Search Results for: Federal Reserve

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 8, 2022 ~ Bailing out the Wall Street megabanks that are serially fined and hit with felony counts appears to be catching on as a major career advancement strategy at the New York Fed. On August 22, Lorie Logan began her big promotion as President of the Dallas Fed, a position that paid $440,700 at the end of 2020. That’s $40,700 more than the salary of the President of the United States. Prior to joining the Dallas Fed, Logan was the Manager of the System Open Market Account (SOMA) at the New York Fed, effectively the Fed’s trading floor. As part of her job, Logan oversaw the trillions of dollars that were electronically created at the New York Fed to bail out Wall Street trading houses in the fall of 2019 and through the middle of 2020. (See our related report The Fed Appears … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 8, 2022 ~ The Fed would appear to have violated both the spirit and the letter of the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation in the second quarter of 2020, according to new repo loan data released by the New York Fed for the second quarter of 2020. The data shows that Citigroup received 96 percent of all repo loans made by the Fed between June 24, 2020 and June 30, 2020. Citigroup also dwarfed all other borrowers in the Fed’s repo loan program during the full second quarter of 2020. Citigroup borrowed a cumulative total of $454,751,000,000 from the Fed between April 1 and June 30, 2020. Of the 24 firms that borrowed during the second quarter of 2020 from the Fed’s repo loan program, Citigroup’s share amounted to more than the combined total of 19 firms. (See charts above and below.) Congress and the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: September 7, 2022 On Thursday evening, September 1, President Joe Biden addressed the nation from Philadelphia, the second location of the U.S. Capitol in its early years. During his remarks, Biden spoke these words: “Too much of what’s happening in our country today is not normal. Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic. “Now, I want to be very clear — very clear up front: Not every Republican, not even the majority of Republicans, are MAGA Republicans. Not every Republican embraces their extreme ideology. I know because I’ve been able to work with these mainstream Republicans. “But there is no question that the Republican Party today is dominated, driven, and intimidated by Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans, and that is a threat to this country.” The two most important words in this excerpt from Biden’s remarks are the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 6, 2022 On August 11, the Attorney General of the U.S. Department of Justice, Merrick Garland, told the American people at a press conference that: “Faithful adherence to the rule of law is the bedrock principle of the Justice Department and of our democracy. Upholding the rule of law means applying the rule of law evenly, without fear or favor.” That was certainly not true of Eric Holder’s Justice Department under President Obama, nor was it true of William Barr’s Justice Department under President Trump. In fact, just the opposite was true. Under Holder, the Justice Department functioned as a coverup and white-washing mechanism for a crime syndicate of powerful players on Wall Street. (See here and here.) Under Barr, the Justice Department took a machete to the rule of law and sculpted an art form out of doling out favorable treatment to criminal … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 30, 2022 ~ According to YCharts (give the chart time to load) since January 1, 2017 through December 31, 2021 – a span of five years – JPMorgan Chase has spent a total of $84.312 billion buying back its own stock. In eight of those quarters, it spent more than $5 billion buying back its own shares. In the three quarters when JPMorgan Chase was on a secret feeding tube from the Fed via the Fed’s emergency repo loans and other emergency programs, the bank bought back the most stock in its history according to YCharts: $6.949 billion for the quarter ending September 30, 2019; $6.751 billion for the quarter ending December 31, 2019; and $6.517 billion for the quarter ending March 31, 2020. Now, the unthinkable has happened. The Fed has actually put JPMorgan Chase on a leash. As a result, the bank … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 29, 2022 ~ Tomorrow, Simon & Schuster will release a new book by Jamie Fiore Higgins, a woman who worked her entire Wall Street career at one firm. Over the span of just under 18 years, beginning on September 2, 1998 and ending officially on May 31, 2016 according to BrokerCheck, Fiore Higgins achieved a level of financial success rarely attained by a woman on Wall Street. She was fresh out of college, at age 22, when this journey began. She was a seven-figure Managing Director at the quintessential good ole boys club on Wall Street when it ended. Now, six years after she resigned her post (possibly heretofore restrained by the customary non-disparagement agreement one is asked to sign when leaving a Wall Street investment bank) Fiore Higgins is spilling the beans on what she saw and heard and experienced at Goldman Sachs. … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 23, 2022 ~ Caitlin Long is the founder and CEO of a crypto startup called Custodia Bank, previously known as Avanti Financial Group. Custodia is allowed to call itself a “bank” – despite the fact that it does not have FDIC insurance on deposits – because of a 2019 law in Wyoming that allows Custodia to operate as a Special Purpose Depository Institution (SPDI). The lack of federal insurance on bank deposits and Wall Street’s wild speculations are what led to thousands of banks going belly up following the 1929 stock market crash. Wyoming has become to crypto what the state of Delaware is to corporate secrecy – a very friendly venue. Since 2018, Wyoming has passed a flurry of laws to effectively roll out the red carpet to crypto startups and their army of lobbyists. The University of Wyoming even offers a Minor … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 22, 2022 ~ Last week the Federal Reserve announced that it was banning Ronald D. Paul for life from the banking industry. Paul is the former Chairman and CEO of EagleBank, a small bank operating 20 offices in Maryland, Washington, D.C. and Virginia. The Fed also announced it was fining EagleBank $9.5 million for violating the Board’s “insider lending regulation,” over EagleBank extending “credit totaling nearly $100 million to entities that Paul owned or controlled, including certain family trusts, without making appropriate disclosures….” This is just one more case of the Federal Reserve going after the little fish while taking a hands-off approach to the killer whales – the megabanks on Wall Street. For more than a decade, JPMorgan Chase has been asserting in its proxy statement that its entire Board of Directors, other than Jamie Dimon, consists of independent directors. In its most … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 17, 2022 ~ After crypto has blighted trust in the financial landscape of the United States and left tens of thousands of Americans as victims of theft, or locked out of access to their money, the Federal Reserve has finally found the courage to take on the loud-mouthed crypto hawkers and issue a warning. The Fed sent a letter yesterday to supervisory staff at its 12 regional Federal Reserve banks and to all Fed member banks. The letter started out with a curious sentence (potentially crafted to assuage the loud-mouthed crypto hawkers which include a significant number of right-wing members of Congress on the Senate Banking and House Financial Services Committees which oversee the Fed). The sentence read: “The emerging crypto-asset sector presents potential opportunities to banking organizations, their customers, and the overall financial system…” (Italics added.) The word “opportunities” typically suggests that something of … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 15, 2022 ~ Last Thursday evening, Justice Department Attorney General, Merrick Garland, held a brief press conference to announce that he had asked a federal court to unseal the search warrant and inventory receipts filed in connection with the FBI’s search of Donald Trump’s Palm Beach oceanfront home and beach resort, Mar-a- Lago. As part of his statement to the press, Garland said this: “Faithful adherence to the rule of law is the bedrock principle of the Justice Department and of our democracy. Upholding the rule of law means applying the rule of law evenly, without fear or favor.” Unfortunately, the vast majority of Americans believe there is one set of laws for the rich and powerful and another set of laws for average Americans. According to a Gallup poll released on July 5, only 14 percent of Americans had “a great deal” or … Continue reading →