In an effort to shore up the U.S. economy, the Federal Reserve has launched a new round of quantitative easing, or QE2, that will buy $600 billion of longer-term treasury securities by the middle of next year, the Financial Times reports.

Quantitative easing (QE) is a monetary policy used by some central banks to increase the supply of money by increasing the excess reserves of the banking system, generally through buying of the central government’s own bonds to stabilize or raise their prices and thereby lower long-term interest rates, according to the Wikipedia.com entry on quantitative easing. The policy is usually invoked when the normal methods to control the money supply have failed, i.e the bank interest rate, discount rate, and/or interbank interest rate are either at, or close to, zero, according to the Wikipedia entry. It has considered the electronic equivalent of printing legal tender.

Fed may infuse economy with $600 billion via QE2