QE, QT, RRP... Understanding The Fed and The Market

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A lot to digest, but very interesting and worth understanding.

The Federal Reserve has continued to unwind the buildup in its balance sheet. It accumulated a lot of Treasury debt and mortgage backed securities (MBS) during 4 separate rounds of quantitative easing (QE), and since early 2022 it has been letting those mature and roll off. That action is referred to as “quantitative tightening”, or QT.
QT is a bearish force on the stock market, because it takes liquidity out of the banking system. But QT has been getting mitigated by something else the Fed is doing. Starting in 2021, the Fed began accepting a whole lot of “reverse repurchase agreements” or RRPs. An RRP involves a bank borrowing Treasuries from the Fed, to make its balance sheet look better. That bank pledges some of its loan book as collateral for the borrowed Treasuries. The effect of this on the stock market is that RRPs lock up money in the banking system so that this money is not available to do things like help lift stock prices. You can read the NY Fed's description of the process at https://www.newyorkfed.org/markets/rrp_faq

source:

McClellan Financial Publications
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