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 →

By Pam Martens: January 4, 2022 ~ We were attempting to hold the Fed, Big Media, and the Wall Street megabanks accountable with our article yesterday on mainstream media’s news blackout of the Fed’s release of the names of the Wall Street trading houses that got $4.5 trillion in cumulative repo loans from the Fed in the last quarter of 2019 – long before the first case of COVID-19 was reported in the U.S. on January 20, 2020. (The full tally came to $11.23 trillion in cumulative repo loans from September 17, 2019 through July 2, 2020.) But when a Reddit group that calls itself “Superstonk” spotted our article and posted it in their comment section, our website got caught in the crosshairs. The traffic to our article was so heavy at times that our website couldn’t be accessed from either a laptop or a cell phone. Here’s the timeline of … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 3, 2022 ~ Four days ago, the Federal Reserve released the names of the banks that had received $4.5 trillion in cumulative loans in the last quarter of 2019 under its emergency repo loan operations for a liquidity crisis that has yet to be credibly explained. Among the largest borrowers were JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, three of the Wall Street banks that were at the center of the subprime and derivatives crisis in 2008 that brought down the U.S. economy. That’s blockbuster news. But as of 7 a.m. this morning, not one major business media outlet has reported the details of the Fed’s big reveal. On September 17, 2019, the Fed began making trillions of dollars a month in emergency repo loans to 24 trading houses on Wall Street. The Fed released on a daily basis the dollar amounts it was loaning, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 31, 2021 ~ Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, likes to perpetually brag about his bank’s “fortress balance sheet.” But in the fall of 2019, that fortress needed to borrow huge sums of money from the Federal Reserve – for still unexplained reasons. The trading units of other Wall Street banks also borrowed large sums from the Fed but they haven’t branded themselves as the “fortress balance sheet.” Yesterday, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York released the names of the banks and the dollar amounts that were borrowed under its emergency repo loan operations for the last quarter of 2019. It had previously released the data for the period of September 17, 2019 through September 30, 2019. The Fed has yet to release the data for the emergency repo loan operations in 2020. Repo loans, short for repurchase agreements, are supposed … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 30, 2021 ~ The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) has had its share of scandals. There was the late 1930s when former NYSE President Richard Whitney went to prison for embezzlement.  In 2004 New York State Attorney General Elliot Spitzer took the NYSE and its former Chairman and CEO, Richard Grasso, to court over charges of violating New York State non-profit law by giving an obscene $187.5 million pay package to Grasso. In 2014 bestselling author Michael Lewis went on 60 Minutes to report that “the United States stock market, the most iconic market in global capitalism, is rigged” after writing a very convincing book, “Flash Boys,” explaining exactly how it was rigged. (We could go on and on but you get the point.) We want to go on the record, here and now, that the past scandals of the New York Stock Exchange … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 29, 2021 ~ The conventional wisdom is that the Fed’s recent emergency lending facilities to Wall Street were caused by the COVID-19 crisis. The above chart, which uses the New York Fed’s own Excel spreadsheet repo loan data, shows the conventional wisdom is dangerously wrong. In the last quarter of 2019 – before there was any news of COVID-19 in the U.S., and months before the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic – the Fed pumped $4.5 trillion in cumulative repo loans to unnamed trading houses on Wall Street – its so-called “primary dealers.” The collateral that the Fed accepted for the cumulative $4.5 trillion in loans consisted of $3.497 trillion in U.S. Treasury securities; $988.3 billion in agency Mortgage-Backed Securities (MBS); and $15.839 billion in agency debt. The Fed’s emergency repo loan operations began on September 17, 2019. From September 17, 2019 … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 28, 2021 ~ On December 3 there were 585 new 52-week lows on the Nasdaq stock market versus 12 new 52-week highs. To look at it another way, 48.75 times more stocks were setting new 52-week lows than were reaching new 52-week highs. That doesn’t sound like the definition of a bull market to us. The Nasdaq had closed down just 1.9 percent that day. Yesterday, the Nasdaq closed up 1.39 percent. We decided to check out the breadth of the market. Sure enough, even on an up day for the Nasdaq, there was negative breadth. There were 139 new 52-week highs but 203 new 52-week lows. Against this pattern of a clearly deteriorating stock market picture came a raft of headlines yesterday touting that the S&P 500 Index had notched its 69th record close for the year. But here’s what you need to know … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 27, 2021 ~ Maxine Waters is the Chair of the House Financial Services Committee. That Committee oversees the nation’s banks, including the megabanks on Wall Street that are serially charged by prosecutors with ever creative ways of looting the public. Waters’ Committee also oversees the bank regulators, which are frequently “captured” by Wall Street. One of those bank regulators has now come into the cross hairs of Waters. Typically, if one is a captured bank regulator, one goes to extreme lengths to hide that fact. Thus, it is unusual that the Chair of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), Jelena McWilliams (a Trump holdover), has decided she has the power to run the federal agency with an iron hand and overturn the will of her Board of Directors. Even more unusual, McWilliams is engaging in this battle with her Board in public. We’ve seen … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 24, 2021 ~ The Dallas Fed has not publicly announced the retirement or dismissal of its General Counsel, Sharon Sweeney. And yet, it is currently running a help-wanted ad to replace her. Sweeney is still listed as General Counsel on the Dallas Fed’s website. We placed a call to the bank’s media contact this morning to clarify the details and left a message. We’ll update this article if we receive further information. Sweeney has been with the Dallas Fed for the past 36 years. She doubles as the Dallas Fed’s Ethics Officer and put her signature to former Dallas Fed President Robert Kaplan’s outrageous financial disclosure forms, year after year. Those forms indicated that Kaplan was trading in and out of S&P 500 futures contracts in “over $1 million” trades – even in 2020 when he sat as a voting member of the Fed’s … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 23, 2021 ~ The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the regulator of national banks that operate across state lines, released a report on Monday that details the quantity and variety of derivatives held by commercial banks, savings associations and trust companies as of September 30. (According to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, there were 4,914 commercial banks, savings associations and trust companies operating in the U.S. with FDIC insurance as of September 30.) The striking detail in the OCC report is that one taxpayer-backstopped, federally-insured bank, JPMorgan Chase Bank N.A., is for some unfathomable reason sitting on 62 percent of all stock (equity) derivatives held at all 4,914 federally-insured banks in the United States. The second striking detail is that this federally-insured bank’s holdings of stock derivatives come to a notional amount (face amount) of $3.3 trillion. (Yes, trillion with a … Continue reading →