By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 9, 2022 ~ Beginning in November of 2008, the Fed was allowed by Congress to manipulate the U.S. bond market through purchases of bonds with money it creates at the flick of an electronic button. The Fed calls this “Quantitative Easing” or QE.  Beginning on September 17, 2019 – when overnight lending rates on repo (repo means repurchase agreements between financial institutions) touched 10 percent instead of the 2-1/2 percent that the Fed wanted the market to be at – the Fed began providing repo loans at “administered rates.” It did that by jumping into the repo market with both feet, proceeding to make trillions of dollars in cumulative loans to trading houses on Wall Street, at interest rates as low as 0.10 percent by the spring of 2020. During 2020, the Fed also artificially propped up money market mutual funds, commercial paper, Exchange … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 6, 2022 ~ We’ve been reading SEC filings for more than 35 years. We have to sadly say that the 10-Q that Goldman Sachs filed with the SEC on May 2, for the quarter ending March 31, 2022, shocks even our well-documented assessment of Wall Street as a crime syndicate. Goldman Sachs has listed pretty much everything the firm does as a target of an ongoing investigation, notwithstanding that the company and a subsidiary were criminally charged by the U.S. Department of Justice in the looting and bribery scandal known as 1MDB in October 2020, admitted to the charges, and had to pay over $2.9 billion. The good news is that Goldman Sachs’ Dark Pools are one of the areas it lists as being under a probe. Dark Pools (also benignly called Alternative Trading Systems or ATS) are effectively unregulated stock exchanges being run by … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: May 5, 2022 ~ At the Fed’s press conference yesterday, Federal Reserve Chair Pro Tempore Jerome Powell was asked by Mike McKee of Bloomberg Television a series of questions on monetary policy which ended with this: “Are you concerned about Fed credibility with the American people?” Powell answered the monetary policy questions but did not directly address the credibility issue. McKee then repeated the question, phrased as follows: “Do you think the Fed has a credibility problem?” Powell’s answer provides an alarming insight into with whom the Fed seeks to maintain confidence. Powell said this: Powell: “No. I don’t. A good example of why would be that—so in the fourth quarter of last year, as we started talking about tapering sooner and then raising rates this year, you saw financial markets reacting, you know, very appropriately. Not to bless any particular day’s measure, but the way financial markets—you … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 4, 2022 ~ The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) will release its decision on hiking the Fed’s benchmark interest rate at 2:00 p.m. ET today, along with its plans for shrinking the Fed’s $9 trillion balance sheet. The announcement will be followed with Fed Chair Pro Tempore Jerome Powell holding a press conference at 2:30 p.m. ET. (Powell still awaits full Senate confirmation for a second term as Fed Chair, thus the designation “Pro Tempore.” Wall Street is expecting a 50-basis point rate hike (half of one percent), which would put the Fed Funds rate in a range of 0.75 to 1 percent. Wall Street does not like large interest rate increases from the Fed because five of the megabanks are sitting with a $200 trillion albatross of derivatives around their neck with questionable counterparties on the other side of a lot of those … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 3, 2022 ~ Yesterday the international newswire, Reuters, broke the story that the U.S. megabank, Citigroup, was responsible for a flash crash that plunged Sweden’s benchmark index, the OMX, by 8 percent at its low. The index later recovered to close with a loss of just under 2 percent. The plunge caused a rapid ripple effect that briefly spread to other European stock markets. Trading volume in Europe was lower than normal yesterday because the London Stock Exchange was closed for a banking holiday. (As detailed below, Citigroup previously exploited a low volume day in August 2004 in the European bond market.) Citigroup has confirmed its role in yesterday’s flash crash, releasing the following statement on Monday: “This morning one of our traders made an error when inputting a transaction. Within minutes, we identified the error and corrected it.” El Pais, a leading newspaper … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 2, 2022 ~ Last Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Justice, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) brought charges against executives at Archegos Capital Management, the family office hedge fund that was somehow able to trick the most sophisticated trading houses on Wall Street into giving it 85 to 90 percent margin debt on concentrated stock positions – one of which had been called a “fraud” in a detailed report. Archegos blew itself up with that margin debt in March 2021, leaving a handful of these sophisticated trading firms acknowledging losses of more than $10 billion dollars. The complaint filed by the Justice Department is the only complaint from the three federal agencies that names the Wall Street banks involved – although it paints the banks as hapless victims of the fraud instead of co-conspirators. (The SEC complaint … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 29, 2022 ~ The Financial Times is reporting this morning that “Germany’s federal police office, criminal prosecutors and the country’s financial watchdog BaFin are raiding Deutsche Bank’s headquarters in Frankfurt” this morning, according to a statement from prosecutors. The raid comes just four days after the body of Valentin (Val) Broeksmit, 46, was discovered at about 7 a.m. Monday at Woodrow Wilson High School in El Sereno, just outside of Los Angeles. Val Broeksmit was the son of William Broeksmit who was found hanged in his London home on January 26, 2014. The senior Boreksmit was a senior executive at Deutsche Bank involved in assessing risk on the bank’s balance sheet. (See our report: Documents Emerge in Senate Hearing from William Broeksmit, Deutsche Exec Alleged to Have Hanged Himself in January.) According to a profile of Val Broeksmit written by David Enrich in the New … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 28, 2022 ~ Yesterday, the U.S. Department of Justice, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) brought charges against executives at Archegos Capital Management, the family office hedge fund that blew up in March of 2021. The Justice Department brought criminal charges while the SEC and CFTC brought civil charges. Archegos founder and owner Sung Kook (Bill) Hwang and its former CFO, Patrick Halligan, were indicted on securities fraud and racketeering charges. William Tomita, the former Head Trader, and Scott Becker, the former Chief Risk Officer, have pleaded guilty for their roles in the fraud and are cooperating with the Justice Department. All three federal agencies adopted the narrative that the biggest trading houses on Wall Street were the hapless victims of the Archegos’ fraud. That narrative is going to be difficult for a jury to swallow for … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 27, 2022 ~ As long-term readers of Wall Street On Parade know well, we have regularly warned that the failure of Congress to meaningfully reform Wall Street by restoring the Glass-Steagall Act poses a national security threat to our nation in times of crisis. Instead of meaningful reform, Congress has stood by and watched the Fed bail out the global banks repeatedly since 2008 – either with direct loans or by keeping interest rates artificially low (“administered rates”) or through trillions of dollars in asset purchases from the banks (what the Fed prefers to call Quantitative Easing). The Fed’s balance sheet has ballooned from less than $1 trillion before the financial crisis in 2008 to $9 trillion today as a result of its willingness to perpetually bail out Wall Street. American taxpayers are on the hook for 98 percent of the Fed’s balance sheet … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 26, 2022 When the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics released its Consumer Price Index (CPI) report on April 12, it showed that inflation had surged to the highest rate in 40 years, reaching 8.5 percent in March compared to the same month a year ago. The CPI report for February had shown a year-over-year increase of 7.9 percent – meaning that inflation had surged further in March and the Fed’s target of 2 percent inflation was getting further out of reach. While inflation has soared, supply bottlenecks from the pandemic and now Russia’s war in Ukraine are pushing down Gross Domestic Product (GDP) expectations. The highly-respected GDPNow model from the folks at the Atlanta Fed puts first quarter GDP in the U.S. at a tepid 1.3 percent. (That figure will be updated later today following the release of new home sales for March at … Continue reading →