America Demands Justice NOW

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Fed Chair Powell Has Gone Rogue on Repo Loans and the Volcker Rule

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 follow when it comes to monitoring and disciplining Wall Street banks in the passage of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act that was enacted on July 21, 2010. The legislation was meant to rein in the greed, corruption and illegal trading activities of Wall Street banks that had led to the financial crash and Great Recession — where 8.7 million Americans lost their jobs and 10 million American homes were lost to foreclosure from 2006 to 2014.

One of the key provisions of Dodd-Frank instructed the Federal Reserve that it would be on a short leash going forward in terms of secret, multi-trillion dollar bailouts of Wall Street’s trading houses. Without the approval or even awareness of Congress, the Federal Reserve, predominantly through the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, had showered $29 trillion in cumulative loans to bail out Wall Street’s trading houses from the end of 2007 through the middle of 2010. The Federal Reserve fought a court battle for years to keep that information secret from the American people. That was on Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s watch. But this is what has happened on Chairman Powell’s watch.

Since September 17, 2019, the New York Fed, with full awareness from Chairman Powell, has funneled $6.6 trillion in revolving loans to the trading houses of Wall Street with no vote in Congress and no disclosures as to what firms are receiving this money and why. (bolded for emphasis)

Powell has attempted to pass off the loans as part of the New York Fed’s routine open market operations, which are not subject to Congressional oversight. But open market operations don’t last every business day for more than four months with a new plan to extend them into April and involve $6.6 trillion flowing to unnamed trading houses on Wall Street when there is no stated emergency by the Fed. Last November 13, Powell testified in a Congressional hearing that “The core of the financial sector appears resilient, with leverage low and funding risk limited relative to the levels of recent decades.”

According to Section 1101 of the Dodd-Frank legislation, both the House Financial Services Committee and the Senate Banking Committee are to be briefed on any emergency loans made by the Fed, including the names of the banks doing the borrowing. The section reads:

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https://wallstreetonparade.com/2020/02/fed-chair-powell-has-gone-rogue-on-repo-loans-and-the-volcker-rule/