-
Recent Posts
- On the Eve of Netanyahu’s Address to Congress, Senator Bernie Sanders Delivers a Breathtaking Assessment of His War Crimes
- Trump’s Sit-Down with Netanyahu at Mar-a-Lago Will Cost U.S. Taxpayers Millions While Profiting Trump’s Business
- Protecting Trump and His Jet-Setting Adult Children During His Presidency Cost Taxpayers Over $1 Billion
- A Congressman and a Doctor Reported a Woman Being Shot at Trump Rally: She’s Vanished from Official Reports
- Jamie Dimon Goes Missing from Earnings Call, After Dumping $183 Million of His JPMorgan Chase Stock Earlier this Year
- U.S. Senate Candidate Backed by Hedge Fund Billionaires Was Sitting in Front Row at Trump Rally as the Sniper Fired into the Bleachers
- Project 2025: The Fossil Fuel and Banking Money Behind the Madness
- The Fund Created to Unwind a Failing Megabank Has a Problem: There’s No Money in It
- Joe Biden Versus the New York Times
- Grand Jury Transcript in Jeffrey Epstein Case Is Released, Raising Questions about Epstein’s Darkest Secrets Being Protected in JPMorgan Cases
- The Supreme Court Crowns a King, Immunizing Future Criminal Acts Under Project 2025 – a Right Wing Manifesto
- The Debate Disaster and the Supreme Court’s “Chevron” Repeal Have a Money Trail Leading to Charles Koch
- Congressman Andy Barr Stacks a Hearing on the Fed’s Stress Tests with Lobbyists for Megabanks
- The Fed Posts Historic Operating Losses As It Pays Out 5.40 Percent Interest to Banks
- Goldman Sachs’ Bank Derivatives Have Grown from $40 Trillion to $54 Trillion in Five Years; So How Did Its Credit Exposure Improve by 200 Percent?
- The Fed and FDIC Wake Up Suddenly to the Threat of Derivatives, Flunking the Four Largest Derivative Banks on their Wind-Down Plans
- Is the Stock Market Setting Investors Up for a Tech Bust Similar to the Dot.com Bust?
- Chase Bank Customers Are Reporting a Wave of Wire Fraud in their Accounts; the Bank Won’t Make Good on the Looted Funds
- The Senate Race in Ohio Is the Sickest in U.S. History in Terms of Billionaire Money from Outside the State
- Sullivan & Cromwell’s Legal Work for Sam Bankman-Fried’s Crypto House of Fraud Is Getting a Closer Look in Two Federal Court Cases
- Crypto Tries to Recreate the Koch Money Machine to Pack Congress with Shills
- French Fears Ignite Selloff in U.S. Megabanks and Foreign Peers
- Crypto Just Got Exponentially More Dangerous: Meet Fairshake
- Nvidia Hit a $3 Trillion Market Cap Last Week; Dark Pools Are Making Over 300,000 Trades in the Stock Weekly
- The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Is Making Enemies in All the Right Places
- A Former Exec at Citibank Raises Alarm Bells in Federal Court Over Failed Risk Controls Inside the Bank
- Charles Koch’s Money Is Being Used in Elections in Ways Only Orwell Could Have Imagined
- Freakonomics and Frankenbanks: JPMorgan Chase Sucked Up 18 Percent of All Profits of 4,568 FDIC-Insured Banks in the First Quarter
- Academic Study Provides Hard Numbers to the Sick, Revolving Door Culture at Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Citigroup
- $244 Billion of Treasury Debt to Hit the Market Today and Tomorrow as Interest Rates Spike on Ballooning Supply
- CFTC Fines J.P. Morgan Securities — a Fed Primary Dealer — $100 Million for Failing to Surveil Potential Spoofing and High Frequency Trading for Eight Years
- Another FDIC-Insured Bank Got in Bed with Fintech; It’s Now Got a Dumpster Fire and Desperate Pleas from Customers for their Money
- Citigroup Gets Fined $79 Million Two Years After It Caused a $300 Billion Flash Crash in European Stock Markets
- After Weeks of Howling by MAGA Republicans for the Chair of the FDIC “to Resign,” a Democrat Delivers the Decisive Stab in the Back
- The Curious Money Trail Behind the Supreme Court/Clarence Thomas Decision to Rescue a Federal Agency that Wall Street Hates
- Saudi Arabia’s Wealth Fund Dumps Its JPMorgan Chase Stock; Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Did the Same in 2020
