Millennials have been dealt two very bad economic hands during their lifetimes.

First, they weathered the 2008 financial crisis brought about by reckless risk-taking in the financial sector. Now, they confront a much more severe economic calamity caused not by Wall Street's misbehavior but by a malicious virus. Yet in both situations, the burden is disproportionately falling on working families, many of them millennials who are just now starting to accumulate some wealth and security.

And while Washington has responded aggressively with early commitments to help Main Street, as stimulus programs unfold it's becoming apparent that Wall Street (again) is going to come out on top.

The primary reason for this is that our elected officials have ceded too much responsibility for the economy to the Federal Reserve. But the Fed is not well equipped for this role. It is essentially a big bank, primarily configured to lend to other big banks.

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When an economic crisis hits, its instinctive response is to pump money into them. It can do this easily because, unlike us, big banks are allowed to have reserve accounts where the Fed can directly credit funds.

When the Fed wants to stimulate the economy, it can make loans to big banks at very low rates or buy assets from them outright. The Fed used these kinds of tools during the 2008 financial crisis to help stabilize the banking system, but it's not clear those tools did much for the rest of the economy.

To Federal Reserve Chair Jay Powell's credit, this time around the Fed has promised to help Main Street by supporting lending to small and medium-sized businesses. But the Fed is finding that hard to do because there are so many of them. The programs the Fed is trying to launch are administratively more cumbersome and have more conditions than the programs supporting large institutions.

And the Fed must still rely on banks as intermediaries. Meanwhile, trillions have already been lent out to Wall Street firms to support their "repo" operations (short-term funding markets), and trillions more will be dispersed to support commercial paper (short-term debt), money market funds (also bailed out in 2008), asset-backed securities, corporate debt and municipal bonds. The Fed is even propping up corporate junk bonds.