by Wolf Richter
Wolf Street
Yesterday, the Fed raised its interest rate on overnight reverse repos, and this morning, a giant sucking sound of cash.
The Fed sold a record $756 billion in Treasury securities this morning in exchange for cash via overnight “reverse repos.” This was up by a stunning 45% from yesterday’s operations of $521 billion. There were 68 counterparties involved. Yesterday’s overnight reverse repos had matured and unwound this morning, to be more than replaced by today’s tsunami.
During the period starting in 2014 and then abating with the Fed’s quantitative tightening in 2018, the US financial system was also creaking under a massive amount of cash following years of QE, and the Fed drained some of that cash out via reverse repos. There too were spikes, but they came at the last day of the quarter, and particularly at the end of the year.