Deflation -- not inflation -- will win the day going forward because the money is pooling up within the banks as massive excess reserves and the banks aren't lending enough of it out. Money supply is up but money velocity is lower than it has been in over a century. The Fed can shove as much new money into the banking system as it wants, but there's no guarantee that money will make it out into the economy. Some of that money does find its way into asset prices, causing them to inflate, corporate executives have a mal-incentive to invest their capital into financial assets vs productivity. The end result is that overall economic productivity is depressed. When the Fed is able to monetize its liabilities as legal tender, which some are pushing for, then that would change the game and runaway inflation would ensue. Our current debt, demographic and technological trends are very deflationary and Inflation overcoming that is a difficult task until the rules are changed. So Beyond the extreme case of running out of assets to buy inflation is controlled. But If banks face capital requirements (due to regulation or other market-induced reasons), then the total value of reserves that banks can hold is linked to the total amount of bank capital available in the economy. Eventually, as bank capital becomes scarce, the cost of holding additional...