Search Results for: Federal Reserve

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 16, 2020 ~ Taxpayers’ money is being used to make the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans. Thus, the public has every right to know the names of the recipients of those loans. Despite originally promising transparency, U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin is now stonewalling Congress on releasing a list of the recipients. Congress sold the plan to the public on the basis that the loans would go to small businesses with less than 500 employees. The funds were to be predominantly used to keep workers employed and allow the businesses to survive the coronavirus shutdowns. Instead, our search of filings at the Securities and Exchange Commission reveals that dozens of debt zombie companies that trade on Nasdaq got the loans. Dozens of publicly-traded companies with large credit lines from banks got the loans. Dozens of companies with a lot more than 500 employees … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 12, 2020 ~ Every major Wall Street bank tanked yesterday. Citigroup fared the worst, losing 13.37 percent of its market value versus a broader market decline of 5.89 percent on the S&P 500 Index. Bank of America didn’t look like much of a source of strength either, losing 10.04 percent on the day. The largest bank in the country, JPMorgan Chase, whose CEO, Jamie Dimon, perpetually brags about its “fortress balance sheet,” lost 8.34 percent. For a close look at what’s hiding in the tall weeds behind that fortress, see here. Just the afternoon before this bank carnage, this is what the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, had to say in his press conference about the U.S. banking system (which, of course, the Fed has been in charge of supervising in order to prevent another catastrophic blowup as occurred in 2008): … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 11, 2020 ~ Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell’s press conferences are typically snooze sessions. Yesterday’s virtual press conference got off to a similar start with mainstream media reporters asking about inflation and monetary policy instead of the more critical questions they should have been asking in the midst of the worst labor market and business closures since the Great Depression and food pantry lines that stretch for blocks. Fortunately, two reporters shook things up at the very end of the press conference. Nancy Marshall-Genzer of Marketplace, which airs on public media stations, bluntly asked Powell this: “Is there more the Fed could do to deal with inequality, for example, use the Black unemployment rate as a benchmark.” Powell’s answer was an abomination. First Powell stated that inequality is not related to monetary policy. Next, he decided to target a more specific villain – … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 10, 2020 ~ The Federal Reserve has authorized 11 financial bailout programs thus far. Despite Fed Chairman Jerome Powell’s reassurances at his press conferences that these programs are to help American families, a full 10 of these programs are actually bailouts of Wall Street banks or their trading units. The latest Wall Street bank bailout to come out of hiding is the Fed’s Secondary Market Corporate Credit Facility (SMCCF). This program was supposed to buy up corporate bonds in the secondary market in order to help corporate bond markets regain liquidity. Thus far, the only thing the SMCCF has bought up are Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) holding investment grade and junk-rated bonds. The SMCCF program began operations on May 12. By May 18 the Fed had spent $1.58 billion buying up ETFs. The ultimate goal of the facility, at this point, is to … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 9, 2020 ~ The Federal Reserve is desperately hoping that the pandemic, the coast-to-coast protests and the military generals’ scathing rebuke of the President’s plan to “dominate” grannies and college kids with bayonets and Black Hawk helicopters in the streets would distract the public from its money-feeding tube to Wall Street. Unfortunately for the Fed, Americans can multitask. Between Monday and Friday of last week, the Fed made $304.20 billion in repo loans to Wall Street’s trading houses. That was 230 percent of what it made the week before and 700 percent of what it loaned the week before that. (See chart above.) This would suggest that the liquidity crisis is heating up and/or that it’s taking ever larger amounts to levitate the stock market as sellers come back in. The Fed has gone completely bonkers when it comes to its money spigot … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 8, 2020 ~ Wall Street On Parade has previously written that a financial crisis was already well under way before the first case of COVID-19 was reported anywhere in the world. This should matter greatly to Americans because the Federal Reserve is attempting to blame the financial crisis on the virus to avoid Congressional investigations of its second epic failure in a dozen years at regulating the behemoth Wall Street banks. America needs a comprehensive investigation of what really triggered this financial crisis in order to restructure the U.S. financial system away from a casino culture into one that doesn’t regularly need massive Federal Reserve and government bailouts. These bailouts are piling more and more debt on the shoulders of taxpayers and becoming a crushing drag on the U.S. economy, notwithstanding Fed Chairman Jerome Powell’s dismissive remark to Congress that we’ll worry about … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 5, 2020 ~ It’s called “Going Direct.” That’s the financial bailout plan designed and authored by former central bankers now on the payroll at BlackRock, an  investment manager of $7 trillion in stock and bond funds. The plan was rolled out in August 2019 at the G7 summit of central bankers in Jackson Hole, Wyoming – months before the public was aware of any financial crisis. One month later, on September 17, 2019, the U.S. Federal Reserve would begin an emergency repo loan bailout program, making hundreds of billions of dollars a week in loans by “going direct” to the trading houses on Wall Street. The BlackRock plan calls for blurring the lines between government fiscal policy and central bank monetary policy – exactly what the U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve are doing today in the United States. BlackRock has now been … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 2, 2020 ~ The words of the President of the United States over the past three days suggest that he is determined to be a wartime president and that he has found the enemy: it’s the American people. As racial justice protests raged in cities across the United States on May 30 over the murder of George Floyd in broad daylight at the hands of four policemen in Minneapolis, President Donald Trump tweeted that if the protesters had breached the fence at the White House, “they would have been greeted with the most vicious dogs, and most ominous weapons, I have ever seen.” (Considering that the President avoided military service on the basis of bone spurs, he probably hasn’t actually seen too many ominous weapons.) Yesterday, President Trump held a phone conference with state Governors around the U.S. He said this at one … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 1, 2020 ~ As we watched the dangerous scenes of protesters interacting with riot police and the ransacking of banks and businesses in cities across the United States this past weekend, a warning from the 19th century abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, came to mind: “Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.” The protests last week and this past weekend were sparked by unspeakable cellphone videos of a Minneapolis policeman, Derek Chauvin, torturing and murdering George Floyd with his knee crushing his throat for almost nine minutes as Floyd lay handcuffed and pinned face down on the ground by Chauvin and three other police officers. Only Chauvin has been charged with third degree … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 29, 2020 ~ On May 29, 2019, the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet stood at $3.9 trillion. As of this past Wednesday, May 27, 2020, the Fed’s balance sheet had skyrocketed to $7.145 trillion, an increase of 83 percent in one year’s time. But the explosion in the Fed’s balance sheet cannot be attributed solely to the economic downturn caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The math and the timeline simply do not support that argument. According to the timeline at the World Health Organization, on December 31, 2019, China first reported a cluster of cases of pneumonia which were identified in early January to be the coronavirus now known as COVID-19. These were the first known cases anywhere in the world. But on December 31, 2019, the Federal Reserve was already deep into a debt crisis in the United States. We know that from … Continue reading →