Courtesy of Pam Martens
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens
On May 29, 2019, the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet stood at $3.9 trillion. As of this past Wednesday, May 27, 2020, the Fed’s balance sheet had skyrocketed to $7.145 trillion, an increase of 83 percent in one year’s time.
But the explosion in the Fed’s balance sheet cannot be attributed solely to the economic downturn caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The math and the timeline simply do not support that argument. According to the timeline at the World Health Organization, on December 31, 2019, China first reported a cluster of cases of pneumonia which were identified in early January to be the coronavirus now known as COVID-19. These were the first known cases anywhere in the world.
But on December 31, 2019, the Federal Reserve was already deep into a debt crisis in the United States. We know that from the minutes of the Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee. The Fed minutes for the meetings on December 10-11, 2019 state that the Fed’s emergency repo loans (that it had started making on September 17, 2019 for the first time since the financial crisis of 2008) had “totaled roughly $215 billion per day” as of the date of that meeting.
Using the Fed’s own Excel spread sheet data for its emergency repo loans, Wall Street On Parade reported on January 27 that the Fed had made $6.6 trillion cumulatively in emergency revolving repo loans to Wall Street since September 17. The first death in the U.S. from COVID-19 did not come until February 28 and was reported by CNN one day later.
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