Search Results for: trillion

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 29, 2021 ~ The conventional wisdom is that the Fed’s recent emergency lending facilities to Wall Street were caused by the COVID-19 crisis. The above chart, which uses the New York Fed’s own Excel spreadsheet repo loan data, shows the conventional wisdom is dangerously wrong. In the last quarter of 2019 – before there was any news of COVID-19 in the U.S., and months before the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic – the Fed pumped $4.5 trillion in cumulative repo loans to unnamed trading houses on Wall Street – its so-called “primary dealers.” The collateral that the Fed accepted for the cumulative $4.5 trillion in loans consisted of $3.497 trillion in U.S. Treasury securities; $988.3 billion in agency Mortgage-Backed Securities (MBS); and $15.839 billion in agency debt. The Fed’s emergency repo loan operations began on September 17, 2019. From September 17, 2019 … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 1, 2021 ~ Fed Chair Jerome Powell along with Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen appeared before the Senate Banking Committee yesterday to deliver their semi-annual reports. Approximately 34 minutes into the hearing, in response to a question from Senator Pat Toomey, Republican from Pennsylvania, Powell announced that he was retiring the word “transitory” to describe the inflationary forces that have a grip on prices in the U.S. The stock market interpreted this to mean that Powell, who just eight days prior had become Democrat President Joe Biden’s nominee for another four years at the helm of the Fed, was now pivoting to cater to Republican inflation hawks in order to win their votes at his upcoming confirmation hearing. The Dow Jones Industrial Average quickly did a bungee dive of 402 points. About 90 minutes into the hearing, the stock market went into a new wave … 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: August 27, 2021 ~ For the past 19 years, China has been stonewalling U.S. regulators over access to the work papers of auditors of publicly traded companies that are based in China but listed on U.S. stock exchanges. China takes the position that these audit work papers hold state secrets and it prohibits audit firms from releasing the documents directly to U.S. regulators, effectively gutting U.S. law. Finally, last December, Congress addressed the long brewing problem. Both houses of Congress unanimously passed legislation called the Holding Foreign Companies Accountable Act. The legislation requires that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) identify companies that are listed in the U.S. which the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) cannot “inspect or investigate completely because of a position taken by an authority in the foreign jurisdiction.” The legislation also requires the listed companies to provide documentation showing that … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: August 3, 2021 ~ Risky derivative bets made by the mega banks on Wall Street, offloaded onto inadequately capitalized counterparties, were at the core of the collapse of the U.S. financial system in 2008. That collapse left millions of Americans without jobs, which led to millions of families and traumatized children losing their homes to foreclosure. The bank bosses got their million-dollar bonuses from the taxpayer bailouts and the Federal Reserve secretly pumped in over $29 trillion over 31 months to shore up the failing trading houses on Wall Street and their foreign derivative counterparties. Wall Street banks have rebuilt that derivatives doomsday machine today – a $168 trillion monster concentrated at four mega banks on Wall Street. But as we read through dozens of pages of written testimony submitted by witnesses for today’s Senate Banking hearing, the word “derivative” did not appear once. At 10:00 a.m. the U.S. Senate … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 3, 2021 ~ If you want to get your hair cut outside of your home in the United States, the job has to be done by a licensed worker at a regulated business. The same thing applies to plumbers, electricians, home inspectors, real estate and insurance agents. They all require a license and are subject to regulatory scrutiny. Likewise, commodities like corn, sugar, wheat, lumber and oil are all traded on regulated exchanges which are overseen by a federal regulator. But, for reasons that have yet to be explained to the American people, when it comes to the $1.7 trillion cryptocurrency market – which is effectively a con-game based on the greater fool theory, nothing is regulated. Not the crypto currency; not the promoters; not the crypto exchanges; and not the firms that are providing as much as 100 times leverage to fuel this … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 11, 2021 ~ When the motherlode of stock market bubbles finally pops, exposing the corrupt edifices on which it was built, you can count on one thing for sure – there will be lots of testimony before Congress that no one could have seen it coming. The simple chart above, that took us 30 minutes to prepare in an Excel spreadsheet, is proof that anyone among the legions of Wall Street bank regulators at the Federal Reserve, the OCC, the FDIC, and the SEC can see what’s coming. The chart compares U.S. GDP to the total stock market value at December 31, 1999, prior to the bursting of the dot.com bubble; at December 31, 2007, prior to the bursting of the subprime and derivatives bubble; and on December 31, 2020, prior to the bursting of whatever the bailout boys decide to call this bubble. … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 30, 2021 ~ During Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell’s press conference this past Wednesday, he took a question from Brian Cheung of Yahoo Finance. The question was: “It seems like to people on the outside who might not follow finance daily, they’re paying attention to things like GameStop, now Dogecoin. And it seems like there’s interesting reach for yield in this market to some extent — also Archegos. So, does the Fed see a relationship between low rates and easy policy to those things, and is there a financial stability concern from the Fed’s perspective at this time?” As part of Powell’s long, meandering answer, he said this: “Leverage in the financial system is not a problem.” Within a second or so, Powell repeated himself: “Leverage in the financial system is not an issue.” (Read the full transcript here.) Either Powell has not read … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 13, 2021 ~ When Jerome Powell, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, appeared for an interview this past Sunday night on the CBS investigative program, 60 Minutes, he asserted complete ignorance of the amount of margin debt currently being used to inflate the stock market to one new historic high after another. The exchange between Powell and 60 Minutes host, Scott Pelley, went as follows: Pelley: “The securities industry has reported that $814 billion has been borrowed by people investing in the stock market, borrowed against their portfolios. That’s a 49 percent increase over last year. “And the last time it grew that much was in 2007, before the Great Recession. And the time it grew that much before that was 1999, just before the dot com implosion. At what point does the Federal Reserve start to rein in this speculative bidding up of … Continue reading →

“This raises the serious question as to whether the Senate Banking and House Financial Services Committees should be investigating the gamification of markets or the monetization of the stock market via Wall Street’s ownership of federally insured deposits.” By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 5, 2021 ~ In late March, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) released its quarterly report on “Bank Trading and Derivatives Activities.” Graph 15 of the report shows that using data submitted by banks on their form RC-R of their call reports, JPMorgan Chase’s federally insured bank had exposure to $2.65 trillion in notional equity (stock) derivatives as of December 31, 2020. (Notional means face amount.) That’s a stunning figure for the largest federally-insured bank in the United States to have in exposure to the stock market. But more stunning is the fact that according to the OCC, JPMorgan Chase’s equity derivative contracts … Continue reading →