Although there’s been no official announcement, the Federal Reserve has restarted QE — better known as Quack Economics.

You might know it better as Quantitative Easing, in which the central bank buys large amounts of government bonds or other assets to help stimulate the economy. There have been three of these QEs since the financial crisis more than 10 years ago. But the big question now: Is there a new crisis that has the Fed dusting off QE?

The Fed isn’t saying.

QE is simple to understand even though economists gave it a sophisticated name. Here’s how it works: The Fed electronically prints trillions of dollars in extra money, which it uses to purchase bonds and other securities.

This was supposed to keep interest rates low. And the low interest rates were supposed to help the economy grow.

Once the economy got going, the Fed was supposed to stop printing money. The economy would then stand on its own.

I used the phrase “supposed to” a number of times because QE didn’t quite live up to expectations. And there have been many vocal critics — myself included — who have argued that QE was just another version of the age-old money-printing schemes that have created enormous inflation problems in the past.

If you print too much money, then prices are bound to go up.

And once prices start rising the possibility of unchecked inflation becomes very real.

Let’s say, for instance, that you have $200 in your household budget for groceries, and you’ve been making do with that amount. Suddenly the price of food rises 10 percent, 20 percent or 30 percent because there is too much money chasing the same amount of goods.

The cost of things is as important to your family as the amount of money you earn.

Another big problem is that QE didn’t do much to help the economy, which has been stuck at around 2 percent annual growth for years.

Still another problem: What the Fed is really doing is rigging the bond market, where interest rate levels are ultimately determined.

By being a shill bidder at government bond auctions with QE money in its pocket, the Fed is causing the prices of bonds to go up. And that automatically causes the yield on those bonds (the interest rate) to come down.

Like at any other auction, eventually legitimate buyers won’t stand for this bid rigging any more.

QE advocates have argued since the beginning that their scheme is different from past money-printing operations. They argued that this wasn’t real money since it was designed strictly to purchase bonds and keep interest rates low.

This extra QE money wasn’t going to seep out into the real economy. And it wouldn’t affect things like living expenses.

And the Fed under former chairman Ben Bernanke — who initiated the first Quantitative Easing in November 2008 — promised that QE would be reversed when it was no longer needed. That means, the Fed, whose balance sheet exploded in size to nearly $4.5 trillion, would be selling the bonds it bought during the era of low interest rates.

The Fed under current Chairman Jerome Powell even started reducing the balance sheet, but only to the point where it was holding around $3.8 trillion worth of securities.

But it stopped the sell-off — essentially reneging on its promise to reverse QE.

Then last week the Fed double reneged when it announced that it would start purchasing $60 billion a month in securities from the open market.

This is the same as QE only the Fed didn’t call it that. So, if the Fed instituted Quantitative Easing in the first place in 2008 because there was a financial crisis, what’s the problem now?

There are plenty of problems to choose from. Here are some guesses:

Since QE was employed the first time because of a banking/Wall Street crisis, the first guess has to be that there is a hidden problem now that the Fed knows about and we don’t. US financial markets look healthy, although there are bubbles. The best guess is that the Fed is worried about a crisis somewhere else in the world that might affect us.

The political crisis in Washington would be my best guess. Although others in the media won’t admit it, there is currently a constitutional crisis in this country.

Democrats have been trying to expel President Trump from office ever since he was elected. Right now there is an impeachment investigation in the House. The Fed may be trying to get in front of all this through QE rather than rate cuts.

Or, maybe the economy is really doing as well as we are led to believe by government statistics. Maybe the Fed knows something we don’t (although that’s unlikely in this case) and is reviving Quantitative Easing for this reason.

Perhaps the Fed is just caving in to President Trump’s demands for lower interest rates and decided to do this in a more circumspect way. Rather than simply announcing rate cuts, the Fed might be trying to keep borrowing costs low by buying bonds.

The Fed could also be trying to spur more inflation, which has been coming in under its preferred target of around 2 percent a year. Maybe it believes that by putting more money into the economy through QE it will get inflation up to a more desirable level without overdoing it.