Search Results for: Janet Yellen

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 5, 2021 ~ Remember that LifeLock tv commercial where masked bank robbers storm into a bank, smashing things with a baseball bat and screaming, “on the floor.” As the customers hit the floor, a security guard is still standing looking calmly at the robbers with his hands at his side. A woman looks up from the floor at the guard and whispers to him: “Do something.” His reply: “Oh, I’m not a security guard, I’m a security monitor. I only notify people if there’s a robbery.” After a few seconds of observing the scene around him, he looks back down at the woman and says: “There’s a robbery.” The commercial ends with the voice over: “Why monitor a problem if you don’t fix it?” This commercial perfectly reflects the attitude of the Securities and Exchange Commission under the past two SEC Chairs, Mary … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 4, 2021 ~ Since 2000, the Securities and Exchange Commission has required brokerage firms to file a quarterly report showing where they are routing their stock trades for execution. The filing is known as a 606 report after Rule 606 of Regulation NMS (National Market System). Because so many traders at Reddit’s WallStreetBets’ message board have focused on the fact that billionaire Ken Griffin’s Citadel Securities was executing the majority of trades for Robinhood, the trading app where a lot of the Redditors directed their GameStop trades, we decided to take a look at what other online brokers might have also been directing GameStop trades to Citadel Securities. According to the 606 reports for the fourth quarter of 2020 for the following nine online brokers, Citadel was providing payment-for-order-flow (giving a cash rebate for trade orders directed to it) to each of the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 22, 2020 ~ The language that Republican Senator Pat Toomey inserted into the final stimulus bill (Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2021) appears below. It not only restricts the Federal Reserve’s ability to extend some of its current emergency lending programs that help small and medium size businesses and state and local governments beyond December 31 of this year (while leaving Wall Street bailout programs alive for at least another 90 days) but it also enshrines the autonomy of the U.S. Treasury Secretary to operate a massive slush fund – the Exchange Stabilization Fund (ESF). Most Americans have never heard of the Treasury’s Exchange Stabilization Fund. It was created in 1934 to provide support to the U.S. dollar during the Great Depression. The ESF has grown from $94.3 billion in assets prior to Trump taking office to a balance of $681 billion as of October 31, 2020. As recently … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 1, 2020 ~ Five days before Congress passed the CARES Act on March 25 of this year, President Donald Trump issued an Executive Memorandum giving U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin complete discretion to use $50 billion in the Treasury’s Exchange Stabilization Fund (ESF) as Mnuchin solely saw fit. The Memorandum was dated Friday, March 20. On the prior Tuesday and Wednesday of that same week, Mnuchin had already used $20 billion of the Exchange Stabilization Fund to bail out Wall Street. As Mnuchin’s letter of November 19 to Fed Chair Jerome Powell confirms, he gave (or committed) $10 billion from the ESF to the Fed’s Commercial Paper Funding Facility on March 17 and another $10 billion to another Fed emergency lending program, the Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility, on March 18. Most Americans have never heard of the Treasury’s Exchange Stabilization Fund (ESF), … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 4, 2020 ~ David Sirota has read the collective mind of progressives when it comes to Presidential candidate Joe Biden. On August 1 Sirota Tweeted: “Give us an anti-Wall Street Treasury Secretary and AG [Attorney General], and you can have your sh*tty VP…On the other hand, give us a sh*tty Treasury Secretary and AG and try to paper it over with a good VP, and you’ve basically given everyone the big middle finger.” There is growing concern about Biden among progressives because he has made the decidedly ill-advised move of using the infamous Larry Summers as an advisor. Summers is the man who played an outsized role in the creation of Frankenbanks on Wall Street in 1999 with his push to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act and the deregulation of derivatives in 2000 as Treasury Secretary in the Clinton administration. Carrying on the proud … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 25, 2020 ~ Randal Quarles is the Vice Chairman for Supervision at the Federal Reserve Board. This is the most important position among Federal regulators when it comes to sniffing out and preventing the kind of systemic in-house bank frauds that collapsed much of Wall Street in 2008 and brought on the greatest U.S. economic downturn since the Great Depression. On November 26, 2018, Quarles was also appointed to a three-year term as Chairman of the Financial Stability Board, the international standard-setting body for financial stability around the globe. Financial stability at the largest global banks that Quarles oversees is looking less certain today than it has since the last financial crisis. Quarles is playing a key role in helping Fed Chairman Jerome Powell establish emergency lending facilities that are making trillions of dollars in revolving loans to Wall Street banks and trading … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 28, 2020 ~ “The Fed has, effectively, become a hedge fund in drag as a central bank.” When the Fed published its weekly H.4.1 data last Thursday, there was no mention of its two, highly controversial, corporate bond buying programs: the Primary Market Corporate Credit Facility (PMCCF) and the Secondary Market Corporate Credit Facility (SMCCF). We sent an email to the New York Fed to find out if the two programs are operational and if they will be consolidated on the Fed’s balance sheet. A spokesman for the New York Fed replied that “the PMCCF and SMCCF are not yet operational. And, as we note on the websites for each, additional information will be published before the facilities are launched.” That strikes us as strange. Last fall, the Fed launched a highly questionable repo loan program in as little as 24 hours and … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 14, 2020 ~ In the past few weeks everyone from Fed Chair Jerome Powell to U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin to former Fed Chair Janet Yellen to bank analyst Mike Mayo have appeared on TV to tell the American people that the big banks on Wall Street are well capitalized. To put it in Janet Yellen’s exact words on CNBC last Thursday, “we have a strong, well capitalized banking system.” These folks have to keep repeating this mantra to the public because the public is increasingly getting curious as to why the New York Fed has had to pump a cumulative $9 trillion in cash to these Wall Street banks, since September 17 of last year, if they are so well capitalized. Can big banks actually be well capitalized and have no liquid money to make loans – the key function of a … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 9, 2020 ~ For the first time in the history of the Federal Reserve, it has signed on to a plan with Congress to nationalize the unmanageable debts of global banks and other multinational corporations and put the U.S. taxpayer on the hook for the losses. Conducting the bulk of these programs will be the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, known as the New York Fed, which is a private institution owned by (wait for it) multinational banks. Because the New York Fed is owned by multinational banks and is allowed to create trillions of dollars out of thin air to conduct bailouts of global banks and multinational corporations since it created this precedent in 2008, it is effectively functioning as a multinational central bank with the Federal Reserve in Washington, D.C. and Fed Chairman Jerome Powell little more than titular props … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 1, 2020 ~ On March 26 Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell went on the Today show to deliver one message: “There is nothing fundamentally wrong with our economy.” Recently U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin has appeared on the White House lawn to tell reporters that this is nothing like the last financial crisis. Fed regional bank presidents have appeared on cable news asserting that the Wall Street banks have plenty of capital and today’s economic distress is caused solely by the coronavirus. Even New York Times columnist and perpetual Wall Street cheerleader, Paul Krugman, was on CNBC this week reassuring viewers that today’s problem was not like the last financial crisis. And yet – the facts keep getting in the way of this “official” narrative. The first coronavirus COVID-19 case was discovered in China in December 2019 and didn’t become a major issue … Continue reading →