The Federal Reserve's balance sheet, also known as Fed Balance Sheet in English, is a financial statement released by the Federal Reserve on its official website every Thursday around 4:30 pm. The full name is: "Factors Affecting Reserve Balances". It includes an analysis of the assets and liabilities held by the Federal Reserve and outlines the main factors affecting the supply and absorption of funds by the Federal Reserve. Current and historical balance sheets can be viewed on the Federal Reserve's official website. Similar to an ordinary company's balance sheet, the Fed's balance sheet also consists of assets and liabilities, but there is no shareholder equity part. The assets in the Federal Reserve's balance sheet include all Treasuries, agency bonds, mortgage-backed securities (MBS) purchased by the Federal Reserve in the open market, and loans provided to banks, as well as gold certificates, foreign exchange assets, etc. Among all asset types, U.S. Treasury bonds account for 75% to 90%, definitely the largest share. Its liabilities consist of all currency in circulation and all funds held in reserve accounts at member banks and U.S. depository institutions. Before 2007, the Federal Reserve's balance sheet did not receive much attention. However, after the subprime financial crisis from 2007 to 2009, due to the special monetary policy implemented by the Federal Reserve during the financial crisis and the Federal Reserve's special authority to actively create money, people began to pay attention to the Federal Reserve's balance sheet to predict whether future monetary policy would be expansion or contraction. In August 2007, before the financial crisis, the Fed's balance sheet totaled about $870 billion. After the financial crisis broke out in 2008, the Federal Reserve began to implement a quantitative easing policy, known as Quantitative Easing in English, or QE for short. Quantitative easing (QE) refers to the Fed's expansion of its balance sheet by purchasing Treasury bonds, agency MBS and other assets to lower long-term interest rates and improve financial conditions. After the implementation of quantitative easing policy, the total value of the Federal Reserve's balance sheet swelled to $4.5 trillion in January 2015, more than five times what it was before the 2008 financial crisis. After that, the market stabilized, and the Fed's balance sheet values also showed a stable trend. Table 4 contains information on the outstanding principal amounts of loans provided by the Reserve Bank to limited liability companies (LLCs), and information on the net portfolio holdings of Credit Facilities Limited Liability Companies (LLCs), including outstanding facility asset purchases, treasury contributions and other assets. Form 5 Table 5 is the balance sheet of the Federal Reserve System, which has two pages: The first page shows the assets held by the Fed The second page shows the Fed's liabilities Form 5 (first page) Form 5 (Second page) Form 6 Table VI provides data for each Federal Reserve Bank. Form 7 Table VII provides information regarding the assets pledged as collateral for Federal Reserve Notes. Fed's asset-liability trend chart Source After a substantial increase during the financial crisis from 2007 to 2009, the total value of the Federal Reserve's balance sheet entered a relatively stable growth stage, and then a stable stage, with the total value stable at around US$4.5 trillion. It later shrank to about $3.78 trillion to stabilize the U.S. economy at that time. But in 2020, due to the outbreak of COVID-19, the economic situation was severely impacted. The Federal Reserve once again stepped in to adjust, and the total balance sheet increased significantly again, rising to about 7 trillion US dollars in 2021, and continued to increase to 2022, close to 9 trillion US dollars. Although it stabilized the economy, it greatly pushed up the prices of the stock market and housing market, and at the same time caused substantial inflation (the inflation rate in January 2022 reached a 40-year historical high of 7%). After that, the Fed raised interest rates and began to adopt QT policy, which caused the Fed's balance sheet to begin to decline. As of February 2026, the Federal Reserve's assets reached 6.6 trillion. More investment guides
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