Bern
Member

5/28/20 - $7.145T $60B increase over last week. Balance sheet expansion appears to be slowing down.

5/21/20 - $7.085T $103B increase. Less than half of last week's increase. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-21/fed-has-purchased-1-8-billion-of-corporate-bond-etfs-so-far

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/05/19/doj-centralizes-control-of-sensitive-insider-trading-probes-269914

With an exponential rate of growth, I'm guessing it will reach a quadrillion before I die. What's a few more zeros between friends?

More: https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/econographics/the-rise-of-central-bank-digital-currencies/ They have an interactive map of the world. Hover your cursor over a country to see a report of their status with respect to a CBDC.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-21/how-larry-fink-s-blackrock-is-helping-the-fed-with-bond-buying?srnd=premium

Heaven forbid any child attend a zoom meeting while not in compliance with the school's dress code.

Yeah, $305 million worth. They started buying Tuesday, so balance sheet report just shows the first two days or so of activity. They are just getting started. https://wolfstreet.com/2020/05/14/fed-finally-buys-whopping-305-million-in-corporate-bonds-after-two-months-of-jawboning-and-media-hype-that-triggered-a-huge-rally/

5/14/20 - $6.982T $213B increase. Biggest weekly increase in a month after steadily declining increases.

Who will be surprised when the "ethical wall" turns out to be made of swiss cheese?

Thanks for sharing.

I haven't seen any detail on it. I only just now (when I looked prior to my last post) noticed the line item in the report. Apparently they started reporting on it with the April 16 report. It went from $0 -> $0.95B -> $2.71B -> $3.347B -> $3.948B. A drop in the bucket of the overall balance sheet for sure, but it would be interesting to know which zombies the Fed are helping to continue to eat brains. Wolf Richter posted another analysis of the balance sheet report: https://wolfstreet.com/2020/05/08/fed-cuts-qe-helicopter-money-for-wall-street-further-still-hasnt-bought-junk-bonds-or-etfs-was-just-jawboning/ I'm not sure he noticed the CPFF line item as he says they haven't bought junk bonds yet...

5/7/20 - $ 6.769 T Just a $66B increase (over last week). Looks like the Fed now owns $4B in the "Commercial Paper Funding Facility II LLC".

The Fed has increased their balance sheet roughly 50% within the last couple of months. That is a lot, but most of that increase occurred *before* all of the buying programs the Fed has announced. Most of the programs the Fed has announced within the last month have not actually happened as announced. "Just" an $82B increase in the last week's report is surprisingly low given the programs the Fed had announced. The wolfstreet analysis that I referenced goes into more detail on the issue. I'm not alone in noticing this as you can see from the ZH link devil21 posted above.