Courtesy of Pam Martens
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens
During Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell’s press conference this past Wednesday, he took a question from Brian Cheung of Yahoo Finance. The question was: “It seems like to people on the outside who might not follow finance daily, they’re paying attention to things like GameStop, now Dogecoin. And it seems like there’s interesting reach for yield in this market to some extent — also Archegos. So, does the Fed see a relationship between low rates and easy policy to those things, and is there a financial stability concern from the Fed’s perspective at this time?”
As part of Powell’s long, meandering answer, he said this: “Leverage in the financial system is not a problem.” Within a second or so, Powell repeated himself: “Leverage in the financial system is not an issue.” (Read the full transcript here.)
Either Powell has not read any of the quarterly reports coming out of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), a Federal regulator of national banks, or he’s willfully misleading the American people.
According to the OCC’s most recent “Quarterly Report on Bank Trading and Derivatives Activities,” for the quarter ending December 31, 2020, equity (stock) derivative contracts at federally-insured banks and savings associations have exploded from $737 billion (notional or face amount) since the Wall Street banks last blew themselves up in 2008 to $4.197 trillion notional as of December 31, 2020. That’s a staggering increase of 469 percent in just 12 years.
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