Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell tried once more to tell U.S. markets what they wanted to hear, saying the Fed would ‘soon announce measures to add to the supply of reserves over time.”
A little history lesson for my younger readers:
Back in January 2008, the Fed’s balance sheet was approximately $880 billion in assets.Those were mostly securities (exclusively or mostly U.S. Treasury bonds) purchased in the past during monetary expansions (when the Fed buys a security from a member bank, it takes in the security and gives the member bank U.S. dollars, meaning there are more dollars available to lend out into the economy).
During its various rounds of “quantitative easing” and other inflationary programs in the years after the 2008 crisis, the Fed’s balance sheet increased to over $4.4 trillion. This was a once-in-a-lifetime thing, said the Fed at the time, and the balance sheet would quickly be “normalized” when the once-in-a-lifetime crisis was past.
Well, the Fed began normalizing its balance sheet in late 2017 (with the president screaming bloody murder the whole time) and got down to about $3.7 trillion – still over four times what it was in January 2008.
The normalization effort didn’t last long. Despite Powell’s comments, the Fed actually began adding to its balance sheet again in August. It’s now back to $3.945 trillion – a $200 billion increase in just two months. In other words, the Fed just added to its balance sheet in those two months 1/4 of what it added during its first 95 years of existence (1913 – 2008). This in an economy the Fed says is strong.
The Rubicon is in the rear view mirror. Where this monetary mayhem will take us is anyone’s guess.
Tom Mullen is the author of Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness? Part One and A Return to Common Sense: Reawakening Liberty in the Inhabitants of America.
