Although many tend to think of the Federal Reserve as a Washington-centric institution, it is, in fact, a structure of twelve independent regional Reserve Banks, one of which is just a few blocks from here, teamed in harness with the Board of Governors in Washington.
Do they reinvest in bank debt or do they invest it somewhere else? In the current quarter, an additional wrinkle in thinking about this is that a fair chunk of debt maturing is government-guaranteed bank paper. So the decisions of some of these investors may not be the same as those of more traditional bank credit investors.