Courtesy of Pam Martens
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 26, 2019 ~
There is one phrase on Wall Street that instills fright like no other – “intra-day bankruptcy” – especially if it’s describing a bankruptcy filing by a highly interconnected Wall Street firm.
On July 20, 2008 a Federal Reserve economist, Patrick Parkinson, used that phrase in an email to describe fears that Lehman Brothers might have to make an intra-day bankruptcy filing and to speculate on what was going on in the minds of the folks at JPMorgan Chase, Lehman’s clearing bank, regarding how it might get “stuck” with Lehman’s overnight loans.
The email describes perfectly what is highly likely going on in the minds of top executives at JPMorgan Chase today and why the Fed has been pumping hundreds of billions of dollars each week into unnamed trading houses on Wall Street since September 17.
The email was contained in documents provided with the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission Report, the official analysis of the crisis that took down century-old iconic names on Wall Street in 2008. In that email, Parkinson wrote:
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