Hoisington data show the Fed's Treasury holdings rose about $290bn from December
2025 to end-June 2026, a seven-month increase approaching the roughly $320bn
seen during the pandemic; total holdings are at a record high. The rise partly
reflects reserve-management purchases to keep reserves ample and partly
reinvestment of maturing MBS principal — the latter reshapes asset mix rather
than equivalently expanding the balance sheet. The NY Fed began
reserve-management purchases at $40bn/month and trimmed them to $10bn/month by
summer. NY Fed research concludes these buys have raised demand for short-term
debt, eased repo-market stress and marginally lowered short-end funding costs,
but are far smaller than 2020 QE, when the Fed bought nearly $2trn of medium-
and long-term Treasuries. The flow indicates only that runoff has ended and the
Fed is again a material buyer of short-dated debt; it does not constitute QE or
yield-curve control.