by Wolf Richter
Wolf Street
QE from crisis to crisis, and even when there is no crisis.
The Fed’s total assets on its balance sheet for the week through Wednesday, May 5, fell by $10 billion from the prior week and by $40 billion from the record two weeks earlier, to $7.77 trillion. Over the 14 months since the crazy money-printing show has started, the Fed has piled $3.53 trillion in assets on top of its existing mountain.
But wait… Since the repo market blew out in September 2019, this can-do Fed has added $4.0 trillion to its balance sheet, more than doubling it in 18 months. That’s how nuts these efforts have been to bail out the biggest speculators, inflate the biggest Everything Mania, and create the biggest wealth disparity America has ever seen, all of it in the shortest amount of time: