This comment gets it. I think it's disingenuous and borderline immoral to use a big number to drum up sensationalist panic without explaining how it even behaves or contextualizing what it exists inside of. People are reflexively going to complain about how it seems like 2008 all over again even though the beast is, as you say, entirely different.
10T is a huge number, but that's not the issue -- the issue is that as a percentage of GDB that's also at an all times high value.
It is like 2008 in the sense that a bubble popping (corporate debt this time) is forcing the FED to bailout irresponsible corporations yet again (see the recent balance sheet increase).
That's just a bit like saying when drug prices are so low it's ok to have a lot of overdoses, because, hey, people are taking advantage of those low drug prices.
If we entered a new era where such low interest rates are necessary for the "econony", great let's all accept this new fact.
However the interest rates were cut in 2008 so that elites could be bailed out, lest they default and drag everybody else and they were supposed to be brought back where they used to be; the central banks balance sheets were supposed to be brought back to where they were historically -- none of this has happened.
Nah, the interest rates being so low serve mostly the elites while propping up massive bubbles in financial markets, real-estate and big corporations too big to fail.
The central banks/states get to pick who is saved, involve themselves more and more in the economy and replace what should be regular market mechanisms and create huge systemic problems.
What's so wrong with savers receiving decent yields for their bank deposits?
Why should everybody all of a sudden use their savings to buy houses that they let?
Just so they can fuel the vicious bubble cycle of the de jour investment vehicle the elites have picked?
Why should central banks exchange money printed out of thin air with negative interest rates for ill performing bonds, locking in the profits of bond-holders?
The only answer is "because otherwise it will lead to cascading series of defaults that will bring down the economy" -- then the problem is the financialization of the economy and no actionable way of removing the bad apples from the basket, in which case we're allready in for a catastrophic failure of the current financial system when all the apples will go bad.
