Search Results for: Federal Reserve

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 17, 2024 ~ According to Federal Reserve data, for the first time in its history, the Fed has been losing money on a consistent basis since September 28, 2022. As of the last reporting date of April 10, those losses came to a cumulative $162.9 billion. As the chart above from the Fed indicates, the monthly losses thus far in 2024 have ranged from a high of $13.4 billion in January to $5.5 billion in March. We are not talking about unrealized losses on the debt securities the Fed holds on its balance sheet, which it acquired under its various Quantitative Easing programs. (The Fed does not mark to market the gains or losses on those securities on the basis that it plans to hold them to maturity.) We’re talking about real cash operating losses the Fed is experiencing from earning approximately 2 percent interest on … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 16, 2023 ~ The pileup of conflicts of interests, ethical lapses, and overall moral turpitude at the Federal Reserve have resulted in a recent Gallup poll showing that confidence in the Federal Reserve Chair (currently Jerome Powell) has reached the lowest point in two decades of Gallup polling on this topic. Americans who have “a great deal” or “a fair amount” of confidence in the Fed Chair stands at just 36 percent according to the poll. Tomorrow, the Senate Banking’s Subcommittee on Economic Policy plans to confront the ethically-challenged structure of the Fed head on. It is a given that there will be some fireworks during this hearing because the Chair of this Subcommittee is Senator Elizabeth Warren, who has labeled Fed Chair Powell “a dangerous man” and called out a “culture of corruption” at the Fed last August. (Warren, a former Harvard Law … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 24, 2021 ~ Yesterday the Federal Reserve Board of Governors announced the termination of an enforcement action against Goldman Sachs that dates back to 2016. It’s one more case where Goldman Sachs, the “great vampire squid,” throws its lower-ranked employees under the bus and quickly returns to “relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” The Fed had fined Goldman Sachs a paltry $36.3 million in August of 2016 over its employees using confidential supervisory information that had been stolen from the New York Fed to make presentations to clients and prospective clients. The Fed’s settlement followed an October 28, 2015 settlement between Goldman and the New York State Department of Financial Services over similar charges. Goldman agreed to settle the NYSDFS case for $50 million. The case centers around Rohit Bansal, who had worked at the New York Fed and … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 13, 2021 ~ This evening, the PBS program, Frontline, will do something that corporate broadcast media has failed to do since the financial crash of 2008. Frontline will air the results of its year-long investigation of the most powerful financial institution in the world – the central bank of the United States – known as the Federal Reserve, or simply “the Fed.” The Fed’s radical makeover of itself began in December of 2007 when the Fed decided, on its own, that it had the authority to secretly pump out trillions of dollars in cumulative loans to prop up the mega banks on Wall Street, as well as to the foreign banks that were on the other side of Wall Street’s hundreds of trillions of dollars in derivative trades. The Fed secretly ran that program through at least July of 2010 according to the eventual … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 11, 2021 ~ Fed Chair Jerome Powell will take his seat before the House Financial Services Committee on Wednesday at noon and before the U.S. Senate Banking Committee on Thursday at 9:30 a.m. for his semi-annual testimony on monetary policy. Some embarrassing questions may come up for Powell based on an investigative report on the Fed that’s airing earlier in the week. This Tuesday evening, the PBS investigative program, Frontline, will broadcast a documentary covering its year-long investigation of the Federal Reserve’s bailouts of Wall Street, from the financial crisis of 2008 to the present. According to the information about the program that Frontline has released, the documentary, titled “The Power of the Fed,” will include interviews with multiple people who believe that the Fed has been captured by Wall Street and is creating dangerous asset bubbles. Legendary investor Jeremy Grantham will tell viewers … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 9, 2021 ~ The Federal Reserve will release the results of its stress tests of the mega banks on Wall Street on June 24. That exercise is nothing more than a shell game to mislead Congress and the public into believing that actual due diligence is being done by the Fed on these massive federally insured banks with their inhouse trading casinos. (See Three Federal Studies Show Fed’s Stress Tests of Big Banks Are Just a Placebo.) In reality, the Fed is a completely captured appendage of Wall Street. The Fed has outsourced the nitty-gritty supervision of Wall Street banks to the New York Fed, which is, literally, owned by the same banks. (See These Are the Banks that Own the New York Fed and Its Money Button.) That the Fed is still allowed by Congress to have anything to do with supervising these … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 21, 2021 ~ The chart above should provide ample proof to any thinking American that Bitcoin is about as appropriate as a payment mechanism as Elon Musk is appropriate as the CEO of an S&P 500 company. The U.S. Dollar Index, the orange line, is steady as she goes – meaning you have a stable currency to make payments for goods and services. In contrast, Bitcoin, the green line, looks like a heart attack patient being mugged on a gurney. A crypto crash in U.S. markets on Wednesday, spurred by China taking decisive action on barring cryptocurrencies as a means of payment at financial institutions and payment companies, apparently lit a fire under the U.S. Treasury and Federal Reserve to finally come out of their bunkers on the subject. Senator Sherrod Brown, Chair of the Senate Banking Committee, released a powerful letter to the … Continue reading →

Ask and it shall be given: pic.twitter.com/FcnwtuAJQT — Trevor Chow (@tmychow) March 11, 2021 By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 12, 2021 ~ Trevor Chow is a first-year economist and Jardine Scholar at Trinity College, part of the University of Cambridge in England. With his hilarious and profoundly thought-provoking video satire of the four most recent Chairs of the Federal Reserve singing the words to Rick Astley’s 1987 hit single, “Never Gonna Give You Up,” he has immortalized himself with us and, very likely, Nomi Prins, Senator Bernie Sanders and the family of the late, courageous reporter, Mark Pittman of Bloomberg News. All of us have attempted to bring transparency to the wayward path of the Fed. Debuting in what is sure to be the first of many such Fed singing videos are, left to right, former Fed Chairs Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, Janet Yellen and the current Fed Chair, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 28, 2020 ~ Following the financial crisis of 2007 to 2010, President Obama signed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act into law on July 21, 2010. At the time, Democrats controlled both houses of Congress and could have put teeth into the law, had they chosen to do so. The Act did not reform Wall Street nor did it protect American consumers from the looting practices of the Wall Street banks. Dodd-Frank allowed Wall Street’s private justice system to continue, where both customers and employees must waive their rights to bring claims in a court of law; it allowed Wall Street banks to continue using depositors’ money to make wild gambles in derivatives; it permitted Wall Street banks to continue buying triple-A credit ratings from the ratings agencies for dodgy securitized products; it allowed the very same banks that blew … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 30, 2020 ~ Imagine that your neighbor across the street had been criminally charged with five felony counts for financial crimes in the past six years and admitted to committing each and every crime to the U.S. Department of Justice. Would you put one-third of all of your money in a safe, give that neighbor the combination, and ask him to hold the safe in his house for you? You would probably be suited up for a straight jacket if you did something like that. That’s effectively what the Federal Reserve, the central bank of the United States, has done when it comes to JPMorgan Chase. As of this past Wednesday, the Fed has a $7 trillion balance sheet and $2 trillion of its agency Mortgage-Backed Securities are sitting at JPMorgan Chase, the bank that the Department of Justice has charged with five … Continue reading →