- One of Jeffrey Epstein’s Protectors at JPMorgan Chase, Mary Erdoes, Has Sold $29 Million of Her Stock in the Bank Since Just Before Epstein’s Arrest in 2019
- Delinquencies on Office Property Loans at Banks Are at 8 Percent While Office Loans the Banks Sold to Investors Show 31 Percent in Trouble
- Goldman Sachs Shines Up Its Swamp Creature Reputation by Rehiring Robert Kaplan as Vice Chairman – the Guy Who Traded Like a Hedge Fund Kingpin While President of the Dallas Fed
- Cleary Gottlieb – Outside Counsel to Wall Street’s Serially Bailed Out Megabanks – Tarnishes the FDIC Chair in its So-Called “Independent” Report
- JPMorgan Chase and Its Regulators Are Hiding Dark Trading Secrets at the Largest and Riskiest U.S. Bank
- Campus Protests Over Gaza Open a Pandora’s Box for Wall Street Megabanks that Underwrote $8 Billion of Israel’s Bonds in March
- Wall Street’s Megabanks Have Trillions of Dollars Off-Balance Sheet, in a Replay of Accounting Hubris that Led to the 2008 Wall Street Collapse
- JPMorgan Remains the Second Largest Money Market Fund Manager, Despite Needing Billions in Money Market Bailouts from the Fed in 2020
- The First Bank Failure of 2024 Leaves a 1-Cent Stock for Investors and $667 Million in Losses for the FDIC
- Catch and Kill Protection Rackets: Trump, Weinstein, Epstein and Wall Street
- Wall Street’s Judge Shopping Continues: It’s Trying to Stop the FTC’s Ban on Worker Handcuffs Known as Non-Compete Agreements
- The Fed Tallies Up a Big Threat to Financial Stability in the U.S.: “Runnables” at $21.3 Trillion
- Billionaire-Owned Media Has Gone Full Throttle to Save Fellow Billionaire, Jamie Dimon
- The Professor Who Wrote the Seminal Book on Wall Street Megabanks Calls Today’s Financial System “Dangerously Unstable”
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Here’s Why the Fed Hasn’t Yet Invoked Its 13(3) Emergency Powers to Stem a Stock Market Crash
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 17, 2020 ~ The U.S. stock market set new records yesterday – all of them bad. The Dow Jones Industrial Average suffered its worst point loss in history, closing down 2,997 points at 20,188.52, which effectively erases all of its gains in the last three years. On January 20, 2017, when Donald Trump was sworn in as President, the Dow closed at 19,827. It’s now grown by just 1.8 percent in total over that span of time. The Dow also had its second worst percentage loss in history yesterday, losing 12.93 percent. That loss is only exceeded by Black Monday, October 19, 1987, when the Dow lost 22.6 percent. It barely beats out October 28, 1929 when the Dow lost 12.8 percent and ushered in what would become the worst stock market crash in history. From late 1929 to 1933 the stock market … Continue reading
The Fed Tried to Give Away $1 Trillion to Wall Street Today and Failed, Suggesting Specific Banks Are In Trouble
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 16, 2020 ~
What is the world coming to when the New York Fed can’t mix up $1 trillion of almost-free money in its punch bowl and get the mega Wall Street banks to drink freely?
The New York Fed handed out $129.60 billion this morning at an average interest rate of 0.112. That was for a one-day loan to one or more of Wall Street’s trading firms. The specific names of which firms are doing the borrowing are a closely-guarded secret at the Fed – just as they were during the financial crisis in 2008 until media lawsuits and a legislative amendment forced the banks’ names out into the open. All that the public is allowed to know today is that any of the Fed’s 24 primary dealers (Wall Street trading houses) are allowed to borrow from the facility. (See list below.)
The New York Fed also offered $500 billion in a 28-day loan this morning and, stunningly, it only had offers for $18.45 billion of the $500 billion, which was loaned at an average interest rate of 0.151 percent.
