Search Results for: Janet Yellen

Senator Elizabeth Warren Versus Paul Krugman on Too Big to Fail

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 19, 2014 Two weeks ago, Paul Krugman used some expensive media real estate to write a propaganda piece on the unsupportable proposition that the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation passed in 2010 is “a success story” and that its bank wind-down program known as Ordinary Liquidation Authority has put an end to “bailing out the bankers.” Wall Street On Parade took Krugman to task over this fanciful ode to accomplishments by the President the day after his piece ran in the New York Times’ opinion pages and suggested he do proper research on this subject before opining in the future. That was the morning of August 5. By late in the afternoon of August 5, Krugman had a reality smack-down on his Dodd-Frank success fairy tale by two Federal regulators. Every major media outlet was running with the news that eleven of the biggest … Continue reading

Dodd-Frank Versus Glass-Steagall: How Do They Compare?

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 7, 2014 The U.S. Senate has been holding hearings since June which show a clear rethinking on what type of legislation it must enact going forward to achieve meaningful reforms of Wall Street and protect the economy from its excesses. The 849-page Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation, enacted four years ago in 2010, mandated 398 new rules; just 208 of those rules, or 52 percent, have been enacted and none of them seem to be reining in excesses on Wall Street. To understand why Dodd-Frank has been such a failure in reforming Wall Street conduct, one need only read the following sentence and think about it for a moment: Public Law 73-66, 73d Congress, H.R. 5661: An Act to provide for the safer and more effective use of the assets of banks, to regulate interbank control, to prevent the undue diversion of funds into … Continue reading

Citigroup Offers Five Times Leverage to Bank Depositors to Trade in Foreign Currencies

By Pam Martens: August 4, 2014 It’s so crazy that one’s first instinct is that it must be a spoof web site. It reads: “A Citibank International Personal Bank FX Leveraged Loan Account can help you maximize the most of what you have. It allows you to borrow up to 5 times your deposit balance to trade in foreign currencies, so you may increase your potential investment power.” (The italics on deposit balance are ours.) It turns out that this is a real Citibank offering, a real Citibank web site, and there is a similar deal being offered in Hong Kong by Citibank – one of Wall Street’s largest banks – a bank that appears hell bent on setting a Guinness World Record for the most screw ups in one decade. Putting aside the fact that Citigroup, parent of Citibank, is under investigation for potentially helping to rig foreign currency … Continue reading

BOE’s Carney: Inflated Central Bank Balance Sheet the New Normal; Expect to Hear the Same Conclusion from the U.S. Fed

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 25, 2014 The tabloids in London are having a field day today with headlines calling Bank of England Governor, Mark Carney, an “unreliable boyfriend” – a remark made yesterday by MP Pat McFadden during a hearing of the Treasury Select Committee of Parliament over the mixed signals Carney is sending the market about the timing of interest rate hikes by the BOE. (Carney, a Canadian and former head of the Bank of Canada, where he masterfully steered the Canadian economy through the financial crisis, might be forgiven for alternately thinking he’s on a bad blind date in his current assignment.) Carney suffered a withering grilling yesterday over a speech he delivered on June 12 in which he said “There’s already great speculation about the exact timing of the first rate hike and this decision is becoming more balanced. It could happen sooner than … Continue reading

Mr. President, Executive Orders Are No Match for this Economic Slowdown

By Pam Martens: March 13, 2014 The warning signs are piling up that the U.S. economy is stalling and the feeble measures of the President to address this economic slowdown with executive signings are too little too late. Congress needs to put partisan bickering aside and open its eyes to an onslaught of data pointing to an economy hitting a brick wall. For five years now, the executive branch and Congress have been living under the Wall Street-imposed delusion that flooding the big banks with liquidity (bailouts and years of quantitative easing) would promote job growth in the private sector and restore good jobs to the middle class. What it restored instead were rising bonuses for a limited, elite set of the financial sector who have used that flood of cash to make highly leveraged, high risk wagers in trading venues around the world while exacerbating income inequality in the … Continue reading

