Nah the fed will keep the music on forever. Can't stop it now as it's too late. Everyone is so used to the free money and significant gains that any blip would cause a ripple effect that would be far worse than any collapse we have ever seen.
They can try but they will fail. Delay they've done impressively. Indefinitely prevent they'll fail miserably.
When the Fed does something that promotes price inflation, that inflationary effect is lessened to the (very large) extent that non-Americans hold dollars. We "export our inflation". And since the other monetary heavies, like the euro and yuan, are equally inflationary, the dollar doesn't lose its position as the dominant reserve currency.
Because QE is not money printing. Not in Japan and not in the US. Even Powell has publicly admitted this. All those media pundits and no-nothing journalists who call it that have no idea what they are talking about.
Debt has to be paid back in dollars. Rich have most of their assets in stocks, bonds, and real estate. If you tried to convert one third to cash, you couldn't. You would just crash all markets. And government would still not have learned to restrain its spendthrift habits. In the resulting depression, it would immediately begin to plunge us back deeply into debt. And to top it off, the 1% (and a whole lot of scared wealthy people below them, because no one would want to become the new 1% after the people above them left) would flee the US in droves and take as much of their money and investment acumen with them as possible. The only people left would be the people who could not afford to leave, and they would have to pay enough in taxes to replace all the wealthy people who had fled.
It's not different in Japan--or in Europe either. QE can lead to excessive bank lending in some circumstances (and bank lending is what creates inflation--and economic growth), but those circumstances do not prevail in the developed world these days. However, it might still induce increased bank lending in emerging market countries with younger populations, underinvestment in business and household technology, and less debt weighing on the economy.
All sorts of financial engineering and innovations are possible to prevent the massive sell offs. With a big chunk of US debt out of the play, the US economy will see a major boost in growth as if gotten a new injection of vitamins and energy etc. However, US government needs to watch its spending ways for sure for the long term.