Courtesy of Pam Martens
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens
The Fed’s H.4.1 release which is faithfully posted on the Fed’s website each Thursday at 4:30 p.m. was seriously delayed today due to “technical difficulties.” When the data was finally posted, it showed that the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet has grown by a stunning $2.4 trillion since April 17 of last year. The Fed’s balance sheet now stands at $6.4 trillion.
Following three rounds of Quantitative Easing (QE) after the financial crisis on Wall Street in 2008, the Fed’s balance sheet peaked at $4.5 trillion in 2015. On the day that Lehman Brothers collapsed into bankruptcy on September 15, 2008, the Fed’s balance sheet stood at just $995 billion.
The Fed’s balance sheet was supposed to be “normalized” and “wound down” following the last financial crisis. That it has now ballooned to new heights raises the serious question as to whether the United States has entered a perpetual era of one Wall Street banking crisis after another as a result of the “universal” bank model where high-risk Wall Street trading firms are under the same ownership with giant, federally-insured, deposit-taking banks that are too-big-to-fail and too-big-to-manage prudently.
