A date for history: Today, September 15, the Fed stopped buying mortgage-backed securities altogether. It had been tapering its purchases since late last year. Since June, when the phase-in of QT started, it still purchased MBS to replace some of the pass-through principal payments from mortgage payoffs and mortgage payments that reduced the balance of its MBS faster than the cap of $17.5 billion. The idea was to keep the run-off of MBS within the cap of $17.5 billion in June, July, and August. But this circus is finally over.
On today’s release of scheduled purchases by the New York Fed, there were zero MBS purchases scheduled.