On December 13, 2013, Matt Phillips writes on Quartz:
The Federal Reserve’s balance sheet is on its way to becoming one of the biggest numbers in economics.
Sure it’s not Japan’s ¥1 quadrillion government debt. Or the US economy’s $16 trillion-plus economy. (Or come to think of it, the US’s $16 trillion-plus debt.)
But still, the amount of financial assets the US central bank is holding in the wake of quantitative easing and other stimulus measures of the past five years is a very big number: Unless something truly bizarre happens, it will hit $4 trillion very soon. In fact, it’s basically already there. A weekly update yesterday afternoon put its size at $3.994 trillion.
