"The Fed" The Most Powerful Organization In the World

"The Fed conducts both temporary open market operations and permanent ones. Permanent, or outright operations, inject cash and remove securities from the banking system forever. The Fed keeps the securities it has acquired outright in the System Open Market Account, aptly initialed SOMA (in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, the drug soma is produced to keep citizens in a steady state of happiness, much like the Fed's SOMA). Temporary operations, the ones entered into this Friday, involve 1–14 day repurchase or reverse repurchase agreements whereby the Fed purchases (or sells) securities in return for cash with an agreement that the commercial bank on the other side of the deal will buy back (or sell back) the securities after a period of days."

I know little about economics (No Economics 101) but I recently read Brave New World so I had to post this. The SOMA and System Open Market Analogy is great. By throwing all that money into the housing market they are keeping everyone afloat for a while and eventually putting the money back. They in recent years expanded their powers and its unimaginable what they would be able to do. Its like they can shoot up the market with heroin for a few weeks then give nothing at let the people suffer withdrawal symptoms.