As September rolled into October, the US central bank’s monetary madness blew all over us like a fountain of foam in a windstorm. First, the Fed burst into $75 billion in overnight funding operations due to obvious shortages all over the map in bank reserves. Then the surge spread beyond that into longer-term temporary funding of $30 billion twice a week because the overnight loans were not up to the needs. That still not being enough to end the troubles, the Fed’s rapidly expanded the overnight operations to $100 billion and doubled the term operations to $60 billion. Those operations still did not end the troubles the Fed’s tightening had created, so the Fed decided to flood the murky money pools of this world with $60 billion in frothy treasury purchases.
Although this money was permanent reinflation of the Fed’s balance sheet (unlike the temporary overnight and term repos), the Fed told us they are not QE (never mind that exactly like all previous QE, they give new fiat money with interest to primary treasury dealer banks that buy treasuries from the US government). The banks rushed in with more than four times the offers to resell treasuries they had purchased from the government to the Fed than what the Fed was willing to buy.
