Search Results for: BlackRock

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 10, 2022 ~ An anonymous activist group called Occupy the Fed reported in a Substack article on Sunday that Fed Chair Jerome Powell traded on the final day of a Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting on April 29, 2015, when he was a Fed Governor, and also on the final day of an FOMC meeting on December 11, 2019, when he was Fed Chair.  Powell’s trading directly violates the Fed’s written policy which prohibits trading “during the period that begins at the start of the second Saturday (midnight) Eastern Time before the beginning of each FOMC meeting and ends at midnight Eastern Time on the last day of the meeting.” The FOMC meetings are typically when the most sensitive and market-moving information occurs at the Fed, including votes on hiking or lowering interest rates and other confidential actions. Dallas Fed President Robert Kaplan, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 4, 2022 ~ From 401(k) plans to mutual funds to the federal government workers’ pension plan to foreign central bank stock portfolios – everyone is feeling Facebook’s pain today. The parent company’s stock (Meta Platforms, Inc.) lost 26.39 percent of its value yesterday – in one trading session. That’s what happens when the Fed is allowed, with no restraints from Congress, to fuel a bubble market that allows one company — that pays no dividend and has no barriers for upstarts like TikTok to steal its user base — to gain a market cap of over $1 trillion. On June 28 of last year, Facebook’s stock closed above a $1 trillion market cap for the first time. It has been on a price decline since last September and when the stock market’s closing bell rang yesterday, it was a $647 billion stock. Its market … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 14, 2021 ~ Yesterday was the last day that Randal Quarles served in the post as Vice Chair for Supervision at the Federal Reserve. Senator Sherrod Brown, the Chair of the Senate Banking Committee that oversees the Federal Reserve, used the occasion to send a scorching letter to Fed Chair Jerome Powell assessing Quarles’ performance in the job, which began on October 13, 2017. Brown wrote: “When Vice Chair Quarles was confirmed to his position, banking lobbyists cheered. Not only did he immediately set out a plan to shift post-crisis rules to benefitting industry interests over protecting working families, he dutifully continued his deregulatory efforts even as the economy was shaken by a global pandemic. I am deeply concerned about these efforts during a global economic crisis.” But it’s not just deregulation that has been a problem with Quarles and Powell at the helm of … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 5, 2021 ~ After watching the video below, if you have further doubts, consider this: On August 7 of last year, Wall Street On Parade reported that Fed Chairman, Jerome Powell, was having private phone calls with BlackRock CEO, Larry Fink, while BlackRock managed upwards of $25 million of Powell’s personal money and the Fed awarded three no-bid contracts to BlackRock for emergency lending facilities. One of those no-bid contracts allowed BlackRock to use Fed money to buy up corporate bonds and Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) in the secondary market, including BlackRock’s own ETFs. American taxpayers’ money was used to backstop losses in these bailout facilities. And while the individual stock-trading of Kaplan and Rosengren is indeed an outrage, it pales in comparison to what the New York Fed has been doing for decades. On October 30 of last year, Wall Street On Parade reported that the New … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 29, 2021 ~ The culture of Wall Street has now completely engulfed the Fed: it’s legal if you can get away with it. For more than five years the President of the Dallas Fed, Robert Kaplan, was trading like a hedge fund kingpin in “over $1 million” transactions in S&P 500 futures while refusing to follow the requirements of the Fed’s financial disclosure form and list the specific dates of his purchases and sells so that the transactions could be examined for whether he had inside information from the Fed at the time. That information is now as much as five years overdue to the American people and we have asked the Dallas Fed to provide it promptly. The Dallas Fed further hampered the free press in America from doing its job by refusing to answer our simple question as to whether Kaplan … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 28, 2021 ~ The biggest trading scandal in the Federal Reserve’s 108-year history took down two Federal Reserve Bank Presidents yesterday. Boston Fed President Eric Rosengren, who traded in and out of REITs last year in amounts of $1,000 to $50,000, will leave this Thursday; Dallas Fed President Robert Kaplan, whose trading made Rosengren look like a Boy Scout, will step down from his post at the end of next week. Kaplan was making repeated trades of “over $1 million” in S&P 500 futures (an instrument used during and after stock exchange hours by hedge funds) as well as making “over $1 million” trades in a litany of individual stocks. Just as a poker player can give away his hand with a tell, financial disclosure statements can also provide a tell as to the name of the Wall Street firm that is placing the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 21, 2021 ~ Fortunately for Americans, the keen-eyed Wall Street watchdog group, Better Markets, is not living in the same alternative reality universe as the cable financial news network, CNBC. Last Friday, CNBC published a crazy headline regarding Dallas Fed President Robert Kaplan trading tens of millions of dollars of individual stocks and S&P 500 futures in 2020 while Boston Fed President Eric Rosengren traded in and out of REITs (Real Estate Investment Trusts). The trading occurred despite both men being privy to non-public, market moving information coming from the Federal Reserve, the central bank of the United States. CNBC’s headline read: “After years of being ‘squeaky clean,’ the Federal Reserve is surrounded by controversy.” CNBC was royally roasted on Twitter for its “squeaky clean” fairy tale. CNBC’s flight from reality comes after the Fed’s former Chair, Janet Yellen, went straight from her position at … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 16, 2021 ~ During the financial collapse of 2008, money market funds found themselves holding toxic paper that no one wanted to buy. In order to stop panic runs on money market funds, on September 19, 2008 the U.S. Treasury Department issued a statement indicating it would guarantee more than $3.5 trillion in money market funds. As COVID-19 concerns took root in March of last year and the stock market plunged, the Fed launched another bailout program for money market funds on March 18, 2020. The program was called the Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility (MMLF) and was run out of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. Going forward, the Fed does not want to be in the position of having to bail out more privately owned money market funds. So the Fed has been seducing money market funds and other financial institutions … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 15, 2021 ~ Last Tuesday, Mike Derby reported at the Wall Street Journal that the President of the Dallas Fed, Robert Kaplan, had “made multiple million-dollar-plus stock trades in 2020, according to a financial disclosure form provided by his bank.” The individual stocks included shares of Apple, Alphabet (Google), Alibaba,  Amazon, Chevron, Delta Airlines, Facebook, General Electric, Johnson and Johnson, Oracle, Tesla and numerous others. Kaplan previously spent more than two decades at Goldman Sachs, one of the largest trading houses on Wall Street, and, apparently, he thinks he still works there. Think about this for a moment. While Fed Chair Jerome Powell is repeatedly testifying to Congress last year that its every monetary move during the pandemic was on behalf of the average American, the Dallas Fed President is making million-dollar bets on big tech stocks the Justice Department is investigating for anti-trust … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 13, 2021 ~ After stepping down as Fed Chair on February 3, 2018, Janet Yellen began a whirlwind of speaking engagements that netted her millions of dollars over the next two years. But when it came time to disclose those fees after she was nominated by President Biden to become Treasury Secretary, Yellen disclosed only the fees she had made in 2019 and 2020, not the millions she had made in fees in 2018. What Yellen did disclose showed more than $7 million in speaking fees, with the bulk of that coming from Wall Street banks, trading houses and hedge funds. As the news broke this past January about Yellen’s cash haul, Senior Reporter Jesse Eisinger of ProPublica Tweeted this: “Deeply troubling two-fisted money grab from banks by Janet Yellen. This is corruption, but isn’t called that because it’s so quotidian.” Eisinger added: “Sure, Yellen … Continue reading →