In case you haven’t heard of him, let me introduce Brian Sack. As Executive Vice President at the New York Fed, he’s the guy in charge of implementing the Federal Reserves’s monetary policy efforts including all the purchases of agency securities and Treasury bonds in QE1 and QE2 (LSAP1 and LSAP2 in Fedspeak, where they are known as large-scale asset purchases).
Sack gave an interesting speech last week on the Fed’s $2.654 trillion portfolio. Among other things, he reiterated the Fed view that the impact of the portfolio comes from the owning, not just the buying:
Lastly, I should note that the market seems to have adjusted fairly well so far to the end of the purchase program. The pace of the Desk’s purchases fell back sharply at the end of June, as we moved from expanding the portfolio to simply reinvesting principal payments. In particular, our purchases slowed from an average pace of about $100 billion per month through June to an anticipated pace of about $15 billion per month going forward. We do not expect this adjustment to our purchases to produce significant upward pressure on interest rates or a tightening of broader financial conditions, given our view that the effects of the program arise primarily from the stock of our holdings rather than the flow of our purchases. While there has been considerable volatility in Treasury yields over the past several weeks, we attribute those movements primarily to incoming economic data and to broader risk events. However, we will continue to watch the markets and assess their adjustment to the end of the purchase program.
…
As noted earlier, the current directive from the FOMC is to reinvest principal payments on the securities we hold in order to maintain the level of domestic assets in the SOMA portfolio. This approach can be interpreted as keeping monetary policy on hold. Indeed, one can generally think of the stance of monetary policy in terms of two tools—the level of the federal funds rate, and the amount and type of assets held on the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet. The FOMC has decided to keep both of these tools basically unchanged for now. (Emphasis added)
In short, quantitative easing is over, but quantitative accommodation is still boosting the economy.
Sack also offered a rule of thumb equating each $250 billion in asset purchases to a 25 basis point reduction in the federal funds rate. By that metric, the $1.6 trillion in asset purchases has been the equivalent of lowering short-term rates by about 1.6 percentage points. (Over at Econbrowser, however, James Hamilton suggests that impact may be significantly smaller.)