Source:
All The Money The Government Is Printing This Year, In One Graphic
Miki Meek
NPR, October 16, 2012
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/10/09/162568387/all-the-money-the-government-is-printing-this-year-in-one-graphic
This piece is cross-posted from The Big Picture with permission.
This graphic is mislabeled, you can see the correction on the original source (NPR). It should say Thousands of Notes, not Millions. Still a lot (about $480 billion)
"QE3 was announced on 13 September 2012. In an 11-to-1 vote, the Federal Reserve decided to launch a new $40 billion a month, open-ended, bond purchasing program of agency mortgage-backed securities and also to continue extremely low rates policy until at least mid-2015.[61]" — a quote from Wikipedia. $40bn a month, $480 billion a year.
QE3 is not the literal "printing of money"; that's just a figure of speech to describe the creation of book entries that can be transferred from one book to another. The graphic is concerned with "literal printing", ink on paper, which is just a small fraction of the total effective outstanding "book entry" money.