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Toys “R” Us filed for bankruptcy protection Tuesday. The next day, the Federal Reserve announced it will begin to shrink its balance sheet.

There is no causality in that chain of events; just the opposite, in fact.

By flooding the economy with money and keeping interest rates at unprecedentedly low levels, the U.S. central bank may well have kept the once-dominant big-box toys retailer going by allowing it to soldier on while carrying a massive, $5 billion-plus debt load.

To be sure, Toys “R” Us’s Chapter 11 filing doesn’t mean its demise. In fact, this is a shot in the arm. Post-bankruptcy financing means that suppliers will resume shipping merchandise for the crucial holiday selling system, which they had been reluctant to do prior to the filing.

So, the specialist retailer lives to carry on against the far more formidable competition from Wal-Mart Stores (WMT), Target (TGT) and, of course, Amazon.com (AMZN). I haven’t set foot in a Toys “R” Us store for years, but memories of dingy stores with lousy service and erratic inventory from the days when my kids were young would certainly keep me away. Doubly so, since I simply can get anything I want in a couple of days from Amazon Prime.

I’ll admit it was charming that Geoffrey the Giraffe, the chain’s mascot, would call my daughter on her birthday each year. But that the calls kept coming as late as her 21st birthday suggested something was a bit amiss with its information systems.

Moreover, toys are no longer are a fun business, either. “Long-term secular trends for the industry are troublesome: birth rates are lower in developed countries and mobile phones and computers are replacing Toys’ core video games and electronics,” Kim Nolan, an analyst with Gimme Credit wrote in a research note last year.

Yet the availability of cheap money kept Toys “R” Us going. Creditors agreed to a renegotiation of some of its debt last year in an attempt to push out some maturities and give the company a bit more breathing room. But to no avail, given the retailer now has to operate with the protection of the bankruptcy court.

It’s not just Toys “R” Us. Investors are piling into the debt of retail real-estate investment trusts, The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this week. Mall REITs have been able to borrow for less than 6% out to 2026, supposedly because debt investors aren’t as skittish as equity types, according to a REIT executive quoted in the piece.

It also could reflect the low absolute and tight spreads in the current credit market. Bank of America Merrill Lynch Tuesday noted a “milestone” in a key credit derivative for the investment-grade corporate market equaled the level paid for insurance at the low of Oct. 18, 2007. In case you don’t remember, that was right around when the Dow Jones Industrial Average peaked--and before the financial crisis deepened in earnest in 2008.

In other words, credit conditions are the easiest they have been in a decade. That has reflected the massive liquidity injected from the Fed’s securities purchases, which has expanded its balance sheet from under $1 trillion before the crisis to $4.5 trillion currently.

That process is slated to begin to go into reverse when the Fed begins to pare its holdings of Treasury and agency mortgage-backed securities in October. What that may mean is less money that has to get put to work by return-parched investors. And, in turn, fewer zombie retailers and malls being kept on life support.