Search Results for: Federal Reserve

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 16, 2021 ~  Rewarding bad behavior with obscene pay is the sine qua non of Wall Street. Thus it’s a remarkable event to see a CEO of a mega Wall Street bank get punished with a 21 percent pay cut.  Michael Corbat is slated to retire this month as Citigroup’s CEO and be replaced by Jane Fraser, the first woman CEO of any major Wall Street bank. (The news would be more welcome if the areas that Fraser previously supervised at the bank did not have all those fines and sanctions.) The Board delivered an unusual kick in the pants to Corbat on his way out the door. It cut his compensation for 2020 by $5 million from what he had been awarded for 2019. Corbat’s total compensation went from $24 million in 2019 to $19 million for 2020. The announcement was made in … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 15, 2021 ~ The tentacles of Ken Griffin’s Citadel octopus were involved in multiple ways in the GameStop saga that will get a hearing this Thursday before the House Financial Services Committee. Griffin has been called to testify along with others. GameStop is the brick-and-mortar video game retailer whose stock soared from $18.84 on December 31 of last year to an intraday high of $483 on January 28 – a breathtaking run of 2,465 percent in four weeks – before plunging back to earth. It closed on Friday at $52.40. The hearing has been called to understand the relationship between all of the parties that played a pivotal role in the wild trading activity, which made fortunes for some big players while leaving others licking their wounds from what has the appearance of a pump and dump scheme. Griffin’s Citadel Securities was paying … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 10, 2021 ~ Remember all the hubbub in the fall of last year when then U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin demanded in a November 19 letter that the Fed return all of the money from the CARES Act that it had not used for emergency lending programs. Mnuchin’s stated reason for the demand was because he was going to turn the unused funds over to the general fund of the Treasury so that Congress could reappropriate it for other purposes. At the time, Mnuchin made it sound like the Fed had been sitting on the bulk of the $454 billion that the CARES Act had allotted to be used as loss-absorbing capital for the Fed’s emergency lending programs. In reality, Mnuchin had never turned over the bulk of the CARES Act money to the Fed, but had parked it instead in a Treasury … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 4, 2021 ~ Since 2000, the Securities and Exchange Commission has required brokerage firms to file a quarterly report showing where they are routing their stock trades for execution. The filing is known as a 606 report after Rule 606 of Regulation NMS (National Market System). Because so many traders at Reddit’s WallStreetBets’ message board have focused on the fact that billionaire Ken Griffin’s Citadel Securities was executing the majority of trades for Robinhood, the trading app where a lot of the Redditors directed their GameStop trades, we decided to take a look at what other online brokers might have also been directing GameStop trades to Citadel Securities. According to the 606 reports for the fourth quarter of 2020 for the following nine online brokers, Citadel was providing payment-for-order-flow (giving a cash rebate for trade orders directed to it) to each of the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 26, 2021 ~ The chart above reminded us of what happened in the London Whale saga at JPMorgan Chase. The London derivatives traders at JPMorgan Chase were making such huge bets in a specific credit index that they effectively became the market with no escape route to unwind their losing trades. The bank had, insanely, used customer deposits to make those wild bets and ended up losing at least $6.2 billion. Since August 6 of last year, the Fed has purchased $400 billion of U.S. Treasury notes and bonds. Despite that massive amount of propping up the market, the yield on the 10-year Treasury has more than doubled, from half of one percent to a yield of 1.05 percent at 7:30 a.m. this morning. That means that all of those billions of dollars in Treasuries that the Fed bought at lower yields are … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 24, 2021 ~  Haven’t we learned anything about properly vetting people for the highest offices in the U.S. government? Former Fed Chair and Treasury Secretary nominee Janet Yellen has failed to report the details of millions of dollars in fees that she earned in 2018, the year she stepped down as Fed Chair, as she went on a whirlwind of speaking engagements in foreign cities around the world. Yellen’s “leadership” role with the Bloomberg New Economy Forums which had the “active participation and support” of an organization openly tied to the Chinese Communist Party, raises further serious red flags. And yet, Yellen sailed through her Senate Finance Committee confirmation hearing this past week, gaining a favorable vote of 26-0. A full Senate vote to confirm Yellen as Treasury Secretary is expected to occur tomorrow. What Yellen did disclose on her Office of Government … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 18, 2021 ~ At 10 a.m. tomorrow morning, one day ahead of President-Elect Joe Biden’s inauguration, the Senate Finance Committee will hold the confirmation hearing for Janet Yellen to become the next U.S. Treasury Secretary. In that role, Yellen sits atop a sprawling federal agency that includes the IRS; the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which regulates national banks and reports on their hundreds of trillions of dollars in derivatives; the Bureau of Engraving and Printing; the U.S. Mint; the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) which is tasked with combating money laundering but has failed miserably in the job; and numerous other units. In addition, legislation passed by Congress puts Yellen in charge of the slush fund known as the Exchange Stabilization Fund; makes her the Chair of the Financial Stability Oversight Council, and, thanks to stealthy legislation passed during the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: January 15, 2021 ~ I sat behind a trading terminal at two Wall Street firms from 1986 to 2006. I can assure you that if the President of the United States was refusing to accept the outcome of a presidential election and urging a coup d’é·tat by his civilian militia, the stock market would have sold off by double digits. This era’s stock market has yawned at the spectacle. I can further assure you that if an actual, violent coup d’état did occur inside the halls of Congress and played out in real time on every television network and cable news program in the country and around the world, there would have been a crash in the stock market. (I was sitting behind my trading terminal on October 19, 1987 when the Dow Jones Industrial Average crashed 22 percent by the end of the trading day and … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 6, 2021 ~ On December 29 we needed a clarification from former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers about his opinion column against Congress issuing $2,000 stimulus checks. We sent him an email at 10:13 a.m. and received a very clear response from him directly at 12:51 p.m. that day — a span of a few hours. Compare that timely response to Janet Yellen’s respect for the media’s obligation to report a full set of facts to the American people. Three days ago, we contacted Yellen at four different entities with which she is affiliated. Only the Brookings Institution responded, saying she was on leave. President-elect Joe Biden’s media team did not respond at all, nor did the Washington Speakers Bureau and University of California, Berkeley. Yellen is Biden’s nominee for U.S. Treasury Secretary. In anticipation of her Senate confirmation hearing, she has released her … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 4, 2021 ~ Following the stock market crash in 1929, more than 9,000 banks in the United States failed over the next four years. In just the one year of 1933, more than 4,000 banks closed their doors permanently as a result of insolvency. 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 banks, Roosevelt declared a nationwide banking holiday that closed all banks in the United States. On March 9, 1933 Congress passed the Emergency Banking Act which allowed regulators to evaluate each bank before it was permitted to reopen. Thousands of banks were deemed insolvent and permanently closed. It is estimated by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) that depositors lost $1.3 billion to failed banks in that era. That would be … Continue reading →