Despite that poor showing at its money spigot party this morning, the New York Fed made a surprise announcement and said it was throwing another money giveaway of $500 billion at 1:30 p.m. today. Again, only takers for $19.40 billion of the $500 billion showed up. The loans were made at the incredibly low average interest rate of 0.102 percent.
There was this same lack of demand last Thursday and Friday when the Fed tried to give away, almost for free, $1.5 trillion over the two-day span.
What could possibly account for this lack of greed from the typical pigs at the trough?
The reason that jumps to mind to anyone who has been following the Fed’s money spigot closely, is that there are only a handful of Wall Street banks that are in desperate need of this cash. Since the beginning of this program last fall, the New York Fed has imposed caps on how much any one of the 24 Wall Street firms could borrow at each offering. It refers to this limit as a “proposition.”
So, for example, on the latest $500 billion loans, firms can make a “proposition” up to $20 billion on loans backed by U.S. Treasury collateral and up to $20 billion on loans backed by government-backed mortgage securities. It’s not clear if the Fed would provide an individual bank with a total of $40 billion on that specific loan or just $20 billion for both propositions.
It’s also not clear if the Fed has, without the public’s knowledge, imposed an overall cap on how much any one bank can borrow within a specific period of time.
But what today’s unscheduled afternoon loan operation suggests is that a bank that borrowed last Thursday or Friday or this morning, may have been in need of more assistance this afternoon.
We looked at how the Fed’s primary dealers were trading today to see which banks were showing the most distress. At approximately 2:30 today, these banks were showing large percentage declines on the day: Citigroup was down a scary 18.24 percent; Morgan Stanley was down 14.35 percent; Bank of America was down 14.38 percent; and JPMorgan Chase was down 13.64 percent.
Deutsche Bank had earlier in the day traded at a new all-time low of $4.99 before bouncing back to $5.39 for a percentage decline of 9.67 percent. That leaves the bank with just $11.5 billion in common equity capital versus tens of trillions of dollars (notional) in derivatives exposure.
Fed Sets Off Panic with Plan to Eliminate Reserves at Wall Street’s Mega Banks
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 16, 2020 ~ Last evening, it became painfully clear that the Board of Governors at the Federal Reserve do not understand the inner workings of Wall Street. After prattling on for months about the need to rebuild “ample reserves” at the behemoth Wall Street banks after the Fed was forced on September 17 to become the liquidity provider of last resort to the tune of $9 trillion cumulatively thus far, the Fed flipped its thinking on a dime yesterday and sent markets into a panic. As of 8:55 a.m. this morning, S&P 500 futures are locked, limit down, suggesting a steep drop in stocks at the open of trading at 9:30 a.m. Along with a series of other measures to prop up liquidity on Wall Street, the Federal Reserve Board of Governors announced last evening that it “has reduced reserve requirement ratios to … Continue reading
The Fed Has Pumped $9 Trillion into Wall Street Over the Past Six Months, But Mnuchin Says “This Isn’t Like the Financial Crisis”
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 14, 2020 ~ On February 12, 2020, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 29,551.42. Yesterday, March 13, the Dow closed at 23,185.62 -– a loss of 6,365.80 points in one month’s time, or 21.54 percent. In 2008, the greatest financial calamity since the Great Depression, the Dow had lost 2,339.60 points or 21.4 percent one month after the frightening events of September 15, 2008 when Lehman Brothers filed bankruptcy, Merrill Lynch had to be taken over by Bank of America, and one day before the U.S. government seized the giant insurer, AIG, because it couldn’t pay the tens of billions of dollars in derivative bets it had made with the mega banks on Wall Street. On this past Friday morning, in what appeared to be an effort to restore confidence on Wall Street, U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin gave an interview on … Continue reading
The Fed Has 233 Secret Documents about JPMorgan’s Potential Role in the Repo Loan Crisis
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 13, 2020 ~ The Federal Reserve Board of Governors has acknowledged to Wall Street On Parade that it has 233 documents that might shed some light on why JPMorgan Chase was allowed by the Fed to draw down $158 billion of the reserves it held at the Fed last year, creating a liquidity crisis in the overnight loan market according to sources on Wall Street. After taking four months to respond to what should have been a 20-business day turnaround on our Freedom of Information Act request, the Federal Reserve denied our FOIA in its entirety. (Our earlier request to the New York Fed resulted in the same kind of stonewalling. See The New York Fed Is Keeping JPMorgan’s Secrets Close to Its Chest.) The Wall Street liquidity crisis forced the Federal Reserve, beginning on September 17 of last year, to begin making … Continue reading
