story of the angry god allegedly giving tablets to some dude. It is at BEST an allegory but yall go and read it like it happened.
Money is a much more interesting topic that goldbugs give it...um...credit for.
There is another recent discussion on HN:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22573204
that has a lot of pointers to good resources from which to begin the discovery process.
The alternative is, the bank collapsing, taking some part of the economy with it.
I remember 2 years ago the market throwing a tantrum because of the fed unwinding it balance sheet. Doesn’t that mean that typical loans are never repaid and the Fed just let the bonds mature?