A “subtle” whopper appeared in the London Financial Times “Editor’s Digest” column for Sept. 22, under a kicker headline “Central banks’ balance sheets will stay large.” The column, by FT writer Daire MacFadden, asserted: “The central banks’ experience of shrinking their balance sheets—a process known as quantitative tightening—suggests they may not be able to go much further, nor do they really need to.”

This obscured one of the better-kept secrets of the Federal Reserve’s current operations—that it has been carrying out full-on quantitative easing, printing money and building up its balance sheet by buying Treasury securities from big Wall Street banks—since November 2025, having ended “tightening” a year ago. Thus it has been bailing out these banks while assisting them in slowly reducing their Treasury holdings, passing them off to hedge fund and private equity speculators.

Since November 2025, the Federal Reserve has bought $398 billion in Treasuries from its “primary dealer banks,” a quantitative easing pace of $40 billion/month. ALL of those securities have been Treasury Bills, of one-year maturity or less; those short-term Bills are also the largest share of what the Treasury has sold to the primary dealers in that time.

The FT column admitted, that since the Fed announced it was starting “tightening” in late 2017, it has twice restarted “easing”: once in August-September 2019, when the big banks’ “repo crisis” struck on Sept. 15, 2019, the Fed feared a crash, and began a three-year “QE4” episode; and then again late in 2025, as reported above.

The Fed’s balance sheet is again near $7 trillion, ten times its level when this crisis began back in 2007. The question is: How much higher can even the Federal Reserve go, when the coming crisis actually strikes.