Search Results for: Federal Reserve

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 1, 2021 ~ On Friday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, S&P 500 Index and Nasdaq Composite, all closed in positive territory. But as the chart above indicates, mega banks on Wall Street closed in a sea of red ink. Citigroup (ticker, “C”) was among the big losers, closing down 1.72 percent, followed by Credit Suisse (CS) down 1.62 percent and Deutsche Bank (DB), down 1.31 percent. JPMorgan Chase (JPM), Barclays (BCS) and Goldman Sachs (GS) closed down less than 1 percent on Friday. The problem appeared to be the shifting shape of the U.S. Treasury yield curve. The longer out the yield curve an investor goes, the higher the yield – unless the yield curve flattens or inverts. That typically means that the Fed has started to hike interest rates, or is expected to begin hiking interest rates, and the market perceives that the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 1, 2021 ~ Jes Staley, the CEO at the British global bank, Barclays, is stepping down immediately following a probe by British regulators into his ties with child sex trafficker, Jeffrey Epstein. Staley’s ties to Epstein occurred while he was an executive at JPMorgan Chase, the U.S. bank that has racked up five felony counts from the U.S. Department of Justice in the past seven years. Staley will be replaced as CEO by Barclays’ head of global markets, C.S. Venkatakrishnan, who himself came from JPMorgan Chase. Reuters reported early this morning that Staley’s abrupt departure came after Barclays was informed this past Friday of the, as yet unreleased, findings of a report by U.K. financial regulators’ into Staley’s characterization of his relationship with Epstein, who killed himself in jail in August 2019 while awaiting trial on charges involving child sex trafficking. On February 13 … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 29, 2021 ~ Reuters reported on Wednesday that Alec Baldwin and other producers of the low-budget western film, “Rust,” have hired the high-priced law firm, Jenner & Block, to investigate the fatal shooting of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins during a rehearsal on the set. The producers circulated a memo to the movie crew about the hiring of Jenner & Block the night before the Santa Fe Sheriff’s Department was scheduled to hold a press conference and announce its current findings. (See YouTube video below for the full press conference.) During that press conference, Sheriff Adan Mendoza revealed that a real gun, a Colt .45 revolver, was being used by Alec Baldwin at the time of the shooting. Mendoza said the gun had fired a live single round that killed Hutchins and then the bullet embedded itself into the shoulder of Director Joel Souza. (Souza was … Continue reading →

Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 26, 2021 This month, the Vanderbilt Law Review published a 69-page paper by Saule Omarova, President Biden’s nominee to head the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the Federal regulator of the largest banks in the country that operate across state lines. The paper is titled “The People’s Ledger: How to Democratize Money and Finance the Economy.” The paper, in all seriousness, proposes the following: (1) Moving all commercial bank deposits from commercial banks to so-called FedAccounts at the Federal Reserve; (2) Allowing the Fed, in “extreme and rare circumstances, when the Fed is unable to control inflation by raising interest rates,” to confiscate deposits from these FedAccounts in order to tighten monetary policy; (3) Allowing the most Wall Street-conflicted regional Fed bank in the country, the New York Fed, when there are “rises in market value at rates suggestive of a … Continue reading →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →