Search Results for: JPMorgan

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 1, 2022 ~ Adding to a very long laundry list of questions about exactly whom the New York Fed serves, is the help-wanted ad that was posted four days ago. The ad is for a Financial Planning & Analysis Expert to work at the New York Fed’s headquarters in lower Manhattan. One part of the job description is this: “modelling of potential investment opportunities.” The New York Fed is supposed to be implementing monetary policy on behalf of the United States as mandated by the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC). As far as public FOMC records indicate, the New York Fed has not been assigned the job of seeking out “potential investment opportunities.” So for whom is it seeking out these investment opportunities? Is it looking for profit-making investments for the Wall Street megabanks who own it and whose CEOs rotate on and off … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 27, 2022 ~ The last thing a volatile stock market needs right now is more surprises from the dark corners of Wall Street. Unfortunately, we can guarantee you that more surprises are coming in the way of uncleared derivatives blowing up on the balance sheets of publicly-traded corporations. How do we know this? The information in the chart above comes from a study quietly released last July by the Office of Financial Research (OFR). That’s the federal agency that provides research to bank regulators to prevent systemic financial contagion from taking down the Wall Street megabanks and the U.S. economy in another replay of 2008. What the study actually shows, however, is that neither Congress nor bank regulators have done anything meaningful to prevent derivatives from once again blowing up the world’s largest economy. Instead, the watchdogs have simply allowed a rearrangement of … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 25, 2022 ~ The Office of Financial Research (OFR) is the federal agency created under the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation of 2010. Its role is to provide early warnings to U.S. bank regulators and the public of systemic risks that threaten U.S. financial stability, so that another 2008-style Wall Street crisis can never again devastate the U.S. economy. The OFR was doing an outstanding job of sounding alarm bells until the Trump administration gutted the agency. The Biden administration has clearly not done enough to restore the integrity of the office. Consider the research report that was released by the OFR on July 12 of last year, which we just discovered yesterday. The report is titled: “Counterparty Choice, Bank Interconnectedness, and Systemic Risk.” The researchers, Andrew Ellul and Dasol Kim, examined 18 different over-the-counter (OTC) derivative markets and noted the following: “Bank interconnectedness through … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 21, 2022 ~ In her 2007 book, Tulipmania: Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age, Anne Goldgar writes that a tulip bulb in 1637 sold for the equivalent of $12,000 in 2007 money. Now think about the tens of millions of dollars that were spent last year for one NFT.  It’s pretty clear that Tulipmania has nothing on the Fed-induced Bubblemania that is currently in the early stages of The Great Unwind. Goldgar points out that as historians have looked back, the tulip mania of the 1630s in Holland has become a “byword for idiocy.” At least a tulip bulb is a thing of beauty that reblooms year after year. Bitcoin, called “rat poison squared” by Warren Buffett, one of the smartest investors of all time, is not a thing of beauty, has nothing backing it, and is currently in free fall. After … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 20, 2022 ~ The last thing that Fed Chairman Powell needs in his second term are the sleazy details of the Fed’s trading scandal being released by investigators and to have to bail out the same megabank that Fed Chair Bernanke secretly bailed out from December 2007 through at least mid-July 2010. Obviously, we’re talking about Citigroup. Citigroup has been announcing major asset sales so rapidly since December that one has to wonder if the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and/or the Fed is cracking the whip. (We’ll get to the significant details of why that might be the case in a moment.) On January 11, Citigroup announced that it intended to sell its consumer, small business and middle-market banking operations of Banco Nacional de México, otherwise known as Banamex. In 2017, Citigroup settled a criminal probe with the U.S. Department of Justice … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 19, 2022 ~ There are numerous reasons that members of Congress, bank regulators, and mainstream media don’t want to talk about the repo blowup in 2019 and the massive Fed bailout that followed. Economist Michael Hudson previously explained how the Fed lacked authority to bail out a handful of trading houses on Wall Street under the dictates of the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation. Dodd-Frank restricted the Fed to using its emergency lending powers to rescue a “broad base” of the U.S. financial system. As we detailed on Monday, there was no “broad base” of the U.S. financial system being bailed out by the Fed in the last quarter of 2019: 62 percent of a cumulative $19.87 trillion in rolled-over repo loans went to just six trading houses: Nomura Securities International ($3.7 trillion); J.P. Morgan Securities ($2.59 trillion); Goldman Sachs ($1.67 trillion); Barclays Capital ($1.48 … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 14, 2022 ~ Even within economic circles, there is a growing nervousness that the Federal Reserve, the central bank of the United States – with the power to electronically create money out of thin air, bail out insolvent Wall Street megabanks, balloon its balance sheet to $8.8 trillion without one elected person on its Board while the U.S. taxpayer is on the hook for 98 percent of that, and allow its Dallas Fed Bank President to make directional bets on the market by trading in and out of million dollar S&P 500 futures during a declared national emergency – has carved out a no-law zone around itself. The latest ruckus stems from the Fed’s release on December 30 of the names of the 23 Wall Street trading houses and the billions they borrowed under its cumulative $11.23 trillion emergency repo loan facility that the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 11, 2022 ~ It’s now day 13 since the Fed released the names of the Wall Street trading houses that borrowed $4.5 trillion cumulatively, just in the fourth quarter of 2019, from the Fed’s repo loan facility. Not one mainstream media outlet has reported those names of the Wall Street firms or the amounts borrowed – despite the fact that we have prodded them to do so, and despite the fact that some of the largest borrowers were also bailed out by the Fed during and after the financial crash of 2008. The Fed, which is releasing the data on a rolling quarterly basis, had previously released the names of the banks and the amounts borrowed for the last 14 days of September 2019. That cumulative total came to $769.2 billion, or an average of $54.94 billion per day that the Fed was throwing … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 7, 2022 ~ Nine days ago the Fed released the names of the Wall Street trading houses that had borrowed a cumulative total of $4.5 trillion in emergency repo loans from the Fed during just the last quarter of 2019. From September 17, 2019 through July 2, 2020, the same banks had borrowed a cumulative total of $11.23 trillion. The Fed is slowly doling out the names of the banks and the specific amounts borrowed on a quarterly basis, after eight quarters of time has elapsed. The Fed is only releasing the information because the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation of 2010 made it a legal obligation of the Fed to do so. The Fed had fought a multi-year court battle with the press after the 2008 financial crisis to keep its secret bailouts to Wall Street firms hidden from the American people. Strange as … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 6, 2022 ~ From September 17, 2019 through July 2, 2020, the trading units of the Wall Street megabanks (both domestic and foreign) took a cumulative total of $11.23 trillion in emergency repo loans from the Federal Reserve. The loans were conducted by one of the 12 regional Fed banks, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York – which is literally owned by megabanks, including JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and others. The New York Fed is also responsible for sending its bank examiners into these same banks to make sure they aren’t plotting some evil scheme that will bring down the U.S. economy, as they did with their derivatives and subprime debt bombs in 2008. Unfortunately, if a New York Fed bank examiner doesn’t listen to the “relationship managers” at the New York Fed, and insists on giving a negative review … Continue reading →