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Recent Posts
- Half of All Deaths from Hurricane Helene Occurred 485 Miles North of Where It Made Landfall
- What Did Madoff, Jeffrey Epstein and Sanctioned Russian Mercenary Group, Wagner, Have in Common? They All Banked at JPMorgan Chase
- Deadly, Exploding Pagers Force the U.S. to Get Serious About Malware from China in U.S. Products that Are Potential National Security Threats
- Wall Street Has Moved Vast Sums of Its Trading to Its Federally-Insured Banks
- The Stock Market Had a Psychotic Episode After the Fed Rate Cut Yesterday, Plunging 479 Points from the Day’s High
- As Trump Launches a Crypto Firm, FBI Reports Crypto Fraud Has Exploded to $5.6 Billion; Representing Almost 50 Percent of All Financial Fraud
- Everything this Book Predicted on Wall Street Megabanks Ruling their Regulators Is Now Unfolding
- The Fed Just Kicked the Capital Increases for the Dangerous Megabanks and their Derivatives Down the Road for Years
- Intel, Boeing and U.S. Steel May Hold the Secrets to What’s Behind All the Talk of a U.S. Sovereign Wealth Fund
- Trump and Paulson’s Proposal: U.S. Sovereign Wealth Fund (or Another Grifter Bailout)
- A Wall Street Regulator Is Understating Margin Debt by More than $4 Trillion – Because It’s Not Counting Giant Banks Making Margin Loans to Hedge Funds
- After JPMorgan Threatens to Sue, the Fed Cuts Its Capital Requirement on the 5-Count Felon from a Planned 25 Percent Hike to Less than 8 Percent
- Three Megabanks Had Loans Outstanding of $1.832 Trillion to Giant Hedge Funds on March 31
- Jamie Dimon’s Washington Post OpEd Gets Pummeled at Yahoo Finance
- In the Span of 72 Hours, Four People Tied to a Hewlett-Packard Criminal Case Died in Two Separate Events
- Crypto Took Down Another Federally-Insured Bank and Just Handed Its CEO a 24-Year Prison Sentence
- All the Devils from 2008 Are Back at the Megabanks: Leverage, Off-Balance-Sheet Debt, Over $192 Trillion in Derivatives, Shaky Capital Levels
- New Study Says the Fed Is Captured by Congress and White House — Not the Megabanks that Own the Fed Banks and Get Trillions in Bailouts
- Data from the Fed’s Emergency Funding Program Shows Spring 2023 Banking Crisis Was Far Deeper than Americans Were Told
- These FDIC-Insured Banks Have Lost 69 to 40 Percent of their Market Value Year-to-Date
- Exposure at Hedge Funds Has Skyrocketed to Over $28 Trillion; Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Are at Risk
- We Charted the Plunge and Rebound in the Nikkei Versus Nomura and Citigroup; the Correlation Is Frightening
- Former U.S. Labor Secretary Says Billionaires Have No Right to Exist Because their Wealth Comes from Five Illegal or Bad Practices
- Citigroup Is Having a Helluva Summer: A Protest on Thursday Will Turn Up the Heat
- Nikkei Has Biggest Drop in History: Here’s What’s Causing the Global Market Selloff
- JPMorgan Is Tapping Illiquid Assets in its Global Collateral Program; the New York Fed Is Paying for Its Services
- Bank Regulators Issue Warnings on Fintech and Banking as Disasters Pile Up
- Donald Trump Gives a Speech on Not Letting China Win the Crypto Race – Not Realizing China Banned Crypto Mining and Transactions Four Years Ago
- The New York Fed Has Contracted Out Key Functions to JPMorgan Chase; We Filed a FOIA and Got These Strange Invoices
- On the Eve of Netanyahu’s Address to Congress, Senator Bernie Sanders Delivers a Breathtaking Assessment of His War Crimes
- Trump’s Sit-Down with Netanyahu at Mar-a-Lago Will Cost U.S. Taxpayers Millions While Profiting Trump’s Business
- Protecting Trump and His Jet-Setting Adult Children During His Presidency Cost Taxpayers Over $1 Billion
- A Congressman and a Doctor Reported a Woman Being Shot at Trump Rally: She’s Vanished from Official Reports
- Jamie Dimon Goes Missing from Earnings Call, After Dumping $183 Million of His JPMorgan Chase Stock Earlier this Year
- U.S. Senate Candidate Backed by Hedge Fund Billionaires Was Sitting in Front Row at Trump Rally as the Sniper Fired into the Bleachers
- Project 2025: The Fossil Fuel and Banking Money Behind the Madness
- The Fund Created to Unwind a Failing Megabank Has a Problem: There’s No Money in It
- Joe Biden Versus the New York Times
- Grand Jury Transcript in Jeffrey Epstein Case Is Released, Raising Questions about Epstein’s Darkest Secrets Being Protected in JPMorgan Cases
- The Supreme Court Crowns a King, Immunizing Future Criminal Acts Under Project 2025 – a Right Wing Manifesto
- The Debate Disaster and the Supreme Court’s “Chevron” Repeal Have a Money Trail Leading to Charles Koch
- Congressman Andy Barr Stacks a Hearing on the Fed’s Stress Tests with Lobbyists for Megabanks
- The Fed Posts Historic Operating Losses As It Pays Out 5.40 Percent Interest to Banks
- Goldman Sachs’ Bank Derivatives Have Grown from $40 Trillion to $54 Trillion in Five Years; So How Did Its Credit Exposure Improve by 200 Percent?
