Search Results for: JPMorgan

 By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 13, 2020 ~ During his testimony to the Senate Banking Committee yesterday, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell let it slip out, for the first time, that the Federal Reserve has had a 10-year game plan to deal with the financial crisis. In response to a question on cyber threats from Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska, Powell stated the following: “They kind of pay us to be awake at night worrying about things. I would say that if you look at what happened in the financial crisis, we had a game plan there. We implemented it over the course of 10 years. I won’t say that it’s perfect or anything like that, but we have a plan that is meant to address those kinds of things.” “Those kinds of things?” The financial crisis, fueled by corruption and lax regulation of Wall Street banks, destroyed … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 11, 2020 ~ The most sizzling moment thus far today in the House Financial Services Committee hearing with Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell was a line of questioning by Congresswoman Katie Porter of California. Porter began by reminding Powell that he had “frequently spoken about wanting to maintain the independence of the Federal Reserve.” She then asked: “Do you still have that belief?” Powell said he did. Porter then held up a photo of Powell in black tie and asked where the photo was taken. He said it was at a party following the Alfalfa Dinner at the home of Jeff Bezos. Porter then made Powell indicate that the photo was recent, sometime in late January of this year. Porter looked squarely at Powell and stated: “Can you imagine how attending a lavish party at Jeff Bezos’ $23 million home, along with Jared and … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 11, 2020 ~ At 10:00 a.m. this morning, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome (Jay) Powell, will take his seat in the Rayburn House Office Building to deliver his semiannual testimony to the House Financial Services Committee and answer a multitude of questions on what the Fed has been up to lately. Powell will repeat the process again tomorrow before the Senate Banking Committee. The public already knows the kinds of questions Democrats are going to lob at Powell tomorrow because Senators Sherrod Brown, Elizabeth Warren, Jack Reed and Tina Smith sent a letter to Powell on February 6, listing the specific questions they want answers to in preparation for the hearing on February 12. The questions are exclusively focused on the Fed’s unprecedented repo loans to Wall Street’s trading houses that began on September 17 of last year and have been … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 4, 2020 ~ If you stayed up late into the night waiting for the Iowa Caucuses to report on the winner in the Democratic bid for President, you are likely in a foul mood this morning. As of 6:30 a.m. this morning, vote tallies had not been officially released for any of the more than 1600 precincts. That stands in contrast to prior Iowa Caucuses when 25 percent of the votes were reported by 10 p.m. on the same night as the caucuses and 85 percent were reported by 11 p.m. As cable news commentators vented their frustrations last night, shortly after 1 a.m. the Iowa Democratic Party said they would be manually tallying the data to make sure that the results could be reported with “full confidence.” The Iowa Democratic Party had earlier in the evening held a meeting with campaign representatives … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 3, 2020 ~  The Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome (Jay) Powell, regularly states at his press conferences that the Federal Reserve is there to serve the interests of the American people. But his actions regularly undermine the credibility of that statement in a manner not all that dissimilar to Alan Greenspan, whose Fed chairmanship oversaw the gutting of Wall Street banking regulations and ended just before the greatest Wall Street collapse since the Great Depression. Powell goes out of his way to present himself at his press conferences as the quintessential public servant whose only mission is to perform the mandate set out by the elected representatives in Congress while his actions strongly suggest he is a wily rogue agent for Wall Street’s cartel of bank trading houses. Congress set out its mandate for the Federal Reserve and its fellow regulators to … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 27, 2020 ~ According to the data made available on the public website of the New York Fed, since September 17, 2019 it has funneled a cumulative total of $6.6 trillion to some of  the 24 trading houses on Wall Street that are known as its “primary dealers.” The giant sum has been sluiced to Wall Street in the form of repurchase agreement (repo) loans without any details being provided to the elected representatives in Congress as to which firms are getting the money or what it’s being ultimately used for. But since the stock market has set repeated new highs since the program launched, some veteran market watchers believe the Fed is fueling a Ponzi-like rally in stocks. When the nonpartisan investigative arm of Congress, the General Accountability Office (GAO), tallied up the cumulative total that the Federal Reserve had secretly sluiced … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 24, 2020 ~  Yesterday, Transparency International released its annual Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI). The CPI ranks 180 countries and territories by their perceived levels of government corruption, using 13 expert assessments and surveys of business executives. The most corrupt countries rank lower on the scale while a score of 100 represents the least corrupt. This year the United States ranked below Uruguay on the corruption gauge. The report found this about the U.S.:  “With a score of 69, the United States drops two points since last year to earn its lowest score on the CPI in eight years. This comes at a time when Americans’ trust in government is at an historic low of 17 percent according to the Pew Research Center.” The least corrupt nations are Denmark, New Zealand and Finland. Patricia Moreira, Managing Director of Transparency International, said this about the report’s … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 23, 2020 ~ The head of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas (Robert S. Kaplan), the head of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis (Neel Kashkari), the Secretary of the U.S. Treasury (Steve Mnuchin), the President of the European Central Bank (Mario Draghi) and the head of the Bank of England (Mark Carney) all have two things in common: they sit atop vast amounts of money and they are all alums of Goldman Sachs. In addition, the immediate past President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, William Dudley, which secretly sluiced over $29 trillion to bail out Wall Street banks during the financial crisis and has now opened its money spigot for trillions of dollars more, worked at Goldman Sachs for more than two decades, rising to the rank of partner and U.S. Chief Economist. Goldman Sachs has been variously depicted … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 21, 2020 ~ Senator Bernie Sanders has come closer than anyone on the Presidential campaign trail in defining what Wall Street actually does. Sanders has repeatedly stated at his rallies that “the business model of Wall Street is fraud.” That analysis is correct but abbreviated. Sanders needs to go further. It’s not just Wall Street’s business model that has left the United States with the greatest wealth inequality since the Roaring Twenties (a time when Wall Street investment banks were also allowed to own deposit-taking banks). It’s how Wall Street is monetizing that fraud that poses an existential threat to the solvency of the United States and the impoverishment of millions of Americans. The attempted WeWork Initial Public Offering (IPO) of last year was a classic example of how Wall Street can put lipstick on a pig, pass it off as a hot … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 20, 2020 ~ The New York Fed is so protective of its surreptitious trading relationship with Wall Street that it previously denied Wall Street On Parade a photo of its trading floor. (We obtained the one pictured here from a Fed educational video.) It is, by the way, the only one of the 12 regional Federal Reserve banks to have a trading floor. The New York Fed has been allowed by Congress to insert itself so deeply in markets that it’s highly possible that history will find it at least partly responsible for the next market implosion. The well-promulgated notion that the Federal Reserve began heavily meddling in the repo loan market on September 17 of last year is a piece of fiction. According to the U.S. government’s own database, residing at the Office of Financial Research (OFR), from 2014 through December 31, … Continue reading →