Beginning of the global economic panic

In the next few weeks, our country will enter a period without precedence in our experience. On June 30, the Federal Reserve has pledged to cease buying U.S. Treasury bonds. This is the second time since the financial crisis it has intervened in the Treasury market in a major way. The program of buying new Treasury issues has been dubbed "quantitative easing II" (QE2). We'd wager not one in 1,000 Americans has any idea (or at least any real understanding) of what has been going on in the market for U.S. Treasury bonds since the financial crisis. For the last nine months, the Fed has been printing up new dollars and buying huge amounts of newly issued debt from the U.S. Treasury – $600 billion of bonds. And these purchases followed a $1.75 trillion program of quantitative easing that ran from March 2009 to March 2010.

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