By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 28, 2020 ~ “The Fed has, effectively, become a hedge fund in drag as a central bank.” When the Fed published its weekly H.4.1 data last Thursday, there was no mention of its two, highly controversial, corporate bond buying programs: the Primary Market Corporate Credit Facility (PMCCF) and the Secondary Market Corporate Credit Facility (SMCCF). We sent an email to the New York Fed to find out if the two programs are operational and if they will be consolidated on the Fed’s balance sheet. A spokesman for the New York Fed replied that “the PMCCF and SMCCF are not yet operational. And, as we note on the websites for each, additional information will be published before the facilities are launched.” That strikes us as strange. Last fall, the Fed launched a highly questionable repo loan program in as little as 24 hours and … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 27, 2020 ~ Earlier this month President Trump advanced the view that during a national emergency the President has “total power.” The real power, however, is being exercised by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (New York Fed) with not so much as one vote by any elected representatives of the citizens of the U.S. The speed at which the New York Fed, owned by multinational banks, can create trillions of U.S. dollars by pushing an electronic button and bring financial relief to the 1 percent on Wall Street stands in sharp contrast to the millions of mom and pop small businesses across America who are still waiting to see a dime in relief from an elected Congress, forcing a growing number of small businesses to close permanently and thus further consolidating money and power in the United States. On September 17, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 24, 2020 ~ The Fed is back to its same ole bait and switch routine. Yesterday, the Federal Reserve issued a press release, which, on the surface, made it sound like the Fed is going to make full disclosure on where its trillions of dollars in money created out of thin air is going. Unfortunately, upon closer inspection, the Fed is saying it will only release the names and details of its programs where the taxpayer is putting up money to absorb losses. That leaves the following programs with no guarantee of timely transparency: the Fed’s repo loan program which has already made more than $9 trillion in super cheap revolving loans to the trading houses on Wall Street; the Fed’s Discount Window which, as of this past Wednesday, has a balance of $33.7 billion that went to unknown banks; the $31.5 billion … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 23, 2020 ~ (This article has been updated from one that originally ran in 2012.  Please consider emailing it to friends and family members who have given up hope on their ability to create change in America.) ~~~ The late 1920s and the early 2000s had two things in common. There was an unprecedented level of wealth and income inequality in the United States and there was no federal legislation to prevent giant Wall Street trading houses from owning deposit-taking banks filled with the savings of moms and pops across America. In both eras, those Wall Street trading houses used bank deposits to make wild bets in risky markets and pay themselves obscene amounts of money. The 1920s wild west on Wall Street ended in a staggering stock market crash from 1929 to 1932 that rendered thousands of banks insolvent and shut down. … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 22, 2020 ~ When the history books of this era are finally written, this will go down as a time when regulators allowed a no-law zone to be drawn around Wall Street. As the Federal Reserve Bank of New York is using taxpayer money to buy up junk bonds to shore up the sagging balance sheets of the behemoth banks on Wall Street and making ¼ of one percent interest loans to those banks against tanking stocks as collateral, those same Wall Street banks are trading their own bank’s stock in their own thinly-regulated internal stock exchanges known as Dark Pools. It simply can’t get any crazier than this — and yet somehow it always does in this unprecedented era. On June 2, 2014, to stem public outrage over claims of rigged markets, FINRA, the self-regulator and good buddy of Wall Street that … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 21, 2020 ~ “Biggest” or “fastest” declines in history are  becoming routine characterizations in business media of everything from stocks to unemployment claims to U.S. Treasury yields and now to commodity prices. You’d have to go back to the 1930s and the Great Depression to find as many similar references. And there was one other key characteristic that defined the early 1930s and now: unprecedented wealth inequality that had been manufactured by Wall Street running an institutionalized wealth transfer system that culminated in a stock market crash that erased 90 percent of the stock market’s value from 1929 to 1932. The late MIT economist, Lester Thurow, explained some three decades ago what happens when wealth is concentrated in too few hands: “Depression is seen as a product of systematic tendencies for the distribution of wealth to become concentrated among a few. When this … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 20, 2020 ~ The Federal Reserve’s role under the U.S. law that governs it (the Federal Reserve Act) is to function as the nation’s central bank and lender of last resort to deposit-taking commercial banks in a crisis and to set monetary policy to achieve the dual objectives of stable prices (preventing deflation as well as runaway inflation) while maximizing employment. But since December 2007, the Federal Reserve has simply written its own playbook, independent of the law that governs it. The Fed has decided to outsource to one of its 12 regional Federal Reserve banks, the New York Fed, the role of propping up the swamp on Wall Street. The New York Fed’s own playbook involves dangling a shiny object for mainstream media in a “look here but not there” operation. During the 2008 financial collapse on Wall Street that took down … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 17, 2020 ~ According to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, as of yesterday there were 5,117 federally-insured banks and savings associations in the United States. But in terms of risk to the U.S. economy and financial system, according to the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Financial Research, only five of those banks matter. And as you can see from the chart above, those five banks are tanking. On February 14 of this year, Citigroup’s share price closed at $78.79. Yesterday, it closed at $40.52, a decline of 48.5 percent in two months. This is the same bank that was resuscitated by its regulators during the 2007-2010 financial crash when its share price went to 99 cents. Citigroup received the largest bailout in global banking history, including $2.5 trillion in secret, cumulative revolving loans from the Federal Reserve. On February 14, the common stock of … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 16, 2020 ~ The Fed’s H.4.1 release which is faithfully posted on the Fed’s website each Thursday at 4:30 p.m. was seriously delayed today due to “technical difficulties.” When the data was finally posted, it showed that the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet has grown by a stunning $2.4 trillion since April 17 of last year. The Fed’s balance sheet now stands at $6.4 trillion. Following three rounds of Quantitative Easing (QE) after the financial crisis on Wall Street in 2008, the Fed’s balance sheet peaked at $4.5 trillion in 2015. On the day that Lehman Brothers collapsed into bankruptcy on September 15, 2008, the Fed’s balance sheet stood at just $995 billion. The Fed’s balance sheet was supposed to be “normalized” and “wound down” following the last financial crisis. That it has now ballooned to new heights raises the serious question as to … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 16, 2020 ~ Bloomberg News has an article up today with the headline: “The Fed Loves Main Street as much as Wall Street This Time.” The article is accompanied with a graphic of Fed Chair Jerome Powell shooting equal amounts of money at Main Street and Wall Street. Nothing could be further from the truth. Despite the headline, the article by Peter Coy offers not a scintilla of evidence to support the premise that Main Street is getting a fair shake from the Fed. What the article does do is adopt the talking points the Fed has used in every press release it has issued on a new funding facility rollout – that the money will (through some magical and invisible and unexplained hand of the market Gods) make its way to American workers and households. It’s all bunk. Here’s what is actually … Continue reading →