By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 5, 2019 ~ The Fed is in deep fear, while also in deep denial, about what happened last December. Its fear is that it could happen again this December. Its denial is that its lax supervision of the Wall Street mega banks is largely responsible for the mess. The stock market news on December 24 of last year was not what folks want to be reading about on Christmas Eve. The Dow Jones Industrial Average had plunged 653 points on Christmas Eve and headline writers across major media were declaring the month to have been the worst December for stocks since the Great Depression. But the declines in the broader stock market averages paled in comparison to the December carnage that occurred in the share prices of the mega banks on Wall Street and, to the Fed’s consternation, the insurance companies that are … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 4, 2019 ~ David Dayen of American Prospect has a must-read article. The headline and subhead read: “JPMorgan Gets Back Into the Electricity Business: An El Paso, Texas, electric utility is being purchased by an investment fund with deep, undisclosed ties to the big bank.” Dayen is not buying into the idea that it’s an investment fund at JPMorgan that’s buying El Paso Electric, a publicly traded electric utility, but that the deal is simply being “laundered through an allegedly independent investment fund,” due to the fact that “48 executives of the investment fund are actually paid employees of JPMorgan….” Why wouldn’t JPMorgan Chase want to admit that it plans to make an outright purchase of an electric utility company serving 429,000 customers in Texas and New Mexico? For starters, the bank has been charged, and admitted to, three criminal felony counts within … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 4, 2019 ~ Corporate America is increasingly sending conflicting messages to its top executives: engaging in relationships with subordinates, consensual or otherwise, will cost you your job – but criminal acts involving looting the public, not so much. Steve Easterbrook, the CEO of the fast food chain, McDonald’s, was fired by his Board yesterday for engaging in a consensual relationship with an employee, in violation of company policy. The Board of the largest bank in the United States, on the other hand, JPMorgan Chase, has not fired its Chairman and CEO, Jamie Dimon, despite the following occurring on his watch: $6.2 billion in losses from a high-risk gamble with derivatives in London in 2012 – using, mind you, the deposits of its federally-insured bank. Then came 2014 when the bank was charged for its role in the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme. The Madoff … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 1, 2019 ~ Fed Chairman Jerome Powell had a Greenspan moment on Wednesday during his press conference. He made several Goldilocks statements about the banks that are going to come back to haunt him just as former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan’s Alice in Wonderland remarks to Congress in the leadup to the greatest financial crash since the Great Depression have now made him appear to have been either lying to Congress or dangerously out of touch. It took just a few moments for us to pull up some charts to disprove the statements made by Powell. Powell stated the following during the Q&A portion of the press conference: “So, we monitor financial stability risks very carefully all of the time. It’s what we do since the financial crisis, as I’ve mentioned before. Currently, we don’t see large imbalances. This long expansion is notable … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 31, 2019 ~ Yesterday, following the announcement of another 1/4 point interest rate cut by the Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell held a press conference at 2:30 p.m. It proved to be an embarrassing and shameful example of New York City-centric business journalism. Seven business journalists from leading business news outlets that cover Wall Street asked questions in the first 23 minutes of the press conference. Not one of these reporters asked about the liquidity crisis on Wall Street that has resulted in the Fed offering $690 billion a week to 23 Wall Street securities firms and one foreign bank as well as a newly launched “don’t call it QE4” operation by the Fed to buy up $60 billion a month in Treasury bills from Wall Street dealers. The Fed began its repo loan interventions on September 17 of … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 30, 2019 ~ There is growing evidence that the New York Fed, the Wall Street feeding tube team of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, is using its massive new repo loan operations to securities firms (primary dealers) to foam the Wall Street runways to try to avoid a crash landing as money gushes out of hedge funds by the tens of billions of dollars. According to a report at eVestment, investors pulled $29.37 billion from hedge funds in the third quarter of this year, bringing the total year-to-date to an eyebrow-raising $76.86 billion. That’s more than twice the amount that was withdrawn in all of last year. Hedge funds are highly-leveraged, so $76.86 billion in withdrawals could translate into hundreds of billions of dollars of liquidations in stock and bond markets. The report further notes that this is the “sixth consecutive quarterly … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 29, 2019 ~ On January 19, 2011, the Federal Reserve released a video on YouTube to quell the public uproar over its unaccountable money creation operations. The spokesman for the Fed in the video was their Senior Adviser at the time, Steve Meyer, now an Adjunct Professor of Finance at The Wharton School. The Fed was in the middle of its second round of quantitative easing (QE2) and Meyer states this: “The Fed will not keep buying large amounts of securities on an ongoing basis.” The Fed was so intent on conveying the “temporary” nature of its unprecedented actions that it put that statement by Meyer on the screen. (See screen shot above.) Meyer then immediately adds this about the Fed: “Its purchases are a temporary measure to help the economy recover.” But the Fed’s purchases were not temporary. On September 13, 2012 … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 28, 2019 ~  JPMorgan Chase is the largest bank in the United States with $1.6 trillion in deposits from more than 5,000 retail bank branches spread across the country. When it withdraws liquidity from the U.S. financial system, that has a reverberating impact.  According to the filings that JPMorgan Chase makes annually with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), since 2013 JPMorgan Chase has spent $77 billion buying back its own stock. That includes the whopping $17.01 billion it has spent in just the first nine months of this year buying back its stock. But here’s the shocking news. According to its SEC filings, JPMorgan Chase is partly using Federally insured deposits made by moms and pops across the country in its more than 5,000 branches to prop up its share price with buybacks. The wording in the filing is as follows: “In … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 25, 2019 ~ Today would have been Mark Pittman’s 62nd birthday. Pittman died of a heart attack at age 52 on November 25, 2009 in the midst of a pitched court battle with the Federal Reserve to obtain data on its secret loans to Wall Street. Writing for Bloomberg News, Pittman was one of the preeminent chroniclers during the financial crisis of the Federal Reserve’s hubris in refusing to shed any light on what eventually turned out to be an astounding $29 trillion of money it created out of thin air to bail out Wall Street’s mega banks and their foreign bank derivatives counterparties. Pittman had appeared in the documentary, American Casino, produced by Leslie and Andrew Cockburn. In that documentary, the Cockburns brilliantly pieced together for the American people the wealth transfer scheme concocted by the mega banks on Wall Street, which … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 25, 2019 ~ Memories are apparently very short at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The SEC seems to have forgotten that a run on money market funds holding bank commercial paper set off a panic after the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy filing on September 15, 2008. The government had to step in and guarantee the funds. Despite those disastrous days, the SEC has allowed money market funds being sold in the U.S. to hold a staggering $642 billion in the instruments of foreign banks, as of September 30, 2019. It categorizes those instruments as: certificates of deposits, time deposits, sponsored asset-backed commercial paper, and repurchase agreements (repos) where the bank is the counterparty. On top of the $642 billion in the instruments of foreign banks, the money market funds are holding another $292 billion in the instruments of U.S. banks, bringing the total … Continue reading →