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Recent Posts
- Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” Is a Grotesque Giveaway to Fossil Fuel Billionaires While Adding $3.3 Trillion to Nation’s Debt
- Senator Chris Murphy Charges that Trump “Has Opened a Channel for Bribery”
- Congressman Casten: Trump’s Assault on the Rule of Law Is Causing Capital Flight Out of U.S. by Foreign Investors
- Trump’s Approval Rating Drops to 80-Year Low; IMF Says U.S. Tariffs Now Exceed the Highs During the Great Depression
- Nasdaq Has Lost More than 3,000 Points Since Trump’s First Full Day in Office in 2025; the Pain Has Barely Begun
- The Bond Crisis Last Week Was a Global No-Confidence Vote in U. S. President Donald Trump
- Trump’s Tariff Plan Guts $5 Trillion in Stock Value in Two Days; Senator Warren Calls for Emergency Action Before Markets Open on Monday
- Trump’s Attacks on Big Law, Universities, and the Media Have a Common Goal: Silence Dissent Against Authoritarian Rule
- Trump Administration Gives All Clear to Laundering Money through Shell Companies and Bribing Foreign Officials
- Four Megabanks on Wall Street Hold $3.2 Trillion in Uninsured Deposits – Which May Explain Senator Schumer’s Pivot to the GOP to Stop a Government Shutdown
- Here’s What Came Crashing Down Yesterday for Trump’s “Genius” Guy, Elon Musk: Tesla Stock, Access to Twitter (X), His Years of Secret Calls with Putin
- After Banning the Associated Press, Trump Is Now Targeting Specific Journalists That He Wants to See Fired
- Closely Watched Atlanta Fed Model Predicts Negative U.S. Growth in First Quarter
- Trump’s Gangster Diplomacy Makes Front Page Headlines Around the Globe
- Who Benefits Alongside Elon Musk If He Succeeds in Killing the CFPB: the Megabanks on Wall Street that Underwrite His Tesla Stock Offerings
- In Trump 1.0, the State Department Used Taxpayer Money to Publish a Book Elevating Elon Musk to a Superhero; It Was Funded by USAID, the Agency Musk Wants to Quickly Shut Down
- News Host Joy Reid Raises Threat of Trump Selling U.S. to Putin; Ten Days Later Her Show Is Cancelled
- Elon Musk’s DOGE Appears to Be Violating a Court Order; It Has Taken Down Hundreds of YouTube Videos that Educate Americans on How to Avoid Being Swindled
- Barron’s Releases Audio of Jamie Dimon Cursing Out His Workers at a Town Hall, as Dimon Plans to Dump Another One Million JPM Shares
- There’s One Federal Investigative Agency that Neither Trump nor Elon Musk Can Touch: It Just Opened an Investigation into DOGE
- Elon Musk’s Companies Were Under Investigation by Five Inspectors General When the Trump Administration Fired Them and Made Musk the Investigator
- Donald Trump Gives the Greenlight to Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase to Return to Bribing Foreign Officials
- After Tech Geeks Built a Back Door to Loot Billions from FTX, Republicans Refuse to Investigate What Elon Musk’s Tech-Squad Did Inside the U.S. Treasury’s Payment System
- Former Prosecutor, Now U.S. Senator, Informs Tesla That CEO Musk May Be Violating Federal Law and to “Preserve All Records”
- Trump’s Hedge Fund Guy Is Now Overseeing the U.S. Treasury, IRS, OCC, U.S. Mint, FinCEN, F-SOC, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
- As Elon Musk Begins Shutting Down Payments to Federal Contractors, a Strange Money Trail Emerges to His Operatives Inside the U.S. Treasury’s Payment System
- JPMorgan Chase Charged by Yet Another Internal Whistleblower with Cooking the Books
- We Asked Google’s AI Search Model, Gemini, Questions About the Fed and Wall Street Megabanks: It Got the Answers Dead Wrong
- With Trump and Melania’s Crypto Coins Likely to Raise Legal Challenges, Why Didn’t Trump Fire the SEC’s Inspector General in His Purge of IGs?
- Fossil Fuel Industry Could End Up Paying Tens of Billions for LA Wildfires and Deceiving the Public on Climate Change for Decades
- It’s Being Called the Biggest Grift by a President in U.S. History: Trump and First Lady Launch their Own Crypto Coins
- Trump Plans to Install a Fracking CEO to Head the Energy Department and Declare a National Emergency on Energy to Gain Vast Powers
- Fossil Fuel Money Played a Role in the Los Angeles Fires and the Push to Install Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense
- When It Comes to Wealth Retention in Retirement, Concrete May Be the New Gold
- Wall Street Watchdog Warns “Clock Is Ticking on a Coming Catastrophic Financial Crash”
- Wall Street Is Sending the Same Message to Americans on Fossil Fuel Financing that It Sent on Cigarettes: Drop Dead
- In a Six-Week Span, this Dark Pool with a Curious Past Traded 3.7 Billion Shares
- Wall Street’s Lobby Firm Hired Eugene Scalia of Gibson Dunn to Sue the Fed for Jamie Dimon
- Postmaster General Louis DeJoy Made $561,051 in Compensation in 2024, as Mail Costs Spiked and Delivery Deteriorated
- Fed Chair Jay Powell Sends a Bold Message to Trump and Tanks the Dow by 1123 Points
- The Head of Fixed Income at T. Rowe Price Makes the Scary Case for the 10-Year Treasury to Spike to 6 Percent
- $663 Billion in Cash Assets Have Gone Poof at the Largest U.S. Banks
- Donald Trump to Ring Bell at New York Stock Exchange Today as Hit List Posters Appear in Manhattan Targeting Wall Street CEOs
- Trump Has a Slush Fund to Prop Up the Dollar – Will He Use It to Prop Up Bitcoin Instead?
- A CEO Assassination; a Billionaire Heiress/NYPD Commissioner; a Secret Wall Street Spy Center – Here’s How They’re Connected
- Despite More than 1600 Tech Scientists Signing a Letter Calling Crypto a Sham, Trump Names a Crypto Cheerleader for SEC Chair
- The Fed Rings a Warning Bell: Hedge Funds and Life Insurers Are Reporting Historic Leverage
- Trump’s Nominee for FBI Director, Kash Patel, Has Businesses Financially Intertwined with Trump
- Donald Trump Is at Risk of Getting Named in a Fossil Fuels Conspiracy Lawsuit
- Trump Is Having Difficulty Getting a Lawyer to Accept the Nomination for SEC Chair: Here’s Why
Search Results for: Federal Reserve
Compared to the Last Three Treasury Secretaries, Janet Yellen Is Mother Teresa

