By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 14, 2022 ~ The stock market indices that get all the headlines have failed to capture the brutal deterioration that has been occurring for months among the individual stock components of those indices. In early February, Bank of America reported that 46 percent of Nasdaq’s component companies were more than 50 percent below their 52-week highs. And the deterioration in breadth began long before February. On December 28, 2021, Wall Street On Parade ran this headline: A Tale of Two Markets: S&P 500 Notches Its 69th Record Close as the Bottom Falls Out of the Nasdaq. We noted in the article that “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 … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 11, 2022 ~ A Fed spokesperson has provided Wall Street On Parade with a detailed response to our article yesterday, which documented that trades were made in accounts in which Fed Chair Jerome Powell had a financial interest during a Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting in 2015 and another in 2019. Fed officials are clearly prohibited from trading before and during FOMC meetings because that is when they have insider, market-moving information. Below is the full statement from the Fed spokesperson. Following the statement, we will explain its many, serious flaws. “Chair Powell has not traded during FOMC blackout periods. The transactions that were reported occurred in family trusts over which he had no control. Chair Powell is not a trustee and did not direct or control the trades. He relinquished his previous role as a trustee in 2012 when he joined the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 10, 2022 ~ An anonymous activist group called Occupy the Fed reported in a Substack article on Sunday that Fed Chair Jerome Powell traded on the final day of a Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting on April 29, 2015, when he was a Fed Governor, and also on the final day of an FOMC meeting on December 11, 2019, when he was Fed Chair.  Powell’s trading directly violates the Fed’s written policy which prohibits trading “during the period that begins at the start of the second Saturday (midnight) Eastern Time before the beginning of each FOMC meeting and ends at midnight Eastern Time on the last day of the meeting.” The FOMC meetings are typically when the most sensitive and market-moving information occurs at the Fed, including votes on hiking or lowering interest rates and other confidential actions. Dallas Fed President Robert Kaplan, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 9, 2022 ~ At 3:00 p.m. last Friday, the Federal Reserve quietly released the following statement: “The Federal Reserve Board on Friday named Jerome H. Powell as Chair Pro Tempore, pending Senate confirmation to a second term as Chair of the Board of Governors. The action, effective February 5, enables him to continue to carry out his duties as Chair after the expiration of his term on the same day, and while the confirmation process is underway. In its annual organizational meeting in January, the Federal Open Market Committee separately named him as its Chair.” This is the first time in a quarter century that a Fed Chairman’s term has lapsed before he was reconfirmed by the Senate. According to Reuters, the last time it happened was 1996 when Alan Greenspan served from March 3 to June 20 as Fed Chair Pro Tempore. Powell … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 8, 2022 ~ As Wall Street On Parade, two trial lawyers, the U.S. Department of Justice, the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations and one of the bank’s former lawyers have suggested, the largest bank in the United States, JPMorgan Chase, has enshrined crime as a business model. The man ultimately responsible for this business model is Jamie Dimon, the bank’s Chairman and CEO since December 31, 2006. Since 2014, JPMorgan Chase has the unprecedented distinction of admitting to five felony counts brought by the U.S. Department of Justice. In each case, it was given a deferred prosecution agreement and put on probation. (See a sampling of its Rap Sheet here.) Now Dimon and the bank have come into the cross hairs of Senator Sherrod Brown, Chairman of the powerful Senate Banking Committee that oversees the megabanks on Wall Street. Yesterday, Brown and five of … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 7, 2022 ~ Winston Churchill once described Russia as “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” The same could be said of Bloomberg LP, parent of Bloomberg News, which last Friday ran the false headline “Russia Invades Ukraine.” For still unexplained reasons, the headline was left up for at least 24 minutes on the digital front page of Bloomberg News. But as the hundreds of thousands of traders around the globe that use the Bloomberg Data Terminal well know, Bloomberg News first publishes many of its headlines on the Bloomberg Data Terminal – the cash cow of Bloomberg LP that has made its majority owner, Michael Bloomberg, a billionaire. Bloomberg’s largest customers for its Data Terminals include Wall Street megabanks like JPMorgan Chase that it also provides news coverage on via Bloomberg News. (Sometimes that coverage leaves a lot to be desired.) … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 4, 2022 ~ From 401(k) plans to mutual funds to the federal government workers’ pension plan to foreign central bank stock portfolios – everyone is feeling Facebook’s pain today. The parent company’s stock (Meta Platforms, Inc.) lost 26.39 percent of its value yesterday – in one trading session. That’s what happens when the Fed is allowed, with no restraints from Congress, to fuel a bubble market that allows one company — that pays no dividend and has no barriers for upstarts like TikTok to steal its user base — to gain a market cap of over $1 trillion. On June 28 of last year, Facebook’s stock closed above a $1 trillion market cap for the first time. It has been on a price decline since last September and when the stock market’s closing bell rang yesterday, it was a $647 billion stock. Its market … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 3, 2022 ~ New details have emerged to provide a fuller picture of the turmoil that was taking place in the dark corners of markets when the overnight repo market blew up on September 17, 2019 and the Fed had to run to the rescue with trillions of dollars in cumulative loans that went on for months. Imagine if you were the Federal Reserve and had been thoroughly disgraced by waging more than a two-year court battle to prevent the press in America from doing its job and publishing the granular details of the Fed’s 2007 to 2010 bailout of Wall Street and its foreign bank derivative counterparties. Then the Fed was further disgraced after losing the court battles when in 2011 the details of the $29 trillion bailout were published. Chances are that the Fed would not be anxious to let the public … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 2, 2022 ~ As we reported on Monday, there’s a new book out from Simon & Schuster with the provocative title: The Lords of Easy Money: How the Federal Reserve Broke the American Economy. The book, written by bestselling author Christopher Leonard, is sprinkled with eye popping revelations – particularly in regard to how hedge funds have been able to effectively mint billions by designing trades to take advantage of the Fed’s repo bailouts and quantitative easing. Quantitative easing (QE) is a scheme launched by former Fed Chair Ben Bernanke, beginning in November 2008. QE means that the New York Fed, through its open markets desk, buys up Treasury securities and federal-agency-backed Mortgage-Backed Securities (MBS) from its 24 primary dealers. The Fed’s purchases of tens of billions of dollars a month of these securities creates artificial demand that would not otherwise exist, thus lowering … Continue reading →

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 →