There was no good reason that open market purchases should be considered routine and non-threatening if the target Fed-funds rate is above a certain level and the end of the world below that level.
My point here is that open market purchases and the associated expansion of money growth rate are accepted as normal or routine Fed policy so long as interest rates have some room to decline in the process.
Our typical netbook routine -- writing this review in Microsoft Word, running Firefox with a handful of tabs open and listening to the new Weepies CD in iTunes -- felt faster than usual.