Search Results for: Federal Reserve

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 →

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 9, 2022 ~ At 3:00 p.m. last Friday, the Federal Reserve quietly released the following statement: “The Federal Reserve Board on Friday named Jerome H. Powell as Chair Pro Tempore, pending Senate confirmation to a second term as Chair of the Board of Governors. The action, effective February 5, enables him to continue to carry out his duties as Chair after the expiration of his term on the same day, and while the confirmation process is underway. In its annual organizational meeting in January, the Federal Open Market Committee separately named him as its Chair.” This is the first time in a quarter century that a Fed Chairman’s term has lapsed before he was reconfirmed by the Senate. According to Reuters, the last time it happened was 1996 when Alan Greenspan served from March 3 to June 20 as Fed Chair Pro Tempore. Powell … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 3, 2022 ~ New details have emerged to provide a fuller picture of the turmoil that was taking place in the dark corners of markets when the overnight repo market blew up on September 17, 2019 and the Fed had to run to the rescue with trillions of dollars in cumulative loans that went on for months. Imagine if you were the Federal Reserve and had been thoroughly disgraced by waging more than a two-year court battle to prevent the press in America from doing its job and publishing the granular details of the Fed’s 2007 to 2010 bailout of Wall Street and its foreign bank derivative counterparties. Then the Fed was further disgraced after losing the court battles when in 2011 the details of the $29 trillion bailout were published. Chances are that the Fed would not be anxious to let the public … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 2, 2022 ~ As we reported on Monday, there’s a new book out from Simon & Schuster with the provocative title: The Lords of Easy Money: How the Federal Reserve Broke the American Economy. The book, written by bestselling author Christopher Leonard, is sprinkled with eye popping revelations – particularly in regard to how hedge funds have been able to effectively mint billions by designing trades to take advantage of the Fed’s repo bailouts and quantitative easing. Quantitative easing (QE) is a scheme launched by former Fed Chair Ben Bernanke, beginning in November 2008. QE means that the New York Fed, through its open markets desk, buys up Treasury securities and federal-agency-backed Mortgage-Backed Securities (MBS) from its 24 primary dealers. The Fed’s purchases of tens of billions of dollars a month of these securities creates artificial demand that would not otherwise exist, thus lowering … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 1, 2022 ~ Adding to a very long laundry list of questions about exactly whom the New York Fed serves, is the help-wanted ad that was posted four days ago. The ad is for a Financial Planning & Analysis Expert to work at the New York Fed’s headquarters in lower Manhattan. One part of the job description is this: “modelling of potential investment opportunities.” The New York Fed is supposed to be implementing monetary policy on behalf of the United States as mandated by the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC). As far as public FOMC records indicate, the New York Fed has not been assigned the job of seeking out “potential investment opportunities.” So for whom is it seeking out these investment opportunities? Is it looking for profit-making investments for the Wall Street megabanks who own it and whose CEOs rotate on and off … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 31, 2022 ~ On January 11, Simon & Schuster released a new book on the Fed. It’s written by bestselling author and business reporter, Christopher Leonard. The title leaves little doubt about what the author has set out to prove: The Lords of Easy Money: How the Federal Reserve Broke the American Economy. For those of us who have been scrutinizing the trading operations of the New York Fed for decades, with the appropriate amount of skepticism that is inexplicably missing among the mainstream press, Leonard delivers a bombshell on page 242. Leonard writes: “The conference room in the New York Fed was located just off the main trading floor, and its doors were open during meetings so people could quietly go in and out. The room was anchored by a large table, with a couch along the wall for staffers to sit with … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 24, 2022 ~ Bloomberg News ran this headline over the weekend: “U.S. Stocks Historically Deliver Strong Gains in Fed Hike Cycles.” For a reminder to our readers of what happened in 2018, the last time the Fed gently tapped its foot on the brake four times, we’ve listed below some of the headlines we ran in 2018 at Wall Street On Parade. The Fed was not at all aggressive with rate hikes in 2018: it gently raised the Fed Funds rate by a quarter of a point on March 22, June 14, September 27 and December 20. But that was enough to deeply unsettle markets – particularly the megabanks on Wall Street. Consider these headlines and the details in the articles: Yesterday’s Stock Market Plunge Saw Indiscriminate Dumping of Stocks Wall Street Banks Tank Yesterday as Contagion Threat Grows The Fed Gives Wall … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 20, 2022 ~ The last thing that Fed Chairman Powell needs in his second term are the sleazy details of the Fed’s trading scandal being released by investigators and to have to bail out the same megabank that Fed Chair Bernanke secretly bailed out from December 2007 through at least mid-July 2010. Obviously, we’re talking about Citigroup. Citigroup has been announcing major asset sales so rapidly since December that one has to wonder if the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and/or the Fed is cracking the whip. (We’ll get to the significant details of why that might be the case in a moment.) On January 11, Citigroup announced that it intended to sell its consumer, small business and middle-market banking operations of Banco Nacional de México, otherwise known as Banamex. In 2017, Citigroup settled a criminal probe with the U.S. Department of Justice … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 18, 2022 ~ Last Thursday evening, at 5:00 p.m. Dallas time and 6:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, when millions of folks on the East Coast are sitting down for dinner, the Dallas Fed held a virtual Town Hall. Given the fact that the President of the Dallas Fed, Robert Kaplan, had to step down in disgrace in September, after trading like a hedge fund kingpin in 2020 while simultaneously having access to confidential market-moving information as a voting member of the Fed’s Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), there was a very good reason for the Dallas Fed to hold a Town Hall. But stunningly, the tone-deaf Dallas Fed did not focus the Town Hall on how its Board and management had negligently supervised Robert Kaplan, allowing him to trade in and out of S&P 500 futures in over $1 million trades during a year … Continue reading →