The Federal Reserve has restarted its reserve management purchases of short-term Treasury securities after a one-week pause. Officials call the program plumbing, not stimulus, but the pace of purchases has swung since it began.
The Federal Reserve has resumed reserve management purchases of short-term Treasury securities, restarting the program after a one-week pause. Markets have nicknamed the operations "Not QE," and the New York Fed's Open Market Trading Desk runs them, buying Treasury securities with remaining maturities of three years or less.
Purchase pace has slowed
The program started shortly after the Fed officially ended quantitative tightening on December 1, 2025. Purchases reached as high as $40 billion a month in Treasury bills during the program's early months.
Since then, the pace has cooled: the Fed bought about $10 billion in RMPs between July 14 and August 13, alongside reinvestments of maturing securities. For the period running from August 14 to September 14, the Fed has planned zero new RMPs, continuing only about $17 billion in reinvestments.
Why officials reject the QE label
Traditional quantitative easing targets long-term Treasuries and mortgage-backed securities to push down long-term rates and encourage borrowing. RMPs work differently: officials describe them as plumbing operations meant to maintain an "ample-reserves regime," the framework set up after overnight lending rates spiked during the repo market disruption in September 2019. No emergency measures or policy-rate implications attach to the purchases, according to Fed officials.
A familiar script from 2019
The Fed used nearly identical language in October 2019, when it began buying $60 billion a month in Treasury bills to address the repo market disruption. Then-Chair Jerome Powell stressed that those purchases were "in no sense" QE. The swings in pace, from $40 billion a month early on to $10 billion recently to zero new purchases now, suggest the Fed is actively managing the flow rather than following a fixed schedule.
Source: Crypto Briefing
Trading involves risk.
Risk Disclaimer
