Chart assignment
Charts to read and discuss
Read each chart, then answer its questions. Every chart shows its source and date; open it for a table of the numbers and the data to download.
Chart 1 of 1 · Federal budget
How much US debt does the Federal Reserve own?
The interactive chart needs JavaScript. The numbers are on the chart's page.
The Federal Reserve held $4.58 trillion of Treasury securities on October 28, 2026, compared with a peak of $5.77 trillion in May 2022. Its holdings jumped when it bought Treasuries to support the economy after the 2008 financial crisis and in the 2020 pandemic, when they more than doubled in two years, and fell as it let them run off from 2022. Each point is the last weekly figure of the month, including TIPS' inflation adjustment.
Questions to discuss
- In one sentence of your own, what does this chart show?
- Find the biggest change or difference in the chart. What might explain it?
- Who collected these numbers, and how recent are they? What else would you want to know before drawing a conclusion?
Source: Federal Reserve Bank of New York, System Open Market Account (SOMA) Holdings (The SOMA Holdings data is subject to the Terms of Use posted at newyorkfed.org. The New York Fed is not responsible for publication.) · Data as of Oct 28, 2026
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