Search Results for: Federal Reserve

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 28, 2019 ~  JPMorgan Chase is the largest bank in the United States with $1.6 trillion in deposits from more than 5,000 retail bank branches spread across the country. When it withdraws liquidity from the U.S. financial system, that has a reverberating impact.  According to the filings that JPMorgan Chase makes annually with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), since 2013 JPMorgan Chase has spent $77 billion buying back its own stock. That includes the whopping $17.01 billion it has spent in just the first nine months of this year buying back its stock. But here’s the shocking news. According to its SEC filings, JPMorgan Chase is partly using Federally insured deposits made by moms and pops across the country in its more than 5,000 branches to prop up its share price with buybacks. The wording in the filing is as follows: “In … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 25, 2019 ~ Today would have been Mark Pittman’s 62nd birthday. Pittman died of a heart attack at age 52 on November 25, 2009 in the midst of a pitched court battle with the Federal Reserve to obtain data on its secret loans to Wall Street. Writing for Bloomberg News, Pittman was one of the preeminent chroniclers during the financial crisis of the Federal Reserve’s hubris in refusing to shed any light on what eventually turned out to be an astounding $29 trillion of money it created out of thin air to bail out Wall Street’s mega banks and their foreign bank derivatives counterparties. Pittman had appeared in the documentary, American Casino, produced by Leslie and Andrew Cockburn. In that documentary, the Cockburns brilliantly pieced together for the American people the wealth transfer scheme concocted by the mega banks on Wall Street, which … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 25, 2019 ~ Memories are apparently very short at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The SEC seems to have forgotten that a run on money market funds holding bank commercial paper set off a panic after the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy filing on September 15, 2008. The government had to step in and guarantee the funds. Despite those disastrous days, the SEC has allowed money market funds being sold in the U.S. to hold a staggering $642 billion in the instruments of foreign banks, as of September 30, 2019. It categorizes those instruments as: certificates of deposits, time deposits, sponsored asset-backed commercial paper, and repurchase agreements (repos) where the bank is the counterparty. On top of the $642 billion in the instruments of foreign banks, the money market funds are holding another $292 billion in the instruments of U.S. banks, bringing the total … Continue reading →

WSOP Staff: October 25, 2019 ~ Yesterday, the headline above appeared at CNBC. The headline writers there must be living in an alternative reality. Let us remind CNBC viewers what 2019 is actually shaping up to be: it’s the year that the highest priced stock in the price-weighted Dow Jones Industrial Average, Boeing, can’t figure out how to safely fly the plane, the 737 Max, that it has sold to airlines around the world. The stock charts of two of the biggest IPOs of the year, Uber and Lyft, look like crash landings themselves. Another much hyped IPO, WeWork, couldn’t achieve liftoff because its Chairman and CEO was engaging in shady self-dealings with the company. And yet, despite Adam Neumann’s disastrously failed management of his company, SoftBank paid him $1.7 billion to take a hike as thousands of about-to-be fired workers looked on in disgust. And, we should add, despite … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 24, 2019 ~ Yesterday the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (New York Fed) announced that the giant money spigot it turned on for Wall Street on September 17 would be growing exponentially beginning today. The New York Fed will now be lavishing up to $120 billion a day in cheap overnight loans to Wall Street securities trading firms, a daily increase of $45 billion from its previously announced $75 billion a day. In addition, it is increasing its 14-day term loans to Wall Street, a program which also came out of the blue in September, to $45 billion. Those term loans since September have been occurring twice a week, meaning another $90 billion a week will be offered, bringing the total weekly offering to an astounding $690 billion. It should be noted that if the same Wall Street firms are getting these … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 22, 2019 ~ From this past Friday evening through Sunday, if you clicked on any of the web pages at the New York Fed pertaining to the hundreds of billions of dollars it has been pumping out weekly to Wall Street’s securities firms since September 17, you saw the message below: We emailed the New York Fed’s media contact and asked why all of the other web pages at the New York Fed were working just fine but only its repo operation data and announcements had up and disappeared. We received no response. The web pages have since been restored with some tweaking that seems to have the intent of making this massive money spigot to Wall Street, for the first time since the financial crisis, appear to be just your ole run of the mill open market operation from your ole reliable … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 21, 2019 ~ This morning the Federal Reserve pumped another $58.15 billion into Wall Street securities firms under the repo loan program it initiated on September 17. That program has been pumping out hundreds of billions of dollars each week to Wall Street with no authorization from Congress, as far as the public is aware. We decided to take a look at Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell’s daily appointment calendars over the past few months to see if there was any hint of what precipitated the reopening of the Fed’s money spigot to Wall Street for the first time since the financial crisis. We found a very interesting pattern of phone calls and meetings in the month of August. On Thursday, August 1, Powell had a phone call with JPMorgan Chase’s Chairman and CEO, Jamie Dimon. The call lasted 7 minutes, from 10:30 … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 18, 2019 ~ Shhh! Don’t tell Congress that the Federal Reserve is back to electronically creating money out of thin air to throw at a liquidity problem (of an, as yet, undetermined origin) on Wall Street. And be sure not to mention that the Fed’s balance sheet has shot up in a period of just 42 days by $253 billion. And, of course, don’t remind Congress that before the last Wall Street crisis was over the Fed had secretly, with no oversight from Congress, piled up a $29 trillion tab to bail out Wall Street — a fact it fought years in court to keep under wraps. On September 4, 2019, the Fed’s assets on its balance sheet stood at $3.761 trillion. As of October 16, that figure is $4.014 trillion, edging closer to the $4.5 trillion peak it reached in 2015 following the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 17, 2019 ~ Academics and historians who attempt to compare the epic Wall Street crash of 2007- 2010 to the next one that’s inevitably coming won’t be able to count on publicly available articles from Bloomberg News. As we reported on Monday, critical articles by a top investigative reporter at Bloomberg News, Mark Pittman, that exposed the corrupt cronyism between Wall Street and the Federal Reserve have gone missing on the Internet. Just this morning we located yet another key article from Bloomberg News that has just up and disappeared on the Internet. Put this 2008 Bloomberg headline in the Google search box with the quotes included and see what happens: “Citigroup Unravels as Reed Regrets Universal Model.” Bloomberg News informed us that Pittman’s articles are still available on the Bloomberg terminal. That’s a market data and news terminal that hundreds of thousands … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 15, 2019 ~  The mega banks on Wall Street report earnings this week led off by JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and Wells Fargo this morning. Among the items of interest in JPMorgan Chase’s written presentation was that it spent $6.7 billion in this past third quarter buying up its own stock and thus boosting its stock price artificially beyond outside investor demand. The third quarter buybacks of its stock came on top of spending $5 billion in the second quarter and $4.7 billion in the first quarter, bringing its net repurchases of its own stock just so far this year to a whopping $16.4 billion — money that could have otherwise gone to loans to small businesses to kickstart innovation and job growth in America. This Thursday, the House Financial Services’ Subcommittee on Investor Protection, Entrepreneurship and Capital Markets will hold a … Continue reading →