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 15, 2020 ~ President-elect Joe Biden’s nomination of Janet Yellen as Treasury Secretary is being viewed cautiously in some progressive circles. As the post-financial crisis Chair of the Federal Reserve under President Obama, Yellen had the opportunity to interpret the rules of the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation in a manner that would rein in the risks of the mega banks on Wall Street. She failed in that regard while attempting to reassure a skeptical public that the Fed’s stress tests on the banks were adequate to prevent another crisis. Yellen famously stated at a London conference in 2017 the following: “Would I say there will never, ever be another financial crisis? You know probably that would be going too far, but I do think we are much safer, and I hope that it will not be in our lifetimes and I don’t believe … Continue reading
Trump Regulator Set to Consider Approving the Banking Model that Ushered in the Great Depression – Uninsured Deposits

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 14, 2020 ~ Seven banking and credit union associations have sent a letter to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the regulator of national banks in the U.S., spelling out the dangers of the OCC approving a pending bank charter that would allow a national bank to accept and hold deposits that lack federal deposit insurance. The lack of federal deposit insurance triggered the bank runs and banks collapses that played a key role in ushering in the Great Depression. (More on that in a moment.) The bank making the proposal for uninsured banking is Figure Bank, N.A., part of the blockchain startup, Figure Technologies. The organizations wisely arguing against it are the American Bankers Association, Bank Policy Institute, Credit Union National Association, Independent Community Bankers of America, National Association of Federally Insured Credit Unions, The Clearing House, and Consumer … Continue reading
Mission Creep or Creepy Mission: The New York Fed’s Trading Desk Has Ballooned to $6.59 Trillion Today from $576 Billion in 2008

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 11, 2020 ~ Few Americans are aware that the central bank of the United States, the Federal Reserve, has its own trading desk in New York that interacts every business day with the trading desks of the giant Wall Street banks. When Americans think of massive trading operations, names like JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, UBS and Citigroup come to mind. But if we measure trading desks by the value of their portfolio holdings, these global banks are pikers compared to the Fed’s trading desk, operated by one of its 12 private regional banks, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (New York Fed). Using the New York Fed’s own annual reports to obtain the data, we can report that the New York Fed’s Trading Desk has grown from $576 billion in holdings of domestic securities as of December 31, 2008 (at the … Continue reading
The SEC Has a Graph of the Wall Street Short-Term Loan Market that Blew Up: It Needs a Surgeon General Warning Before Viewing

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 10, 2020 ~ If you suffer from chronic nightmares, experience migraine headaches from stress, or have anger management issues when confronted with abject stupidity, you probably want to avoid looking at the above graph that the Securities and Exchange Commission has created to show how one of the most critical financial markets in the United States functions. Or perhaps we should say, why it’s incapable of functioning when it’s most needed. The market is Wall Street’s Short-Term Funding Market which includes its integral repurchase agreement (repo) market. The repo market blew up in 2008 during the last financial crisis and required a Fed bailout. It blew up again on September 17, 2019 for reasons that have yet to be credibly explained and required at least $9 trillion in cumulative emergency loans from the Federal Reserve over the next six months. As we reported … Continue reading
Watchdog Report: Fed’s Billions in Emergency Repo Loans to Wall Street Didn’t Go Away in June; They Just Went Dark

