Search Results for: BlackRock

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 4, 2024 ~ It appears that Senator Elizabeth Warren was spot on in her assessment of the lack of a backbone for Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell when it comes to raising capital requirements on the powerful megabanks on Wall Street. At a March 7 Senate Banking Committee hearing in which Powell was appearing as a witness, Warren said this: “Despite all you said last year when the banks failed [in the spring banking crisis of 2023] about supporting Vice Chair Barr’s recommendations to strengthen rules for big banks, public reporting now says that you are driving efforts inside the Fed to weaken the capital rule. You even told the House Financial Services Committee representatives yesterday that you think it’s ‘very plausible’ that you withdraw the rule.” The capital rule that Senator Warren is referring to was proposed more than a year ago by … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 31, 2024 ~ Last Thursday, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (the Fed), the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the federal supervisors of banks, issued 11 pages of warnings on what could go wrong when federally-insured banks get in bed with uninsured and untested financial technology companies. These financial technology companies are lovingly called Fintechs on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley where big money can be made by venture capitalists who bring the sexy-sounding Fintech startup as an IPO (Initial Public Offering) to investors on Wall Street. The Wall Street firm, in return, gets a nice payday in underwriting fees and a law firm also gets paid as counsel to the underwriters. Federal banking regulators have been in a frenzied scramble to deal with the growing fallout of disastrous marriages between … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 14, 2023 ~ Quietly, on December 1, the New York Fed published the following statement on its website: “The Norinchukin Bank, New York Branch, has been added to the list of Standing Repo Facility Counterparties, effective December 1, 2023.” The Standing Repo Facility (SRF) is a permanent $500 billion bailout facility created by the Federal Reserve and operated by the New York Fed – the private regional Fed bank where multi-trillion dollar Wall Street bank bailouts have become a regular feature of its operations. Without any action from the U.S. legislative branch (otherwise known as Congress), the Fed has unilaterally decided to become lender of last resort to Wall Street trading houses (whom the Fed prefers to call its “primary dealers”) and deposit-taking banks, including the uninsured New York branches of foreign banks like Norinchukin Bank. If you have never heard of Norinchukin Bank, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 5, 2022 ~ If you have been following the Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX crypto exchange story since the company filed for bankruptcy on November 11, you have likely read the phrase “a valuation of $32 billion” dozens of times to describe the “valuation” of FTX as recently as February of this year. (We pulled up 47,600 results from a Google search.) But here’s the funny thing. No media outlet has bothered to explain how FTX came by that $32 billion valuation or precisely how Sam Bankman-Fried, the co-founder and CEO of FTX, became a billionaire overnight. FTX wasn’t publicly traded so its share price wasn’t determined by millions of investors buying and selling its stock on a public stock exchange five days a week. And here’s another funny thing: mainstream media reported in late September that FTX was looking to raise $1 billion more … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 10, 2022 ~ FTX, the second largest crypto exchange, is teetering near bankruptcy this morning; has shuttered withdrawals of money and crypto by its customers; and is dealing with investigations by the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the U.S. Department of Justice. At least one of those investigations is focusing on the potential misuse of customer funds between FTX and Alameda Research, a trading firm created by FTX founder and CEO, Sam Bankman-Fried. The Wall Street Journal reports that FTX has a “shortfall of up to $8 billion.” A deal by the largest crypto exchange, Binance, to buy out FTX as it faltered, was scrapped yesterday after due diligence lawyers for Binance didn’t like what they saw. As recently as January, FTX had a valuation of $32 billion. Its sophisticated investors include Sequoia Capital, BlackRock, Tiger Global Management,  SoftBank, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 12, 2022 ~ On May 4, 2020, while Jay Clayton was the Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission in the Trump administration, the SEC granted approval for a new national stock exchange called MEMX, whose Wall Street megabank owners have admitted to a collective nine criminal felony counts brought by the U.S. Department of Justice. JPMorgan Chase accounts for five of those felony counts; Goldman Sachs and a subsidiary account for two felony counts; Citigroup and UBS account for one felony count each. The other owners of MEMX include: Bank of America, BlackRock, Charles Schwab, Citadel Securities, E*TRADE, Fidelity Investments, Flow Traders, Jane Street, Manikay Partners, Morgan Stanley, TD Ameritrade, Virtu Financial, Wells Fargo, and Williams Trading. The SEC’s letter approving MEMX as a national securities exchange stated that the SEC was confident that MEMX would “prevent fraudulent and manipulative acts and practices, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 19, 2022 ~ For the past week, Wall Street On Parade has been crunching the cryptic data released by the Federal Reserve on March 31 that named the mutual funds that couldn’t meet redemption requests in their money market funds in March and April of 2020 without tapping loans from the Fed. As we reported yesterday, the Fed loaned a cumulative total of $162.9 billion from its Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility (MMLF) in March and April of 2020 with 72 percent of that total going to just six mutual fund families: Federated $27.75 billion; JPMorgan $24.8 billion; Morgan Stanley $19.55 billion; UBS $17.3 billion; Wells Fargo $15.5 billion; and BlackRock $11.98 billion. There are two striking aspects to this story. First, no mainstream media outlet will go near the story. The same media outlets that battled the Fed in court for more … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 18, 2022 ~ The Federal Reserve has set up a veritable obstacle course to prevent the public from drilling down to see that just six big Wall Street firms received the lion’s share of loans from its emergency funding facility called the Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility (MMLF). The MMLF made emergency loans from March 23, 2020 through April 23, 2020, but the program did not end on April 23, 2020. That’s because these were not overnight loans. They were loans made for periods up to as long as 11 months in some cases – taking the program into 2021. The MMLF made loans against paper that could not be sold elsewhere that was sitting in money market funds that were having difficulty raising cash to meet redemption requests. The loans were for the same maturity as the paper being put up … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 29, 2022 ~ The above headline regarding Citadel Securities and Virtu Financial comes from a report authored by John Detrixhe that was published at Quartz in February of last year. The report found that as of December 2020 the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) had a 19.9 percent share of stock market trading versus 13.4 for Citadel Securities and 9.4 percent for Virtu Financial. This gave Citadel Securities and Virtu a combined stock market trading share of 22.8 percent versus 19.9 for the NYSE. The big problem with this picture is that neither Citadel Securities or Virtu Financial are registered as stock exchanges and neither are regulated by the SEC as stock exchanges. Citadel Securities is a broker-dealer that pays for order flow from at least nine online brokerage firms and has a dubious history of regulatory fines and abusive behavior. Virtu Financial is … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 11, 2022 ~ A Fed spokesperson has provided Wall Street On Parade with a detailed response to our article yesterday, which documented that trades were made in accounts in which Fed Chair Jerome Powell had a financial interest during a Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting in 2015 and another in 2019. Fed officials are clearly prohibited from trading before and during FOMC meetings because that is when they have insider, market-moving information. Below is the full statement from the Fed spokesperson. Following the statement, we will explain its many, serious flaws. “Chair Powell has not traded during FOMC blackout periods. The transactions that were reported occurred in family trusts over which he had no control. Chair Powell is not a trustee and did not direct or control the trades. He relinquished his previous role as a trustee in 2012 when he joined the … Continue reading →