via thehill:
As a consequence of its COVID crisis asset purchase program and the subsequent increases in interest rates needed to fight inflation, the Fed is now losing billions of dollars a week.
The Fed’s most recent H.4.1 statement shows that the Fed has borrowed $41 billion to pay its cash losses, but these borrowings do not count as U.S. Treasury debt and are not counted against the congressional Treasury debt ceiling limit.
In the past week, the Fed’s financial statement shows it borrowed an additional $143 billion to fund the FDIC’s bailout of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and Signature Bank, even though the FDIC is supposed to fund bank bailouts using the deposit insurance fund and, if need be, by borrowing from the U.S. Treasury. Instead, the Fed borrowed these funds and lent them to the FDIC to keep these bank failures from reducing the Treasury’s cash balances. You may recall that the Treasury is already precluded from any additional borrowing under the current congressional debt limit.