By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 22, 2020 ~ On Monday, a member of the New York Fed’s own Investor Advisory Committee on Financial Markets, Scott Minerd, published a critique which he headlined as follows: “Global Central Banks Fueling a Ponzi Market,” with this scary subhead: “Ultimately, investors will awaken to the rising tide of defaults and downgrades.” The thrust of the article is that central banks (which include the New York Fed’s Wall Street money spigot that was launched on September 17, 2019) are creating a Ponzi scheme of liquidity that is hiding the true state of risk in both the stock and bond markets. The implication is that without the Fed’s cheap money flooding markets, interest rates on questionable debt would be much higher, thus providing a red flag for investors. Minerd develops his thesis as follows: “The disturbing trend is that despite the rally in risk … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 21, 2020 ~ Senator Bernie Sanders has come closer than anyone on the Presidential campaign trail in defining what Wall Street actually does. Sanders has repeatedly stated at his rallies that “the business model of Wall Street is fraud.” That analysis is correct but abbreviated. Sanders needs to go further. It’s not just Wall Street’s business model that has left the United States with the greatest wealth inequality since the Roaring Twenties (a time when Wall Street investment banks were also allowed to own deposit-taking banks). It’s how Wall Street is monetizing that fraud that poses an existential threat to the solvency of the United States and the impoverishment of millions of Americans. The attempted WeWork Initial Public Offering (IPO) of last year was a classic example of how Wall Street can put lipstick on a pig, pass it off as a hot … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 20, 2020 ~ The New York Fed is so protective of its surreptitious trading relationship with Wall Street that it previously denied Wall Street On Parade a photo of its trading floor. (We obtained the one pictured here from a Fed educational video.) It is, by the way, the only one of the 12 regional Federal Reserve banks to have a trading floor. The New York Fed has been allowed by Congress to insert itself so deeply in markets that it’s highly possible that history will find it at least partly responsible for the next market implosion. The well-promulgated notion that the Federal Reserve began heavily meddling in the repo loan market on September 17 of last year is a piece of fiction. According to the U.S. government’s own database, residing at the Office of Financial Research (OFR), from 2014 through December 31, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 17, 2020 ~ On February 3, 2015, Jim Clifton, the Chairman and CEO of the iconic 85-year old polling company, Gallup, penned an article for his company in which he called the reported unemployment number issued by the U.S. Government “The Big Lie.” Wall Street On Parade has now discovered that a speech by former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and a statement made by the current Fed Chairman Jerome (Jay) Powell,  support the view that today’s reported unemployment rate of 3.5 percent is statistically impossible based on a long-held economic model known as “Okun’s Law.” Named after economist Arthur Okun, the economic law works like this according to a speech given by the Fed Chair Ben Bernanke in March 2012: “Okun noted that, because of ongoing increases in the size of the labor force and in the level of productivity, real GDP growth … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 16, 2020 ~ It’s apparently not enough of a billionaire subsidy for the U.S. Treasury’s Internal Revenue Service to give a monster tax break to hedge fund titans by allowing them to pay Federal taxes on the basis of “carried interest,” meaning that they have a special loophole to pay a lower tax rate than many school teachers, nurses and plumbers. Now, according to an article in the Wall Street Journal, the Federal Reserve is actually considering opening its super-cheap repo loan money spigot to hedge funds. It doesn’t get any crazier than this. Morphing from a central bank mandated to set monetary policy on the basis of maximum employment and stable prices, to the lender-of-last-resort to the criminally-charged trading houses on Wall Street and now, potentially, to the insider-trading/Big Short hedge funds, the New York Fed has totally lost its way if … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 15, 2020 ~ The New York Fed is back to subsidizing billions of dollars in profits at Wall Street’s trading houses, just as it did during the financial crisis. Yesterday, JPMorgan Chase reported that its profits for the quarter ending December 31, 2019 hit an all-time record. (The bank has been around for more than a century, so that’s saying something.) The quarterly profits were $8.52 billion – for the same three-month period in which the New York Fed has been flooding unnamed Wall Street trading houses with hundreds of billions of dollars each week in super cheap loans. The so-called “repo loans” by the New York Fed are being made at a fraction of where the free market would price loans to these Wall Street trading houses. On September 17, 2019, the first day the Fed began this open money spigot to … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 14, 2020 ~ Donald Trump continues to go out of his way to tie his reelection chances to the stock market setting new highs by perpetually taking credit for its gains on his Twitter page. No other sitting U.S. president in history has done that because they have all been aware of how fast trends can change in the stock market. In fact, we recall a previous Republican President, George W. Bush, being dismissive of the stock market, saying “they run it up and they run it down,” or words to that effect. (On Wall Street that’s known as a bull raid and a bear raid.) On January 9 President Trump delivered the message below on his Twitter page, mistakenly referring to a 401(K) as a 409K. The implication is that Trump has rallied the stock market by 70 to 90 percent and … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 13, 2020 ~  Last Friday, the usually reliable and fact-intensive financial website, Wolf Street, threw a hissy fit over how the Wall Street Journal (and by extension, Wall Street On Parade) is reporting the tallies for the repo loans that the New York Fed has been pumping out every business day since September 17, 2019 to the trading houses on Wall Street. The inflammatory headline blared: “The Wall Street Journal (and Other Media) Should Stop Lying About Repos.” The author of the piece, Wolf Richter, explained his criticism as follows: “Here is the ‘in’ of a repurchase agreement [repo loan]: The Fed buys securities (mostly Treasury securities and some agency mortgage-backed securities) in exchange for cash. This adds liquidity to the market. “Here is the ‘out’ of a repurchase agreement: Every repo matures on a set date when the counterparties are obligated to buy the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 10, 2020 ~  The design of the Boeing 737 Max and the Wall Street banking system are both dangerously flawed. The 737 Max has been grounded for almost 10 months following two airline crashes that killed 346 people. The Wall Street banking system, which crashed in 2008 and spread its wreckage into the lives of millions of Americans with job losses, home foreclosures, and trillions of dollars in lost savings is still being allowed to operate on a wing and a prayer. In the case of the Boeing 737 Max, Congress did not know beforehand that dangerous problems existed. In the case of the Wall Street banking system, Congress has had repeated warnings since 2012 of systemic dangers that it has simply chosen to ignore under heavy Wall Street lobbying pressure and the allure of tens of millions of dollars in political campaign … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 9, 2020 ~ Yesterday the World Bank released a report forecasting a decidedly bleak outlook for GDP growth in advanced economies. The U.S. is expected to grow at just 1.8 percent this year and a further drop to 1.7 percent in 2021 and 2022. That forecast throws extremely cold water on what Donald Trump promised just two years ago. On December 6, 2017 President Donald Trump stated at a news conference that his giant corporate tax cut (which Congress ended up passing later that same month) could boost GDP growth to “4, 5 and even 6 percent.” (See video clip below.) In 2018, U.S. GDP registered 2.9 percent and GDP growth for 2019 is expected to drop to approximately 2.2 percent, according to the Federal Reserve’s latest forecast. Thus, a tax cut that has spiraled the United States’ national debt to over $23 … Continue reading →