The Death of the Dollar? – By Rob Arnott

To no one’s surprise, the Fed announced that it will replace the expiring “Operation Twist”—in which it was selling $45 billion of short maturity treasuries and buying a like amount of long maturity treasuries every month—with continued purchases of long bonds. The Fed announced in September that it will buy $40 billion per month in mortgage-backed bonds, to help bring life back into the real estate market.

What does this mean?

The Federal Reserve Board will now be “printing” $85 billion a month in new U.S. dollars in order to buy $85 billion a month in bonds, up from $40 billion a month previously. Doing the math, that’s $1,020 billion—just over $1 trillion—a year. The Fed’s balance sheet had $800 billion in assets before the Global Financial Crisis started in 2008; it’s now over $3 trillion, set to rise $1 trillion a year.

If we’re spending $1 trillion a year more than we produce as a nation (the national deficit) and are financing it by printing $1 trillion a year of crisp newly printed bills (actually, bits in a computer), we’re on a dangerous path. Printing our own money to buy our own debt works fine… until it doesn’t.