QE is the Fed buying government bonds and mortgage-backed securities with newly-created reserves. The balance sheet went from ~$900B in 2008 to ~$8.9T at peak in 2022. Here is the mechanism, the unintended consequences, and what "unwinding" actually looks like.
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QE is the Federal Reserve buying long-dated government bonds and mortgage-backed securities from primary dealer banks, paying for them by crediting those banks' reserve accounts with newly-created reserves. It is not "printing dollars" in the literal sense. It is expanding bank reserves, which pushes long-term interest rates down, inflates the price of stocks, bonds, and housing, and widens the wealth gap between asset owners and wage earners. The Fed's balance sheet went from roughly $900 billion in 2007 to roughly $8.9 trillion at peak in 2022 [VERIFY FRED WALCL].
When short-term interest rates hit zero and the economy still needs stimulus, the Fed runs out of traditional room. QE is what it does next. The New York Fed places bids in the secondary market for long-dated U.S. Treasuries and agency mortgage-backed securities. Primary dealer banks sell those bonds to the Fed. The Fed pays by crediting the selling bank's reserve account at the Fed with newly-created reserves.
The reserves are new. They did not exist before the trade. No taxpayer funded them. The Fed created them by keystroke, the same way a commercial bank creates a deposit when it makes a loan.
QE does not put dollars directly into household bank accounts. It puts reserves into the reserve accounts of large banks. Those reserves cannot, by themselves, leave the Fed system. What they do is free up bank balance-sheet capacity to buy other assets, which bids up the prices of stocks, corporate bonds, and housing.
Before 2008 the Fed's balance sheet was a boring, slow-growing pool of Treasury bills. That changed in September 2008. The chart below is the numbers [VERIFY against FRED WALCL].
QE was sold as a one-time emergency tool in 2008. It has been used four times since.
QE is designed to do three things. All three are transmission-mechanism arguments, not end-state arguments.
The intended first-order effects mostly happened. Long rates fell. Asset prices rose sharply. What was less advertised is where the benefits landed and what else QE did to the dollar.
The S&P 500 roughly quadrupled from the 2009 low to the 2022 high. Median U.S. home prices doubled. Asset owners got richer on paper without a corresponding rise in real output. When consumer inflation finally arrived in 2021-2022, it hit people who had never received the asset gains.
The top 10 percent own roughly 90 percent of U.S. stocks [VERIFY Fed DFA]. When QE lifts equity prices, that benefit is concentrated. Wage earners who own no equities see nothing until the price of groceries and rent catches up, at which point they take the loss.
For the mechanism in detail, see The Cantillon Effect and The Wealth Gap.
QT is the reverse of QE. Instead of buying bonds, the Fed allows bonds on its balance sheet to mature without reinvesting the proceeds. The bonds roll off. The reserves that were created to buy them disappear. The balance sheet shrinks.
The Fed ran its first QT from late 2017 to mid-2019, trimming the balance sheet from roughly $4.5T to roughly $3.6T before the September 2019 repo market crisis forced a pivot [VERIFY]. QT 2.0 began in June 2022, at a faster pace, and has brought the balance sheet from $8.9T down to roughly $6.8T [VERIFY FRED WALCL].
QE is politically easy. QT is politically hard. Every round of QT so far has been paused or reversed before the balance sheet returned to pre-crisis levels. The ratchet goes up in crises and only partly comes back down in good times. The long-run trend is up.
One note on taxpayer cost: QE is not funded by taxpayers in the traditional sense. But the Fed now pays interest on the reserves those QE purchases created. In a high-rate environment, that interest bill can exceed the Fed's income from its bond holdings, producing large operating losses that reduce remittances to Treasury for years.
Last updated 2026-04-14. Not financial advice. Do your own research.