Search Results for: bank collusion

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 23, 2023 ~ The Fed has been under non-stop scandals for the past two years. It pumped out trillions of dollars in repo loans to Wall Street’s casino banks beginning on September 17, 2019 and then made up a hokey excuse to cover up its massive bailout of banks it is incompetent to supervise. After former Dallas Fed President, Robert Kaplan, was caught trading like a hedge fund kingpin while sitting on confidential Fed information, the Fed’s Board of Governors had the audacity to refer the matter to its own Inspector General, who reports to the Fed’s Board of Governors and can be fired by it. Not surprisingly, 19 months later there’s still no word on this investigation. Then there was the President of the St. Louis Fed, James Bullard, who was caught giving a private meeting with Citigroup clients. The New York Fed … Continue reading →

Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 19, 2021 ~ On October 13, Wall Street On Parade broke the story that the Federal Reserve had quietly released the names of the mega banks that had grabbed tens of billions of dollars of repo loans under the Fed’s emergency repo loan operations that began on September 17, 2019 – months before there was a COVID-19 case in the United States or anywhere else in the world. Repos (repurchase agreements) are a short-term form of borrowing where corporations, banks, securities firms and money market mutual funds secure loans from each other by providing safe forms of collateral such as Treasury securities. Repos are supposed to function without the assistance of the Federal Reserve. But on September 17, 2019, the oversized demand for the repos and the lack of available funds to meet the demand drove the overnight interest rate on repo loans to an … 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: March 3, 2020 ~ There is a time for scientists and carefully vetted facts and a time for men who tell the public that everything is great, nothing to see here. It’s clearly a time for the former and less delusional chatter from the latter. The latest magical thinking is that if Fed Chairman Jerome Powell and U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin get on a phone call this morning with the other G7 finance ministers and central bank governors, they can seduce or strongarm the group to announce rate cuts or fiscal stimulus to keep stock markets from further steep declines and GDP from contracting. (For how this played out previously, we recommend Nomi Prins’ brilliant book, Collusion: How Central Bankers Rigged the World.) Unfortunately, the Fed Chair and the U.S. Treasury Secretary are fighting the last war, the financial crisis of 2008, when … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 20, 2019 ~ All three major stock indices set new highs yesterday. The Nasdaq led with a 0.67 percent gain; the Dow Jones Industrial Averaged closed with a 0.49 percent increase while the S&P 500 inched up 0.45 percent. Stocks have been setting new highs all week as the New York Fed funnels tens of billions of dollars each day to Wall Street’s trading houses to quench a “liquidity” crisis whose existence has seemed to escape stock trading desks on Wall Street. The stock markets’ week of new highs comes at a curious time. For only the third time in history, a sitting U.S. President was impeached this past week by the U.S. House of Representatives and the Democratic candidates for President wasted no time in last night’s debate drilling down to why this happened. The words “corrupt” and “corruption” were used repeatedly … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 5, 2018 ~ Australia is showing its muscle in an area where the U.S. has tip-toed around for almost two decades. We’re talking about Wall Street’s brazen antitrust activity in securities offerings. Last month the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) announced that “criminal cartel offences” had been brought against Citigroup Global Markets Australia and Deutsche Bank over a share offering for Australia and New Zealand Banking Group (ANZ) that had been conducted in 2015. ANZ was also criminally charged in the matter as were three executives of Citigroup Australia, two executives at Deutsche Bank and one at ANZ. Although JPMorgan had been part of that underwriting syndicate, it wasn’t charged. The Financial Times reported at the time that “JPMorgan, which jointly underwrote the share placement with Citi and Deutsche, has not been charged by prosecutors and has reportedly been granted immunity after … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 29, 2018 ~ The U.S. Federal Reserve, the country’s central bank that is supposed to serve the interests of the nation, gave the largest Wall Street banks a big, irresponsible gift yesterday. The big banks will now be able to spend approximately $170 billion buying back their own stock and paying out increased dividends to shareholders instead of doing what banks are supposed to do: make loans to worthy businesses to stimulate the U.S. economy. But don’t expect to find that critical news on the front page of your local newspaper. The front pages of newspapers across America proved once again today that chaos in the running of the Federal government is dominating news reporting while it continues to relegate to the back pages the alarming risks that are growing again on Wall Street. This raises the question as to whether the chaos … Continue reading →