At the Engine of the Inflation, Still No Sign of Taper

Two weeks after the Nov. 3 announcement by the Federal Reserve’s Chair Jerome Powell that the Fed was beginning a $15 billion/month “taper” in its quantitative easing, or QE program, the New York Federal Reserve bank is continuing to increase the pace of securities purchases under QE. Again in the week ending Wednesday, Nov. 17, according to the Federal Reserve’s weekly H4.1 Report of assets, Fed holdings of securities increased by roughly $74 billion, with the increase coming primarily in holdings of mortgage-backed securities. Thus the Fed has bought about $110 billion of new securities from the primary dealer banks in the two weeks since Powell’s announcement, hardly a reduction from the $120 billion/month pace of QE maintained since early March of 2020. Federal Reserve assets have moved upward in those two weeks by about $40 billion to $8.42 trillion.