by Aletheia Doukas at Economic Collapse Report
In the middle of the night, while most Americans were asleep, the Federal Reserve injected $29.4 billion into the U.S. banking system. It was a “repo operation” — short for repurchase agreement — a mechanism the Fed uses to lend cash to banks in exchange for collateral, usually Treasury securities. The move didn’t make mainstream headlines, but it sent ripples through financial circles. A sudden infusion of this size often signals acute liquidity stress, the kind that central banks are usually desperate to conceal.
The question is: why now?
The banking system has been treading on thin ice for months. Bond markets remain unstable, commercial real estate is imploding, and deposit flight has quietly resumed among regional banks. The Federal Reserve has been walking a tightrope — raising interest rates to fight inflation while trying not to trigger another 2008-style collapse. Yet this $29.4 billion overnight cash injection suggests that pressure inside the system is reaching a point that requires emergency relief.
A Return to the 2019 “Repo Crisis”?
The last time the Fed intervened so aggressively in repo markets was September 2019. Then, overnight lending rates between banks suddenly spiked from around 2% to as high as 10%, freezing the interbank market and forcing the Fed to inject hundreds of billions in the months leading up to the pandemic. At the time, officials claimed it was merely a “technical adjustment.” Within months, COVID-19 hit, and the Fed began printing trillions.
The parallels today are hard to ignore. The Fed insists…
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