Last I checked a 3rd of Americans aren't paying rent now? It's going to explode dude.
If you look at winners and losers in the stock market, followed the Q2 earnings season and saw what companies were facing, it seems clear to me that our economy faced a transition rather than a crash. There are huge winners in this market. Home Depot, Target, and other major retailers all announced record breaking income this past quarter. People are still shopping. Tech has lead the charge due to WFH and the shift to online. There are many more factors in this economic shift than could be explained by the Fed's money printing.
How is that not "buying the stock market"?
Fed did not purchase a single share of HTZ.
They hold two ETFs that include Hertz corporate bonds. Not stocks. Bonds. And not new issues.
There has actually been interesting speculation that the Fed will eventually buy stocks similar to the Bank of Japan over the past few decades [1] but the Fed hasn’t done it yet.
[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kevincoldiron/2020/07/18/the-fe...
(Edit: Maybe GP was thinking that bankruptcy could lead to debt converting into equity? But even then the Fed’s holding would be indirect and the bond ETF probably wouldn’t hold onto the equity.)
The fact remains that they've spent over a trillion dollars on junk bonds and they are almost singlehandedly financing the entire economy right now.
Whether they directly bought stocks is irrelevant because money's fungible. They injected trillions of dollars into the economy[1]. If that drove institutional investors to stocks from treasuries/bonds (in search of higher returns), the effect is identical to them buying stocks directly.
[1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/bst_recenttren...
This appears across multiple states in the US and in multiple countries.
Restaurant, cinema, theatre, and travel bookings most especially.
Still, those on top are still raking in profit - arguably the crisis isn't that we suddenly are running out of energy, food or housing - just that we're distributing it so badly that we've created poor living conditions for a lot of people.