The Fiscal-Monetary Fusion: Pandemic Money, Inflation Whiplash, and the Militarized Liquidity Regime (2020–2025)

COVID didn’t just trigger stimulus — it fused fiscal and monetary policy into a single war machine. Between 2020 and 2025, governments and central banks ran coordinated mega-deficits, bought their own debt at scale, ignited the first real inflation shock of the QE era, and then slammed rates higher into a fragile, over-financialized system — all while AI, energy constraints, and a new cold war turned liquidity into an explicit weapon.