Bernanke’s Broken Promise: Is It Time To Shrink the Fed Yet?

Published in The New York Sun.

“It’s a temporary action,” the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben Bernanke, testified before Congress on February 9, 2011, 15 years ago. He was referring to the radical expansion of the Fed’s balance sheet begun under his leadership in 2008 by so-called “Quantitative Easing,” which monetized long-term Treasury debt and 30-year mortgage securities. By 2011, QE had inflated the Fed’s total assets to $2.5 trillion. That was 2. 7 times their $915 billion at the end of 2007, the Fed’s last historically-normal annual balance sheet.

Mr. Bernanke further testified, in what certainly sounded like a promise, “what we are doing here is a temporary measure which will be reversed.” Note that was not “may” be or “can” be, but “will” be. Fifteen years later, it hasn’t happened.  

“At the end of this process,” Mr. Bernanke continued, “the amount of the Fed’s balance sheet will be normalized, and there will be no permanent increase, either in money outstanding [or] in the Fed’s balance sheet.”  That promise, or at least prediction, stands in striking contrast with reality.

Today the Fed’s total assets are $6.6 trillion.  That is 2.6 times as big as when Mr. Bernanke was testifying, and 7.2 times as big as in 2007. 

Among the Fed’s assets all these years later we find $1.6 trillion in Treasury bonds which still have more than ten years left to maturity.  More egregiously, we find $2 trillion in long-term mortgage securities.  

The Fed’s monetization of mortgages, which has massively distorted the housing market, should in my opinion be zero, as it always was from the creation of the Fed in 1913 until 2008. Today the mortgage portfolio alone is more than twice as big as the whole Fed was in 2007.

All this doesn’t sound too “temporary.” Even if one would be tempted to paraphrase President Clinton — “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘temporary’ is”— one would have to admit that 15 years after Mr. Bernanke’s testimony and going on 18 years after the beginning of the QE program, it does not qualify as temporary.

The question of what is “temporary” was raised by Congressman Scott Garrett in the 2011 hearing.  “What you have is a difference between one’s interpretation of what is permanent and what is temporary,” Mr. Garrett said, insightfully adding, “I imagine no Fed Chairman would ever come to this witness table and say, ‘I am engaging in permanent monetization of the debt,’ [but] describe it as, ‘I’m only taking a temporary action’…. Isn’t that correct?”

Mr. Bernanke replied, “That’s what we are doing.  It’s a temporary action.”  That was doubtless what he intended at the time, but it isn’t what happened. What this “temporary action” was going to do to the Fed’s own risk and financial performance was raised by the chairman of the hearing, Congressman Paul Ryan. “Have you done a stress test on your balance sheet?” he responsibly asked.  “And what level of losses do you think is acceptable as you withdraw?”

The Fed’s most recent published mark to market of its investments, as of September 2025, provides the future answer to Mr. Ryan’s question: There would be a loss of $856 billion required to liquidate the Fed’s long-term investments. To this sum must be added the Fed’s accumulated operating losses of $224 billion since 2022, all caused by the financial risk of QE. If one uses only the losses of the QE program itself, removing the profits made by other parts of the Fed, the QE-alone operating losses since 2022 exceed $500 billion. These are equally losses to the U.S. Treasury.

Would Mr. Ryan have thought that “acceptable”?  Would Mr. Bernanke have?

Here is what Mr. Bernanke answered: “We have done multiple stress tests. Under most likely scenarios, the fiscal implications of the balance sheet are positive… Under most plausible scenarios, this policy will continue to be profitable.” Reality turned out not to be one of the “plausible scenarios.”

It’s too bad that Mr. Ryan did not follow up by asking for a copy of the Fed’s risk analysis for Congressional oversight of the unprecedented risk of QE. For now it appears that the Fed has lost another $2 billion in the first two months of 2026 despite the enormous subsidy it is receiving from the Treasury in the form of over $800 billion in interest-free deposits. These deposits generate income of about $30 billion a year for the Fed at current interest rates. They increase the Treasury’s deficit by the same amount.

Is it finally time to shrink the Fed to its normal size?  Unfortunately, because of the giant market value losses embedded in the Fed’s QE investments, selling them would be far too expensive. So Mr. Bernanke’s “temporary action” will continue into its 19th year.