Today, again, we receive news that Fed is continuing to pour more and more POMO money into the banking system, this time with a ‘mere’ ~$2 billion addition.
August 7 – New York Fed purchases $1.937 billion in agency coupons
As long-time readers here know, I have been tracking the Permanent Open Market Operations (or "POMO") activity of the Fed for a long time.
As I wrote in The Five Horsemen ( May 31 2009, enrollment required $):
The beginning of the end for nearly every debt-ridden country has always been the attempt to pay for past expenditures with newly-minted money. It always starts innocently enough and seems like the right thing to do, but soon the programs grow and grow, and eventually the currency of the country is destroyed.
Now the Fed is openly and actively buying dodgy debt from the government as well as from the private sector. I covered on this in May (2009) in an "In Session" posting, where I charted the amount of US Treasury debt that was being purchased by the Federal Reserve on a daily basis.
This chart reflects only the Treasury purchases. When we add in agency debt, mortgage-backed securities, and various other corporate debt programs, we find that the Federal Reserve is printing up roughly $15 to $30 billion dollars a day just to keep things limping along.
by jms2112