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 9, 2020 ~ The U.S. Senate Banking Committee, the House Financial Services Committee, and the U.S. mainstream business media now thoroughly qualify as the dumb tourists snapping photos of the raging bull statue on Wall Street as the Wall Street banks loot the country for the second time in a decade. Last Thursday the Financial Stability Oversight Council (pronounced F-SOC) released its 2020 Annual Report. Those tend to be tediously boring reports that tell one nothing meaningful about the true state of the Wall Street mega banks, so we just got around to perusing the document yesterday. Mixed in with the typical snooze-worthy minutiae was a bombshell that made us sit up straight in our chair. Those cumulative repo loans totaling more than $9 trillion to the trading houses on Wall Street that the Fed had been making from September 17 of 2019 … Continue reading
House Hearing: Wall Street Gets Bailed Out by Fed; Main Street Gets Sold Out

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 3, 2020 ~ Sparks were flying throughout yesterday’s House Financial Services Committee hearing. After Fed Chair Jerome Powell and U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin appeared before the Senate Banking Committee on Tuesday, they were grilled for 2 more hours yesterday by members of the House Financial Services Committee. The atmosphere was far less cordial than the prior day, which wasn’t exactly tea and crumpets either. There was good reason for the hostility. For the second time in a dozen years, another former Goldman Sachs banker holds the reins at the Treasury Department as it bails out Wall Street while crushing Main Street businesses and American families. This time it’s Mnuchin rather than Hank Paulson, who served as Treasury Secretary under George W. Bush during the financial crisis. Before we get into the guts of yesterday’s hearing, it’s important to have the background on … Continue reading
Senator Menendez: “3.3 Million Small Businesses Have Closed” and “1.1 Million Local and State Employees Have Lost their Jobs” as a Result of Pandemic

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 2, 2020 ~ The Orwellian nature of U.S. politics as well as the delusional Republican narrative that the U.S. economy has made a robust recovery and “turned the corner” was on tortuous display at yesterday’s Senate Banking hearing. Trump’s loyal devotees on the Senate Banking Committee continued to promote the narrative that job growth is stellar. It isn’t job “growth,” it’s simply some people being called back to the same jobs after their employers reopened after a shutdown because of the pandemic. The Trump administration’s own Department of Labor reported on November 25 that the total number of people claiming unemployment benefits in all unemployment benefit programs for the week ending November 7 was 20,452,223. The 20.4 million figure is 13.7 times where that number stood for the same week in 2019 before the pandemic struck. Yesterday’s hearing was called to question Fed … Continue reading
Trump Issued an Executive Memorandum Giving Mnuchin a $50 Billion Slush Fund; Mnuchin Gave Himself $386 Billion More

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 1, 2020 ~ Five days before Congress passed the CARES Act on March 25 of this year, President Donald Trump issued an Executive Memorandum giving U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin complete discretion to use $50 billion in the Treasury’s Exchange Stabilization Fund (ESF) as Mnuchin solely saw fit. The Memorandum was dated Friday, March 20. On the prior Tuesday and Wednesday of that same week, Mnuchin had already used $20 billion of the Exchange Stabilization Fund to bail out Wall Street. As Mnuchin’s letter of November 19 to Fed Chair Jerome Powell confirms, he gave (or committed) $10 billion from the ESF to the Fed’s Commercial Paper Funding Facility on March 17 and another $10 billion to another Fed emergency lending program, the Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility, on March 18. Most Americans have never heard of the Treasury’s Exchange Stabilization Fund (ESF), … Continue reading
75% of the $454 Billion CARES Act Money Never Went to the Fed; It Was Invested by a Mnuchin Slush Fund Called the ESF

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 27, 2020 ~ The CARES Act was signed into law on March 27. Congress earmarked $454 billion of that stimulus money to be distributed by the Treasury to the Federal Reserve to be used for emergency lending programs to save businesses and jobs during the pandemic and keep credit flowing to the U.S. economy. The catch was that the Treasury Secretary, Steve Mnuchin, would have to give his approval for each of the programs. Since June, Wall Street On Parade has been reporting that $340 billion of the $454 billion that Mnuchin was instructed to turn over to the Fed was unaccounted for. We noted that 98,000 businesses had permanently closed in the U.S. while this money, intended for economic relief, went missing. On November 19, Mnuchin publicly issued a letter to Fed Chair Jerome Powell, making it sound like most of the … Continue reading
Both Citigroup and JPMorgan Have Now Received Huge Fines for Crimes the Regulators Won’t Reveal

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 25, 2020 ~ Maybe it’s because Wall Street On Parade has been shining a bright light on the serial crimes and rap sheets of Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase. Or maybe it’s because the nonpartisan watchdog, Better Markets, published a report last year titled “Wall Street’s Six Biggest Bailed-Out Banks: Their RAP Sheets & Their Ongoing Crime Spree.” Or maybe it all comes down to what Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois said after the financial crisis of 2008: “And the banks – hard to believe in a time when we’re facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created – are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place.” Whatever the reason, the darkness that started growing around the crimes committed by the big Wall Street banks during the Obama administration has now evolved into such a … Continue reading