The Federal Reserve recently made a new move that appears low-key on the surface but might actually be quietly injecting liquidity into the market. Since December of last year, the FOMC has suspended balance sheet reduction reinvestments—meaning they are redirecting the principal from maturing agency debt and MBS into Treasuries, while also rolling over maturing Treasuries. More importantly, the New York Fed is directly purchasing Treasuries on the secondary market and regularly discloses the specifics of these operations each month.

Wall Street has coined a name for this approach: RMP(Reserve Management Purchases). The official explanation is very conservative: it’s merely to maintain liquidity in the banking system and ensure the smooth functioning of payment and settlement, and only short-term Treasuries are being purchased, making it look like a passive stabilization measure.

But from another perspective, RMP is essentially no different from QE—the Fed prints money to buy bonds, the market receives cash, the balance sheet expands, and liquidity is released this way. For risk assets like cryptocurrencies and U.S. stocks, as long as the Fed is “buying, buying, buying,” the extra money will eventually flow into asset prices. In short, it’s old wine in a new bottle, but the effect could be about the same.