Federal Reserve Announces Unprecedented $1.5 Trillion in Loans to Wall Street Today and Tomorrow
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 12, 2020 ~ Making the most unprecedented announcement in the history of Wall Street, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York announced today that it will be offering $500 billion in 3-month repo loans to its primary dealers (Wall Street trading firms) today at 1:30 p.m. That $500 billion comes on top of the $198.10 billion the New York Fed loaned the street in its morning repo operations. Tomorrow, the New York Fed said it will offer its primary dealers another $500 billion in a 3-month loan and another $500 billion in a one-month loan, bringing the two-day total to potentially more than $1.7 trillion being offered at super low interest rates. (The Fed will also offer its regular one-day loan of $175 billion tomorrow.) These are staggering, unprecedented sums being offered by the Fed while it simultaneously claims that the Wall Street … Continue reading
Another Dangerous Virus Hits the U.S. – Wall Street Bank Contagion
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 12, 2020 ~ There has been a lot of delusional talk about the strong capital levels of the mega banks on Wall Street, not only from the Federal Reserve, but also from Wall Street analysts spreading fantasies about the banks on cable news programs. We took an afternoon off last Friday to hear what was being said about the banks on CNBC. We were stunned to hear Mike Mayo, a long-tenured bank analyst on Wall Street, who currently works for Wells Fargo Securities, deliver a huckster-like assessment of the mega Wall Street banks. Mayo said this: “The banking industry has the strongest balance sheet in a generation. Now think about this: the banks have added $1 trillion of additional capital – that’s $1 trillion with a T; $2 trillion of additional cash; $3 trillion of additional deposits. You have a Federal Reserve stress … Continue reading
Federal Reserve to Offer $270 Billion in Loans to Wall Street Tomorrow
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 11, 2020 ~ The little people in America will have to continue to wait to hear any concrete plans for their government to provide financial relief to them for business disruptions resulting from the coronavirus. But Wall Street banks and their sprawling trading desks got the word today that the Fed’s money gusher (repo loans) that began on September 17 of last year will offer them up another $270 billion in cold hard cash at unprecedented low interest rates tomorrow. The Fed announced that its 1-day emergency loans that it has been making each weekday will increase to as much as $175 billion a day beginning tomorrow; its 14-day loans, which will continue to be offered twice a week, will remain at the elevated amount of $45 billion; and the Fed will add three one-month loans of a whopping $50 billion each. The … Continue reading
Role of a Wall Street Law Firm in the Joe Biden Resurgence Raises Alarms for Progressives
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 11, 2020 ~ There has been the feeling of an invisible hand in the miraculous comeback of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden. Biden lost all three of the first races in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada, then spiraled to a long series of state victories despite a lackluster and sometimes rambling performance in the presidential debates. Since the invisible hand in unlikely elections always has a money trail somewhere, we decided to pull back the dark curtain using campaign financing data at the Center for Responsive Politics (OpenSecrets.org). The name of the giant Wall Street law firm – Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP – emerges as a common denominator. Paul Weiss has not only been a major donor to the Biden campaign but it was simultaneously a major donor to the campaigns of the four presidential candidates who dropped out of … Continue reading
There Was a Bloodbath in Wall Street Banks and Insurers Yesterday
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 10, 2020 ~ President Donald Trump is bringing a pea shooter to a gunfight. If you look carefully at the charts on this page from yesterday’s trading bloodbath, it’s clear that there is a deep financial crisis playing out. The idea that this can be remedied with a payroll tax cut is the stuff of tooth fairies. And this crisis didn’t begin with the coronavirus. Headlines about the virus did not start appearing in the U.S. until January of this year. But the Federal Reserve began making hundreds of billions of dollars each week in cheap loans to Wall Street’s banks on September 17, 2019 — the first time it had done this since the 2008 financial crisis. You can earmark September 17, 2019 as the actual date that this Financial Crisis II got underway. All of the toothless financial reforms of the … Continue reading