Courtesy of Pam Martens
Fed Chair Jerome Powell
The culture of Wall Street has now completely engulfed the Fed: it’s legal if you can get away with it.
For more than five years the President of the Dallas Fed, Robert Kaplan, was trading like a hedge fund kingpin in “over $1 million” transactions in S&P 500 futures while refusing to follow the requirements of the Fed’s financial disclosure form and list the specific dates of his purchases and sells so that the transactions could be examined for whether he had inside information from the Fed at the time. That information is now as much as five years overdue to the American people and we have asked the Dallas Fed to provide it promptly.
The Dallas Fed further hampered the free press in America from doing its job by refusing to answer our simple question as to whether Kaplan was shorting stocks or S&P 500 futures during the pandemic crisis in 2020.
Then the Dallas Fed Board of Directors released a statement on Monday saying that Kaplan “sold all of his personal holdings related to financial institutions over which the Federal Reserve had regulatory oversight,” when he joined the Dallas Fed. On Tuesday we published documented proof that Kaplan continued to own four proprietary products from Goldman Sachs, one of which is so opaque that it hasn’t even filed a prospectus or offering memorandum with the Securities and Exchange Commission. (Goldman Sachs has been under Federal Reserve regulatory oversight since September 21, 2008 when it became a bank holding company in order to claim its share of the bailout money the Fed was secretly showering on the trading houses on Wall Street.)
Now it turns out that Boston Fed President Eric Rosengren’s wife had a $150,000 to $500,000 “Secured Loan for Investment” with Citigroup’s federally-insured bank, Citibank. Rosengren’s financial disclosure form shows that all 68 of his purchases and sells in individual stocks and REITs in 2020 occurred in his joint account with his spouse.
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