IMF Fires a Warning Shot at the Fed on Deflation

By Pam Martens: February 20, 2014 The U.S. government’s economic policy wonks are the habitual finger wags. They’ve lectured Japan incessantly for 20 years on how to beat its intractable deflation problem and in more recent years pointed at China for keeping its currency artificially low to boost exports.  Last October 30, when the U.S. Treasury released its semi-annual “International Economic and Exchange Rate Policies” report to Congress, it turned its finger-pointing on Germany, grousing that: “Within the euro area, countries with large and persistent surpluses need to take action to boost domestic demand growth and shrink their surpluses.  Germany has maintained a large current account surplus throughout the euro area financial crisis, and in 2012, Germany’s nominal current account surplus was larger than that of China.  Germany’s anemic pace of domestic demand growth and dependence on exports have hampered rebalancing at a time when many other euro-area countries have … Continue reading

Wall Street Marches to Its Golden Rule: “Don’t Fight the Fed”

By Pam Martens: February 4, 2014 From the very moment one starts a career as a rookie on Wall Street, you are taught the number one Golden Rule of investing by your elders: “Don’t fight the Fed.” If the Fed is hell bent on pumping liquidity into the markets, don’t fight the bull thesis. If the Fed is, for whatever reason, forced to drain that liquidity from the markets, head for the exits before you’re trampled by a stampeding herd. On September 13, 2012, the Fed’s Open Market Committee (FOMC) announced it would begin buying “agency mortgage-backed securities at a pace of $40 billion per month.” A mere three months later, it more than doubled the ante with this announcement on December 12: “To support a stronger economic recovery and to help ensure that inflation, over time, is at the rate most consistent with its dual mandate, the Committee will … Continue reading

The Official Video from the Federal Reserve on How It Creates Electronic Money

By Pam Martens: November 26, 2013 Unless you’ve been lost at sea since 2008, you’ve likely heard time and again that the Federal Reserve is creating money out of thin air. Type the words “Federal Reserve creates money AND thin air” into the Google search engine and you’ll find about 2.4 million people weighing in on the subject, including folks at PBS. There’s no reason for the debate. The Federal Reserve has put out its very own video explaining how it creates money. It prefers the phrase “newly created electronic funds” to the colloquial “out of thin air.” The video is narrated by Steve Meyer, a Senior Advisor to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, who explains how the Fed has been paying for those trillions in bond purchases since the 2008 crash. Meyer says on the video: “You may wonder how the Federal Reserve pays for the securities it … Continue reading

Fed Minutes Reveal a Dangerous Power Grab by New York Fed

By Pam Martens: November 21, 2013 Just when it seemed one could no longer be shocked by the corruption, hubris and lack of accountability in the American financial system, along comes yesterday’s release of the Federal Reserve’s minutes for the October 29-30 meeting of its Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC). While mainstream media focuses on what the minutes revealed about when the Fed might begin to reduce its monthly $85 billion in bond purchases, receiving scant attention is a brazen power grab boldly stated on page two of the eleven pages of minutes. Back on October 31, wire services reported that the temporary dollar and foreign currency swap lines that had been put in place between central banks on a temporary basis during the financial crisis had been turned into standing arrangements. The Associated Press explained the action as follows: “Six of the world’s leading central banks, including the U.S. … Continue reading

Republican Senators Describe Fed Easing: A “Morphine Drip,” a “Sugar High,” “Asset Bubbles”; And They’re Right

By Pam Martens: November 20, 2013 This time around, Republican members of the U.S. Senate Banking Committee want to go on record that they not only see a train wreck coming from the Fed’s easy money policy, but have described it in unmistakable terms to Janet Yellen, the President’s nominee to lead the Federal Reserve. During the recent Senate Banking confirmation hearing of Yellen, three Republican Senators were particularly outspoken about the dangers lurking in the Fed’s policy of pumping $85 billion a month, a whopping $1.02 trillion a year, into Wall Street coffers via bond purchases from the Street. The policy is known in Wall Street jargon as QE3, shorthand for Quantitative Easing, round 3. By preventing a surplus of bonds on the Street, the Fed is keeping interest rates artificially low in hopes of stimulating economic recovery. The flip side of that effort, however, is to flood Wall … Continue reading