Search Results for: Janet Yellen

China and Greece Wobble, Canada Dips Into Recession, Yellen Unfazed

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 16, 2015  Protesters were throwing fire bombs in the streets of Athens last evening over harsh new austerity measures being imposed on Greece, where banks and the stock market remain shuttered. One third of the stocks on the Chinese stock market remain suspended from trading in an effort to avert a crash. Bloomberg Business is reporting that institutional investors are holding the highest levels of cash since shortly after the Lehman Brothers collapse in 2008. And just yesterday, America’s largest export market, Canada, slashed interest rates as its central bank announced its economy had contracted in the first two quarters of this year. The global landscape is beginning to look like the inevitable dystopian reality of a world ruled by the 1 percent. Against this backdrop, Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen, with her incessant chatter about raising interest rates before the year is … Continue reading

Two Charts That Should Frighten Fed Chair Yellen

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 21, 2014 Any ideas that household balance sheets in the U.S. have been repaired since Wall Street took a wrecking ball to the nation’s economy in 2008 were dashed with the release of a study earlier this month by the Federal Reserve. As Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen ponders what will happen in the markets when the Fed starts to eventually raise interest rates, she has to also worry about what will happen to the cash-strapped consumer who is barely hanging on and has no emergency funds to meet a job loss or hike in credit card interest payments. The Fed study was conducted in September 2013 by the Fed’s Division of Consumer and Community Affairs. Its stated aim was to “capture a snapshot of the financial and economic well-being of U.S. households, as well as to monitor their recovery from the recent … Continue reading

Senator Warren Lets Yellen Know She’s Had It With the Fed’s Charade About Too Big to Fail

By Pam Martens: July 16, 2014 Yesterday, Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen delivered her Semiannual Monetary Policy Report to the Senate Banking Committee. Yellen deftly maneuvered questions on slack in the job market, asset bubbles on Wall Street, and assorted digs at the explosion of the Fed’s balance sheet to over $4 trillion as a result of quantitative easing. When it finally came to the turn of the last Senator on the docket to quiz Yellen, Senator Elizabeth Warren, the Fed Chair gave her a big, warm smile at the beginning of the questioning, likely figuring she was about to steal home and get big kudos for her performance back at the Fed. Things didn’t go as planned. Senator Warren has apparently been looking at the bare bones 35-pages released to the public for the various “living wills” or wind-down plans if a systemically important (too-big-to-fail) bank gets into trouble … Continue reading

Fed’s Yellen Versus BOE’s Carney: Big Differences on How to Exit Quantitative Easing

By Pam Martens: March 20, 2014 The head of the Bank of England (BOE), Mark Carney, who also chairs the G20’s Financial Stability Board, has a very different view from the U.S. Fed on how to exit stimulus programs. Carney is credited with successfully guiding Canada, where he previously served as head of the central bank, through the worst of the global financial crisis from 2008 to 2010. Does Carney know something that monetary policy wonks in the U.S. don’t or does the Fed know something the rest of us don’t? In her debut press conference yesterday after taking the reins at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors on February 3 of this year, Janet Yellen jolted markets with the assessment that the Fed’s mammoth, monthly bond buying program, known as quantitative easing (QE), might end as early as this fall. Then, when asked how long after that the Fed … Continue reading

Ms. Yellen, It’s Time to Pay Attention to the Slowdown

By Pam Martens: February 13, 2014 The new Chair of the Federal Reserve Board, Janet Yellen, is one of the most seasoned and knowledgeable central bank chiefs in the 100-year history of the Fed. But there was one sentence in Yellen’s testimony on Tuesday before the U.S. House Financial Services Committee which is alarming. Yellen told the Congressional panel: “Inflation remained low as the economy picked up strength, with both the headline and core personal consumption expenditures, or PCE, price indexes rising only about 1 percent last year, well below the FOMC’s 2 percent objective for inflation over the longer run.” A strong economy is incompatible with declining inflation. One or the other will win out. In a consumer based economy such as the United States, where personal consumption represents 70 percent of GDP, preventing deflation from getting a foothold is prominently on the Fed Chair’s radar screen, whether it … Continue reading

New Study Says the Fed Is Captured by Congress and White House — Not the Megabanks that Own the Fed Banks and Get Trillions in Bailouts

