Search Results for: Federal Reserve

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 10, 2020 ~ This article was updated at 3:40 p.m. today. See Editor’s note below. ~ Every Wall Street bailout program that the Fed has created since September 17 of last year has, according to the Fed, been ostensibly created to somehow help the average American. According to the Fed’s Term Sheet for the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility (TALF), it’s going to “help meet the credit needs of consumers and businesses by facilitating the issuance of asset-backed securities.” Not to put too fine a point on it, but asset-backed securities and related derivatives are what blew up Wall Street in 2008, creating the worst economic downturn, at that point, since the Great Depression. According to the Fed’s TALF transaction data, it has made $2.6 billion in total loans. Forty-six percent of that money, $1.2 billion, went to a company that has 4 … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 9, 2020 ~ The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed with a loss of 632 points yesterday (a 2.25 percent decline) while the Nasdaq erased 465 points for a loss of 4.11 percent. As Wall Street witnessed its most vicious correction since March over the past three consecutive trading sessions, a curious thing happened at the Fed. The Fed’s repo loan money spigot which had churned out more than $9 trillion cumulatively to the trading houses of Wall Street from the inception of the bailout program on September 17, 2019 to our tally in mid-March of this year, pumped out nary a drop of cold cash in repo loans as the market swooned. Big zeros in loans provided by the Fed populated their data sheets on all three days of the selloff. However, to comfort Wall Street with the knowledge that the Fed is … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 3, 2020 ~ Happy New Year – here’s your eviction notice. That’s how tens of millions of struggling Americans have been set up to fail as the one percent on Wall Street, propped up by unlimited money from the Fed, ring in the New Year with Tiffany flutes of Dom Perignon in their Greenwich mansions. According to a recent study published by The Aspen Institute, 30 to 40 million Americans will be at risk of eviction over the next several months. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has been dragged into the eviction morass because Democrats and Republicans in Congress cannot find common ground on a meaningful plan. On Tuesday, the CDC issued an order that bans landlords from evicting tenants that cannot afford to pay rent due to a pandemic-related job loss or income reduction. The CDC action follows an … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 2, 2020 ~  Members Exchange (MEMX), a brand new stock exchange, has announced that it will begin live trading of select stocks for the first time on September 21 with a full phase-in on September 29. Criminal histories are, apparently, no barrier to running a stock exchange in the United States to the deeply conflicted way of thinking of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which issued its approval to operate the exchange on May 5. Investors in the new stock exchange are some of the most serially-charged Wall Street banks, including JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, and UBS, along with the hedge fund, Citadel Securities. BlackRock, which is up to its neck in the Federal Reserve’s deeply conflicted bailout programs, is also an investor, as is the high-frequency trading firm, Virtu Financial, and others. JPMorgan Chase has been criminally investigated by the U.S. Department … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 28, 2020 ~ Thanks to the behemoth banks on Wall Street that engineered the largest Inside Job in the history of global banking and cratered the economy in 2008, retirees are now looking at a yield of 0.75 percent on a 10-year U.S. Treasury note. That paltry yield compares to the 4 percent or higher that retirees have been able to get throughout much of the last century on a T-Note. The Federal Reserve is directly responsible for these unprecedented low yields. For much of the past 12 years, the Fed has been manipulating interest rates lower by buying up trillions of dollars in bonds (quantitative easing) in order to avoid crashing the Wall Street banks. The Wall Street banks are holding tens of trillions of dollars in interest-rate derivative bets — betting that rates won’t rise substantially or will drift lower. So … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 27, 2020 ~ A rather fascinating picture is emerging that suggests that things were not as rosy in the U.S. economic landscape prior to the pandemic as President Donald Trump and his Director of the National Economic Council, Larry Kudlow, would have the public believe. Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc. has been tracking CEO departures for the past 12 years. Its Vice President, Andrew Challenger, called the numbers for 2019 “staggering.” It was the highest number since their surveys began in 2002. A total of 1,640 CEOs headed for the exits last year. That was 156 more CEOs than those who left their post in 2008 – the year that Wall Street blazed a scorched earth trail through the U.S. economy. The number of CEOs that did not leave on their own accord last year was 101 out of the 1,640. According to … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 19, 2020 ~ The first thing you need to know about the right-wing Cato Institute is that it quietly began its life as the Charles Koch Foundation in 1974. The name was changed to the Cato Institute in 1977 according to the restated articles of incorporation. For decades, the Cato Institute enjoyed a taxpayer subsidy as a nonprofit while being secretly owned by a handful of men, two of whom were the fossil fuel billionaire brothers, Charles and David Koch – libertarians with a radical agenda. (David Koch died in August of last year.) The second thing to know about the Cato Institute is that over the past 35 years, Koch-related foundations have pumped more than $22 million into its coffers to help Cato get out its messaging of killing off the following: Social Security; federally-subsidized school lunches; the minimum wage; collective bargaining; … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 14, 2020 ~ According to the official press briefing transcript on August 8, President Donald Trump explained the stalemate between his administration and the Democrats in passing the latest stimulus bill as follows: “…what the Democrats primarily want is bailout money. It has nothing to do with the China virus. It has nothing to do with anything that we’ve been talking about over the last period of time. They want to bailout states that have been badly managed by Democrats, badly run by Democrats for many years — and, in fact, in all cases, many decades.  And we’re not willing to do that.” But according to the U.S. Government’s Bureau of Economic Analysis, two of the states making outsized contributions to the GDP of the United States are California and New York. They are just two states out of a total of 50 … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 13, 2020 ~ The Federal Reserve has thrown everything just short of the kitchen sink at propping up the mega banks on Wall Street – the same ones that were never prosecuted for their fraudulent issuance of mortgage securities and causing the worse economic crash since the Great Depression in 2008. (The Fed bailed the same banks out back then also – to the tune of $29 trillion in cumulative loans.) But yesterday’s market action suggests that something is definitely amiss. The S&P 500 index closed at 3380, just 7 points away from topping its all-time high of 3386 that it set on February 19 of this year. The Dow also gained 289.9 points on the day. But now look at the chart above. There was a sea of red in the Wall Street bank stocks. While the losses in Citigroup, Bank of America, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 12, 2020 ~ On May 30, with little mainstream media attention, four European academics published a report on how some of the largest Wall Street banks (all of whom received massive amounts of secret Federal Reserve bailout money during the 2007 to 2010 financial crash) were shamelessly gaming the system again. Rather than complying with the derivatives regulations imposed under the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation of 2010, the Wall Street mega banks had simply moved much of their interest rate derivatives trading to their foreign subsidiaries that fall outside of U.S. regulatory reach. This is known as regulatory arbitrage: seeking the most lightly regulated jurisdiction to ply your dangerous trading activity. (Think JPMorgan’s London Whale fiasco.) The European academics are Pauline Gandré, Mike Mariathasan, Ouarda Merrouche and Steven Ongena. The paper is titled: “Regulatory Arbitrage and the G20’s Global Derivatives Market Reform.” The researchers discovered … Continue reading →