Search Results for: Janet Yellen

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 16, 2023 ~ U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen finds herself in a very dubious position. Under the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation of 2010, the U.S. Treasury Secretary was given increased powers to oversee financial stability in the U.S. banking system. This increase in power came in response to the 2008 financial crisis – the worst financial collapse since the Great Depression. The legislation made the Treasury Secretary the Chair of the newly created Financial Stability Oversight Council (F-SOC), whose meetings include the heads of all of the federal agencies that supervise banks and trading on Wall Street. The legislation also required the Treasury Secretary’s authorization before the Federal Reserve could create any more of those $29 trillion emergency bailout programs for the mega banks – which had tethered themselves to casino trading on Wall Street since the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999. … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 30, 2022 ~ You can’t make this stuff up. After promoting the false story that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and pushing the U.S. into a deadly and costly war through its reporter, Judith Miller; and using its editorial board to shill for the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act to advance the greedy Wall Street ambitions of Citigroup kingpin Sandy Weill, which ended up taking down the U.S. economy in 2008; the New York Times now appears determined to rehabilitate the reputation of the disgraced Sam Bankman-Fried, Co-Founder and recently ousted CEO of the bankrupt crypto exchange, FTX.  Bankman-Fried is being investigated on multiple continents, including North America, for stealing customer assets and looting his private investors. He has been compared, in headlines around the globe, to Bernie Madoff and his Ponzi scheme. Reuters reported that Bankman-Fried had moved as much as … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 24, 2022 ~ Last Thursday, Jeanna Smialek, who reports on the Fed for the New York Times, broke the news that the President of the St. Louis Fed, James Bullard, gave a private, invitation-only briefing on October 14 to clients of Citigroup – a Wall Street megabank that is supervised by the Fed and which received the largest bailout from the Fed from 2007 to 2010 in global banking history – a cumulative sum of $2.5 trillion in secret loans according to a government audit. Smialek noted in her article that “About 40 people attended the event, which had a formal agenda and was advertised to Citi clients.” Bullard answered questions from attendees, according to Smialek’s reporting. Bullard is a voting member of the Fed’s Federal Open Market Committee and has access to insider information on the Fed’s market-moving monetary policy actions. Bullard would … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 11, 2022 ~ Wall Street veteran Nomi Prins’ new book is being released today with a title that should give every member of the Senate Banking and House Financial Services Committees pause: Permanent Distortion: How the Financial Markets Abandoned the Real Economy Forever. The book does what neither of these Committees has done for the American people. It explains how the financial crash of 2008 unleashed an unbridled and unaccountable Fed as Wall Street’s permanent sugar daddy, distorting market functioning with its perpetual money spigot to the point that markets no longer function as a pricing mechanism or efficient allocator of capital but more along the lines of a Ponzi scheme for the rich. Prins writes: “Once central banks unleashed monetary policy to accommodate mega-banks, subsidize Wall Street financiers, and bolster global markets, the very idea of free and open markets and laissez-faire investing … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 19, 2022 ~ This past Tuesday, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell sat for an interview with Wall Street Journal reporter Nick Timiraos as part of the newspaper’s “Future of Everything Festival.” During that interview, Powell told Timiraos that U.S. markets “are orderly, they’re functioning.” The precise exchange went as follows: (Watch it at 24:38 on YouTube video here.) Timiraos: “A Number of people have suggested to me the one thing that might slow you down or at least make this much more difficult would be some kind of market cataclysm. I wonder, in part, if that is why you are trying to be more transparent, not erratic, making sudden moves on your policy moves. My question there is, where’s your level of concern that financial stability and controlling inflation by raising interest rates, maybe a lot, might be fundamentally incompatible in that raising rates … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: March 23, 2022 ~ As someone who has watched trading screens for the past 36 years, it’s pretty easy to spot a fake market. As the charts below indicate, there is an invisible hand (or hands) pushing this stock market up when it should be plunging. The likely suspects are U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s Plunge Protection Team, known as the Exchange Stabilization Fund; foreign central banks that are aligned with the U.S. position on Ukraine and want to help stabilize financial markets in the West; hedge funds and Wall Street’s Dark Pools owned by megabanks that are net long the market; or a combination of all of the above. One thing’s for sure, the stock market is not responding in a normal fashion to soaring inflation, a hawkish Fed, spiking interest rates, and military aggression by an out-of-control dictator with 6,000 nuclear warheads. Consider the chart below: … 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: January 14, 2022 ~ Even within economic circles, there is a growing nervousness that the Federal Reserve, the central bank of the United States – with the power to electronically create money out of thin air, bail out insolvent Wall Street megabanks, balloon its balance sheet to $8.8 trillion without one elected person on its Board while the U.S. taxpayer is on the hook for 98 percent of that, and allow its Dallas Fed Bank President to make directional bets on the market by trading in and out of million dollar S&P 500 futures during a declared national emergency – has carved out a no-law zone around itself. The latest ruckus stems from the Fed’s release on December 30 of the names of the 23 Wall Street trading houses and the billions they borrowed under its cumulative $11.23 trillion emergency repo loan facility that the … 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: December 1, 2021 ~ Fed Chair Jerome Powell along with Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen appeared before the Senate Banking Committee yesterday to deliver their semi-annual reports. Approximately 34 minutes into the hearing, in response to a question from Senator Pat Toomey, Republican from Pennsylvania, Powell announced that he was retiring the word “transitory” to describe the inflationary forces that have a grip on prices in the U.S. The stock market interpreted this to mean that Powell, who just eight days prior had become Democrat President Joe Biden’s nominee for another four years at the helm of the Fed, was now pivoting to cater to Republican inflation hawks in order to win their votes at his upcoming confirmation hearing. The Dow Jones Industrial Average quickly did a bungee dive of 402 points. About 90 minutes into the hearing, the stock market went into a new wave … Continue reading →