Jerome Powell (Thumbnail)

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 15, 2024 ~ A fascinating new academic paper has been released. Its title is “The Myth of Fed Political Independence.” Its premise is this: “The much-vaunted independence of the Federal Reserve is a myth. The Fed is not the bastion of sound monetary policy. Rather, it is just another politically coopted agency of the federal government.” The study asserts further that “Something like the Stockholm syndrome seems to describe the institutional relationship that exists between the U.S. Congress and the White House (the captors), and the Federal Reserve (the captives). The paper is written by Thomas Joseph Webster, Professor Emeritus of Economics at Pace University’s Lubin School of Business, who has written extensively on the Fed and the role that its quantitative easing has played in ballooning budget deficits, the national debt and inflation. Dr. Webster previously worked as an international economist with the … Continue reading

Reporters Who Ask Tough Questions at Fed Press Conferences Have a Habit of Being Disappeared from the Room

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 6, 2024 ~ The Fed’s longstanding relationship with reporters who are allowed to attend the Fed Chair’s press conferences is akin to a master class in Stockholm Syndrome. Your survival in this room depends on your subservience to intellectual capture by the woman who runs this room with the precision of a heat-seeking missile. A growing number of Fed watchers believe that it is Michelle Smith, the Director of Communications at the Fed for the past 23 years, who is quietly cracking the whip. Smith is now such a critical part of policing every word spoken to the public by or about the Fed that she appeared walking beside Fed Chair Powell in one of his rare interviews on 60 Minutes this past Sunday. Consider the following cases of disappeared reporters from the Fed’s press conferences. On September 7, 2021, reporter Michael Derby of the … Continue reading

A Fed Whistleblower Reveals Efforts to Silence Him 30 Years Ago

Walker F. Todd, Former New York Fed and Cleveland Fed Insider

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 22, 2024 ~ The U.S. Department of Justice needs to immediately appoint an independent Special Counsel to investigate how long and in how many ways the U.S. Central Bank (the Federal Reserve or simply “the Fed”) has been functioning as a protection racket for Wall Street mega banks. We’ll get to the latest revelation about the Fed bullying and intimidating a Fed official in a moment, but first some necessary background. In 2013 the American people learned that Carmen Segarra had been a bank examiner with a law degree at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, one of Wall Street’s key regulators. Segarra charged in a Federal lawsuit that she was bullied by colleagues to change her negative examination of the powerful Wall Street mega bank, Goldman Sachs. Segarra detailed how her colleagues also obstructed and interfered with her investigation. When she refused to … Continue reading

New York State Has Turned Over a Vast Amount of Its Financial Affairs to 5-Count Felon JPMorgan Chase

New York State Comptroller, Thomas DiNapoli

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 10, 2024 ~ There’s only one thing more dangerous than the largest bank in the United States, JPMorgan Chase, being charged with (and admitting to) five criminal felony counts by the U.S. Department of Justice since 2014 and a host of other fraud charges by federal regulators. What is more dangerous is having government officials look the other way at this recidivist history of crime at the nation’s largest bank. In May, federal banking regulators allowed JPMorgan Chase to get even bigger, despite its unprecedented crime wave, by handing it the failed First Republic Bank in a sweetheart deal. Yesterday, we learned from online documents that the Comptroller of New York State has turned over a vast amount of the financial affairs of the fourth largest state in the country to this banking house of crime. (See related articles below.) According to a New York … Continue reading

A Big Picture Look at Our Major Wall Street Corruption Stories of 2023

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 28, 2023 ~ The year 2023 will go down in U.S. banking history as the year in which the fastest bank runs in U.S. history occurred, producing the second, third and fourth largest banking failures in U.S. history in the span of seven weeks.  Losses of more than $32 billion from these failed banks hit the Federal Deposit Insurance Fund (FDIC). Adding to the regulatory hubris, the largest and riskiest bank in the U.S., JPMorgan Chase, was allowed by its compromised regulators to become even riskier by gobbling up the failed First Republic Bank while JPMorgan Chase got an unexplained $50 billion 5-year loan from the FDIC at an undisclosed interest rate to sweeten its purchase of the failed bank. And, what good is a banking crisis if the Fed can’t pony up yet another bank bailout fund, this time with loans of up to … Continue reading