Courtesy of Pam Martens
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens
Steve Meyer, Official Spokesman for the Federal Reserve Board of Governors in 2011
On January 19, 2011, the Federal Reserve released a video on YouTube to quell the public uproar over its unaccountable money creation operations. The spokesman for the Fed in the video was their Senior Adviser at the time, Steve Meyer, now an Adjunct Professor of Finance at The Wharton School. The Fed was in the middle of its second round of quantitative easing (QE2) and Meyer states this: “The Fed will not keep buying large amounts of securities on an ongoing basis.” The Fed was so intent on conveying the “temporary” nature of its unprecedented actions that it put that statement by Meyer on the screen. (See screen shot above.) Meyer then immediately adds this about the Fed: “Its purchases are a temporary measure to help the economy recover.”
But the Fed’s purchases were not temporary. On September 13, 2012 the Fed announced QE3, indicating it would be “purchasing additional agency mortgage-backed securities at a pace of $40 billion per month.” And on December 12, 2012 the Fed expanded QE3 with the announcement that it would “continue purchasing additional agency mortgage-backed securities at a pace of $40 billion per month” and would also “purchase longer-term Treasury securities…initially at a pace of $45 billion per month.”
By 2015, the Fed had increased its balance sheet to $4.5 trillion from the $800 billion it had been prior to the financial crisis. Despite all of the Fed’s promises to “normalize” its balance sheet, today its balance sheet stands at $4 trillion and on September 17 of this year it launched a new, massive money pumping operation on Wall Street’s behalf.
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