Courtesy of Pam Martens
New York Fed Headquarters Building in Lower Manhattan
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York (New York Fed) is just one of the 12 regional Federal Reserve banks around the country. But it has amassed enormous powers for itself since the Federal Reserve was created in 1913. Three of those powers dwarf all others: the ability to create money electronically at the push of a button; the accepted right to meddle in the markets; and the supervision of some of the largest bank holding companies in America.
After Wall Street blew itself up under the indulging and incompetent supervision of the New York Fed in 2008 and it was exposed that the Fed had secretly created $29 trillion in electronic money to bail out zombie banks – most of that funneled out by the New York Fed – most rational folks would have assumed that Congress would have stripped it of supervisory and money-printing powers for bailouts. Insanely, that did not happen and here we are today with the same deeply-conflicted New York Fed creating its own money to dole out $690 billion a week in super-cheap loans to unnamed securities firms while buying up $60 billion a month in the debt of the United States. (The Fed doesn’t want you to call the $60 billion a month QE4 because that would strongly suggest that this is just Stage II of the continuing 2008 bailout of Wall Street and that QE-Infinity is coming.)
In addition to the unprecedented power that the New York Fed has grabbed for itself, it has a strange, incestuous and unexplained relationship with JPMorgan Chase.
For starters, JPMorgan Chase is one of the largest shareholders in the New York Fed. Yes, each regional bank of the Federal Reserve is privately owned by their member banks, the same banks being “supervised” by that regional bank. If that sounds like an insurmountable conflict of interest, it is.
Not only do the member banks own the regional Fed bank, but executives from these banks are allowed to sit on the regional Fed bank’s Board of Directors, despite it being their regulator. Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, sat on the New York Fed’s Board from January 2007 through December 2012.
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