Get Ready for ‘QT1’: A First Look at the Federal Reserve’s Hidden Policy
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The Federal Reserve is now setting out on a new path for quantitative tightening (QT) after nine years of unconventional quantitative (QE) easing policy. It is the evil twin of QE which was used to ease monetary conditions when interest rates were already zero.
First, it is important to examine QE and QT in a broader context of the Fed’s overall policy toolkit. Understanding the many tools the Fed has, which of them they’re using and what the impacts are will allow you to distinguish between what the Fed thinks versus what actually happens.
We have a heavily manipulated system. For years, if not decades, monetary policy has been flipping back and forth between how the economy actually works and what the Fed believes works.
QE was a policy of printing money by buying securities from primary dealers and to ease monetary conditions when interest rates were at zero. QT takes a different approach.
In QT, the Fed will “sell” securities to the primary dealers, take the money, and make it disappear. This is an attempt to ultimately reduce the money supply and implement a policy of tightening money.
There’s a bit of a twist to that selling. Today the Fed’s balance sheet stands at $4.5 trillion. It started at $800 billion in 2008 and has increased over five times that since the crisis. Now they’re going to try to get the balance sheet back to normal levels.
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