Search Results for: Federal Reserve

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 7, 2021 ~ Yesterday, at 4:19 in the afternoon, Wall Street On Parade received an email from the nice communications folks at the Senate Banking Committee, which is chaired by Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, a progressive Democrat who has had about all he can stand of the robber barons on Wall Street. The ranking member of the Senate Banking Committee, who was supposed to become the Chair of the Committee in a Trump coup d’état, is Republican Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, who has been serially funded and backed by Koch-funded front groups. Koch Industries owns a big trading operation, so it is very much vested in what happens in terms of stricter regulations for Wall Street. (For the role of Koch money in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, see our report: The Money Trail to the Siege at the Capitol Leads … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 4, 2021 ~ In a publicly-released letter issued today to SEC Chairman Gary Gensler, Senator Elizabeth Warren has put Fed Chairman Jerome Powell on notice that his plans to conduct a self-investigation of the Fed’s trading scandal isn’t going to fly with her. Warren is a member of the powerful Senate Banking Committee that oversees the Federal Reserve. Warren called on the SEC to “investigate trading in securities by high-level Federal Reserve officials and determine if any of these ethically questionable transactions may have violated insider trading rules.” Warren characterized the trading by Fed officials as reflecting “an attitude that personal profiteering is more important than the American people’s confidence in the Fed.” At one point in the letter, Warren sounded like she might be trying to flush out someone looking for a plea deal to avoid an orange jumpsuit. She invoked the possibility … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 4, 2021 ~ In the late eighteenth century, men gathered under a Buttonwood tree at 68 Wall in lower Manhattan and traded stocks among themselves. That’s not how it works today. Dallas Fed President Robert Kaplan had to give his “over $1 million” trades in a litany of individual stocks and his “over $1 million” transactions in S&P 500 futures to a licensed broker at a registered broker-dealer. The same thing applied to Boston Fed President Eric Rosengren in placing his $1000 to $50,000 trades 68 times in 2020 in individual stocks and publicly traded Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs). The safeguards that failed at the Dallas Fed and the Boston Fed to stop their Presidents from trading like hedge fund wannabes should not have failed at the SEC-regulated Wall Street broker-dealers that placed these trades. The accounts at the trading firms for these … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 1, 2021 We’re sorry to have to tell you this, but the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) process, where the public and members of the press can request information from their government and get a meaningful response, is as dead under the Biden administration as it was under the Trump, Obama and George W. Bush administrations. In no small part, this is why the United States of America, which regularly lectures other countries on what it means to be a democracy, has lost the trust of the American people. Earlier this year we reported that the man that President Biden had selected to head the Criminal Division of the Justice Department, Kenneth Polite, owed more than $1.5 million in debts according to his financial disclosure form and public mortgage records; was paying over 18 percent interest on an outstanding balance on a credit card; 19.99 … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 30, 2021 ~ Last year, during the worst health crisis in more than a hundred years in the United States, Dallas Fed President Robert Kaplan was frequently throwing gasoline on the fire in broadcast and print media interviews. Also in 2020, Kaplan was trading in and out of S&P 500 futures, a sophisticated instrument used by hedge funds to time the market and/or short the market. The Dallas Fed will not say if Kaplan engaged in shorting the market during a national health crisis. (Shorting means to place a bearish bet that the market or a security will fall in value.) Kaplan gave a total of 68 interviews with the press in 2020, an eyebrow raising number for a man also trading S&P 500 futures. Twice in the span of six days in May of 2020, Kaplan predicted that unemployment was going to surge … 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 27, 2021 ~ Dallas Fed President, Robert Kaplan, wasn’t just trading like an aggressive hedge fund kingpin in 2020, he’s been doing the same thing for five years at the Dallas Fed while simultaneously having access to non-public, market moving information from the Federal Reserve’s interest-rate setting FOMC meetings and other confidential communications. In 2017 and 2020, Kaplan was a voting member of the FOMC. In the other years since he joined the Dallas Fed in 2015, he sat in on the confidential FOMC deliberations and was allowed to participate in the discussions. Each of Kaplan’s financial disclosures forms dating back to when he first became Dallas Fed President on September 8, 2015 (which we obtained directly from the Dallas Fed), show that Kaplan was trading in and out of S&P 500 futures, a highly speculative form of trading used by hedge funds and … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 24, 2021 ~ Yesterday, President Biden took the bold step of nominating Saule Omarova to head the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), a top federal bank regulator. Omarova is a Law Professor at Cornell and has written extensively on systemic risk containment. Prior to joining Cornell in 2014, Omarova was Associate Professor at the University of North Carolina School of Law. Prior to her academic career, Omarova worked for the corporate law firm, Davis Polk & Wardwell, in their Financial Institutions Group. In 2006-2007, she served at the U.S. Department of the Treasury as a Special Advisor for Regulatory Policy to the Under Secretary for Domestic Finance. Omarova represents a triple threat to the insidious behavior of mega banks on Wall Street: she has an in-depth knowledge of how they operate; she is not timid about explaining it to investigative bodies … Continue reading →