- The Fed and FDIC Wake Up Suddenly to the Threat of Derivatives, Flunking the Four Largest Derivative Banks on their Wind-Down Plans
- Is the Stock Market Setting Investors Up for a Tech Bust Similar to the Dot.com Bust?
- Chase Bank Customers Are Reporting a Wave of Wire Fraud in their Accounts; the Bank Won’t Make Good on the Looted Funds
- The Senate Race in Ohio Is the Sickest in U.S. History in Terms of Billionaire Money from Outside the State
- Sullivan & Cromwell’s Legal Work for Sam Bankman-Fried’s Crypto House of Fraud Is Getting a Closer Look in Two Federal Court Cases
- Crypto Tries to Recreate the Koch Money Machine to Pack Congress with Shills
Search Results for: Federal Reserve
A Forensic Look at Jerome Powell’s “Pants on Fire” Explanation for His $1 Million to $5 Million Stock Sale
Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 21, 2021 ~ On Monday, October 18, the fearless Robert Kuttner at the American Prospect, broke the news that Fed Chairman Jerome Powell had sold between $1 million and $5 million of the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund on October 1, 2020, the same day that Powell had been on four phone calls with Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, who was coordinating the White House response to the financial crisis resulting from the pandemic. The story went viral and forced the Federal Reserve to offer a preposterously lame excuse for what was obviously a desire by Powell to reduce his exposure to the stock market, despite his having access to more insider information than any other human on the planet. The same day that Kuttner’s story ran, Mike Derby, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, wrote that a Fed representative had characterized the … Continue reading
The Fed Is Subsidizing the Money Market Funds Operated by Larry Fink’s BlackRock as BlackRock Manages a Big Part of Jerome Powell’s Wealth
Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 21, 2021 ~ Last year, during the financial crisis, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell held five confidential phone calls with BlackRock’s Chairman and CEO Larry Fink. The first call on March 19 lasted 30 minutes; there were two calls in April, one on April 3 and one on April 9, both lasting 15 minutes. A phone call between Powell and Fink on May 13 lasted 30 minutes; and one on November 20 lasted 10 minutes. That’s a total of 100 minutes that the Chairman of the central bank of the United States spent on the phone with the man who heads the company that is also managing a large portion of Powell’s wealth through its iShares Exchange Traded Funds. The dates and times of the phone calls come from Powell’s publicly-released daily calendars. Powell’s phone calls with Fink continued this year. On February 5, Powell held … Continue reading
The Wall Street Journal and New York Times Censor Yet Another Major News Story on the Fed and the Mega Banks It Supervises
Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 19, 2021 ~ On October 13, Wall Street On Parade broke the story that the Federal Reserve had quietly released the names of the mega banks that had grabbed tens of billions of dollars of repo loans under the Fed’s emergency repo loan operations that began on September 17, 2019 – months before there was a COVID-19 case in the United States or anywhere else in the world. Repos (repurchase agreements) are a short-term form of borrowing where corporations, banks, securities firms and money market mutual funds secure loans from each other by providing safe forms of collateral such as Treasury securities. Repos are supposed to function without the assistance of the Federal Reserve. But on September 17, 2019, the oversized demand for the repos and the lack of available funds to meet the demand drove the overnight interest rate on repo loans to an … Continue reading
Another Fed Bank President’s Financial Disclosures Fail the Smell Test
Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 18, 2021 ~ Private Banks operated by the mega Wall Street banks have an unseemly reputation. So when we opened Atlanta Fed President Raphael Bostic’s financial disclosure forms and saw that he had a financial relationship with Morgan Stanley’s Private Bank, a red flag went up immediately. Citibank’s Private Bank was previously the subject of an investigation by the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. At a hearing on November 9, 1999, the Chair of the Subcommittee, the late Senator Carl Levin, explained how private banks work. Levin stated: “Once a person becomes a client of a private bank, the bank’s primary goal generally has been to service that client, and servicing a private bank client almost always means using services that are also the tools of money laundering: secret trusts, offshore accounts, secret name accounts, and shell companies called private investment corporations. These private … Continue reading
The SEC Is Taking a Hard Look at Dark Markets, Except for the Darkest of All – Dark Pools
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 15, 2021 ~ On Tuesday, SEC Commissioner Allison Herren Lee delivered an exceptionally well-researched speech on the rising dangers to the broader U.S. economy from the burgeoning dark private markets for non-publicly traded stocks. She makes many important points. However, there is a far larger and more dangerous dark market: the Dark Pools owned by the serially-charged mega banks on Wall Street that are trading, on a daily basis in darkness, the publicly-traded stocks that reside in public pension funds and the mutual funds that make up the bulk of retirement funds for tens of millions of Americans. According to an April 2021 report from McKinsey & Company, “global private equity AUM [Assets Under Management] reached $4.5 trillion in the first half of 2020.” That’s the dark market that SEC Commissioner Lee is worried about. The publicly-traded market in the U.S. stood at $54.768 trillion … Continue reading
Senate Banking Chair, Sherrod Brown, Gives Fed’s Quarles a Scathing Bon Voyage
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
Quietly, the Fed Releases the Names of Banks that Got Billions in Emergency Repo Loans in 2019
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 13, 2021 ~ The Federal Reserve Bank of New York has quietly posted the names of the banks that grabbed billions of dollars under the Fed’s emergency repo loan operations that commenced on September 17, 2019 – months before there was a COVID-19 crisis anywhere in the world. The emergency repo loans were made via Open Market operations at the New York Fed. Under the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation of 2010, the names of the banks, dollar amounts borrowed, interest rate and collateral posted must be made public “on the last day of the eighth calendar quarter following the calendar quarter in which the covered transaction was conducted.” Since the emergency repo loans were initiated in the third quarter of 2019, that meant eight quarters had passed and the public was entitled to the information for at least the month of September 2019. (The Fed … Continue reading
The Dallas Fed Board Is Now Complicit in the Robert Kaplan Saga
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 12, 2021 ~ Last Wednesday, the Editorial Board of the Financial Times of London penned an editorial under a headline that read: “The Fed’s Trading Scandal Undermines Public Trust.” The editorial noted that the President of the Dallas Fed, Robert Kaplan, “held stakes over $1m each in 27 investments, and moved in and out of S&P 500 futures. The precise dates of his transactions are unknown as his form declaring financial interests merely gives ‘multiple’ as the timeframe.” Last Friday, this headline appeared at the Wall Street Journal: “Boston, Dallas Fed Banks Pledge Cooperation With Stock-Trading Probe.” But then the article revealed this: “The Dallas Fed has declined multiple requests to fully disclose Mr. Kaplan’s extensive trading activity. For example, Mr. Kaplan’s disclosures list ‘multiple’ for trades in stocks and other investments without specifying the dates of the transactions.” The financial disclosure form that Kaplan … Continue reading
The U.S. Banking System Is More Dangerous Today than in 1929, Thanks to the Fed’s Reg U and Swaps – Two Well-Kept Secrets from the Senate Banking Committee
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 11, 2021 ~ Regulation U is a 1936 Federal Reserve rule, that is still in force today, that allows federally-insured, taxpayer backstopped commercial banks to make margin loans for speculating in stocks. Unlike 1936, however, Wall Street trading houses are today allowed to own their own federally-insured, taxpayer backstopped commercial banks. That has allowed a lot of mischief to occur in the making of margin loans for speculating in the stock market. We’ll get to the details of all that in a few moments, but first some necessary background. Following the 1929 stock market crash, 9,096 banks that were holding deposits for average Americans failed as a result of insolvency between 1930 and 1933. (See chart above.) The 1930s banking crisis came to a head on March 6, 1933, just one day after President Franklin D. Roosevelt was inaugurated. Following a month-long run on the … Continue reading
Dallas Fed President Robert Kaplan Was Gathering His Own Market Intelligence
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 8, 2021 ~ Dallas Fed President Robert Kaplan is due to step down today after playing a central role in creating the worst trading scandal in the Federal Reserve’s 108-year history. Not only was Kaplan trading in and out of “over $1 million” positions in individual stocks but he was also engaging in “over $1 million” transactions in S&P 500 futures, an instrument used by hedge funds and day traders to make leveraged bets on the direction of the market. As Wall Street On Parade previously explained, a dozen legal safeguards had to fail to allow this to happen. The Dallas Fed has refused to say if Kaplan was shorting the market. It has also refused to provide the dates of Kaplan’s trades, despite the fact that the Dallas Fed’s own financial disclosure form requires Kaplan to provide that information. Other Fed Bank Presidents readily … Continue reading