Search Results for: Federal Reserve

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 3, 2020 ~ Lily Tomlin is credited with the quote: “No matter how cynical you get, it is impossible to keep up.” Wall Street regularly brings that message home. According to the latest derivatives report from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), Citibank, the federally-insured, taxpayer-backstopped bank owned by Citigroup, has sold protection to other banks, hedge funds, insurance companies or corporations on a staggering $858 billion of Credit Default Swaps. When a federally-insured bank sells protection to others on Credit Default Swaps, it is effectively taking on the risk of a default event. At a time of unprecedented levels of debt in the system and growing warnings about leveraged loans, that seems like a very unwise move by Citigroup. The OCC notes that Citibank has bought protection via a larger amount of Credit Default Swaps – a total of … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 2, 2020 ~ Consumers represent two-thirds of GDP in the United States. And yet, when consumers run into trouble, they don’t get a handout from the Federal Reserve – they are forced to file bankruptcy. There are no Fed handouts to small business owners, farmers, or main street merchants either. So why is it exactly that the trading houses on Wall Street, with a serial history of crimes and with the most overpaid and under-punished executives on the planet, are able to perpetually have secret communications with the New York Fed and magically turn on the flow of trillions of dollars of ridiculously cheap loans to bail out their hubris and corruption. The obscene money spigot from the New York Fed to Wall Street’s trading houses didn’t start with the epic financial crisis of 2008, as most Americans believe. It started following the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 27, 2019 ~ As Wall Street On Parade has previously reported, JPMorgan Chase has been fingered as the bank that contributed to the Federal Reserve having to intervene in the overnight loan market on September 17 of this year, and every business day since then. The Fed, through its money spigot, the New York Fed, has flooded Wall Street’s trading houses with hundreds of billions of dollars weekly in cheap loans over the past three months. That cheap, pre-announced source of liquidity has not only caused the stock market to set multiple new historic highs but has caused the stock of JPMorgan Chase to set multiple new historic highs as well. Jamie Dimon is the Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase. Dimon admitted on his quarterly earnings call with analysts that his bank had backed away from lending on September 17. That backing … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 23, 2019 ~ The S&P 500 Index and the Dow Jones Industrial Average set new record highs every single day last week. This occurred despite the Federal Reserve justifying its unprecedented hundreds of billions of dollars each week in cheap loans to Wall Street’s trading houses as necessary to stem a “liquidity” crisis. You can’t have a liquidity crisis when the stock market is setting record highs for an entire week. Those two things just don’t correlate. The Fed, through its money spigot, the New York Fed, began sluicing these funds to Wall Street on September 17, the day the overnight borrowing rate in the repurchase agreement (repo) loan market spiked from 2 percent to 10 percent. This was the first such intervention by the Fed since the financial crisis. The repo market is where banks, hedge funds and money market funds loan … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 19, 2019 ~  When it comes to Wall Street’s mindset, the thinking is that it’s legal if you can get away with it. That mindset seems to have captured the Federal Reserve Bank of New York which secretly pumped trillions of dollars into insolvent banks in violation of its statutory mandate during the financial crisis; is alleged to have fired a bank examiner for refusing to alter her negative examination of Goldman Sachs; and failed to investigate a litany of crimes to which it was made aware. (See U.S. Senate Tries Public Shaming of New York Fed President Dudley.) One of the crimes that the New York Fed failed to bring to the attention of U.S. law enforcement was mega banks cheating on the borrowing rates that they were reporting as their London InterBank Offered Rate or Libor, a benchmark interest rate used … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 18, 2019 ~ The Federal Reserve Bank of New York (New York Fed) seems intent on stonewalling Wall Street On Parade from receiving some very basic information on JPMorgan Chase’s rapid drawdown this year on its liquid reserves at the New York Fed – a matter which some on Wall Street have fingered as a contributing cause of the ongoing repo loan crisis. More on that in a moment, but first some background. For the past decade Wall Street On Parade has been keeping close tabs on the crony operations of the New York Fed. (See related articles below.) The New York Fed has effectively morphed into a key cog in Wall Street’s wealth transfer system – where the little guy’s pocket is picked daily in the service of minting billionaires on Wall Street – who now increasingly want to rule the rest … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 17, 2019 ~ The Federal Reserve Bank of New York (New York Fed) made the astonishing announcement last Thursday that it will be pumping a cumulative $2.93 trillion into Wall Street trading houses (primary dealers) between December 16 and January 14. That’s on top of the $360 billion of liquidity it is pumping into the markets by buying back $60 billion a month in Treasury bills from its primary dealers. The Fed’s excuse for opening its self-created money spigots to the tune of trillions of dollars to Wall Street’s trading houses – a replay of what it did secretly during the financial crisis of 2007 to 2010 – is that this is simply a technical fix for allowing bank reserves at the Fed to shrink too far. But that is merely a symptom – not the actual disease afflicting the U.S. financial system. … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 16, 2019 ~ One has to wonder how much money it would take for the New York Fed to throw at Wall Street before the New York Times reports to its readers on the biggest Wall Street bailout by the Fed since the financial crisis. Last Thursday, December 12, the New York Fed announced that over the next month it would shower the trading houses (primary dealers) on Wall Street with a total of $2.93 trillion in short-term loans. The money is for a Wall Street liquidity crisis that has yet to be explained in credible terms to the American people and yet the New York Times does not appear to have an investigative reporter assigned to investigate what’s really going on just 11 years after those same trading houses blew themselves up in the biggest financial crash since the Great Depression and … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 10, 2019 ~ Last Thursday, U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin was the sole witness called before the House Financial Services Committee to answer questions on the state of financial stability in the U.S. Under the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation of 2010, the U.S. Treasury Secretary also heads the Financial Stability Oversight Council (F-SOC) which is charged with monitoring any threats to the stability of the U.S. financial system in order to prevent a replay of the epic financial crash of 2008 and attendant devastation to the U.S. economy. During the hearing, Mnuchin was grilled time and again by numerous Republicans and Democrats on what is necessitating the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (New York Fed) to be pumping out hundreds of billions of dollars per week to Wall Street trading houses via the repurchase agreement (repo loan) market. But instead of reporting … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 9, 2019  Yesterday, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) dropped a bombshell report that torpedoed the Federal Reserve’s official narrative on what has caused the overnight lending market (repo loan market) on Wall Street to seize up since September 17, leading to more than $3 trillion in cumulative loans from the New York Fed as lender of last resort. The Federal Reserve has said the repo crisis was a result of corporations draining liquidity from the system to pay their quarterly tax payments alongside a large auction of U.S. Treasury securities settling and adding to the cash drain. That excuse was clearly bogus since the Fed has provided hundreds of billions of dollars weekly into the repo market since September 17, while stating that it plans to continue this activity into next year. The BIS report dropped the bombshell that the “US repo … Continue reading →