Courtesy of Pam Martens
Jerome Powell, Chairman of the Federal Reserve
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 to 10:37. Just eight minutes after that phone call ended, Powell had a 15 minute phone conversation with Michael Corbat, CEO of Citigroup. The Federal Reserve has a Vice President for Supervision of the big Wall Street banks, Randal Quarles, so it is not clear why Powell was talking to the big Wall Street banks without him on the phone.
On Tuesday, August 13, Powell had breakfast with Howard Adler, the Deputy Assistant Secretary for the Financial Stability Oversight Council (F-SOC). The meeting lasted from 8 a.m. to 8:45 a.m. F-SOC is the federal agency created under the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation of 2010 to alert the Federal regulators of Wall Street banks when there are looming risks to financial stability on the horizon – ideally in adequate time to prevent a replay of the epic financial crash of 2008 which caught regulators napping.
Just 45 minutes after that meeting ended, Powell had a phone call with Thomas Jordan, the Chairman of the central bank of Switzerland, known as the Swiss National Bank or SNB. The Fed does not provide minutes or notes on what the Fed Chairman’s calls and meetings are about so all we can do is guess as to the topics covered in the phone call, which lasted one-half hour.
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