The Fed's Reverse Repo facility absorbed excess liquidity at its 2022–2023 peak, holding over $2.5 trillion. Money market funds and banks parked reserves there overnight because no better alternative existed. That excess liquidity acted as a system-wide shock absorber: when markets showed stress, RRP-released money could flow into the system rapidly, providing a stabilizing liquidity pulse without requiring active Fed intervention. The RRP is now drained to near-zero. That cushion no longer exists. When the next liquidity shock arrives — and the private credit redemption cascade and the corporate debt wall are already generating that shock — there is no automatic stabilizer. The system goes directly from stress to crisis. The $40 billion T-bill purchase program is the Fed actively replacing this lost buffer through intervention, which is a fundamentally different signal than passive market mechanics. Active intervention says: the system needs help it cannot find on its own. That reading accelerates the capital flight the intervention is designed to prevent — a policy paradox that becomes more dangerous the larger the required scale.