Suppose you wanted to ask the question, hypothetical of course: What percentage of the economy does the FED balance sheet comprise of? If you were to replace “the economy” with “M2”, then you could get something easily measurable. Simply use the symbol:

FRED:WALCL/1000/FRED:WM2NS

One is measured in billions, the other millions, so we divide by 1000 (I say just switch to trillions and stick with it, but so much for standards).

IF this trend continues at the current pace, the FED balance sheet will make up 100% of the economy by about 2050. The dollar will probably be worthless by then, as the only thing that fuels debt monetization currently seems to be a continuously decreasing proportion of honestly earned, productive dollars, and an increasing proportion of dishonest dollars supporting a bankrupt institution of commercial and federal finance.

The balance sheet consists of mostly (see more: https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h41/20220407/):

5.7T Treasury bills, notes, bonds. Who else could buy that many of them? Nobody I know.
2.7T Mortgage backed securities. They own more mortgages than anyone.

Unfortunately the data only goes back to 2012 on TV, not sure why. The FRED WALCL data actually goes back to 2002, so I filled the data in as best as I could using the data from FRED using some red lines. Pretty crude, but probably good enough (should we even trust the data?).

I hope you enjoyed this simple idea and many thanks for reading. Don’t forget to hedge your bets 🙂