Courtesy of Pam Martens
Thomas J. Falk Represents the Public on the Dallas Fed Board of Directors
Last Wednesday, the Editorial Board of the Financial Times of London penned an editorial under a headline that read: “The Fed’s Trading Scandal Undermines Public Trust.” The editorial noted that the President of the Dallas Fed, Robert Kaplan, “held stakes over $1m each in 27 investments, and moved in and out of S&P 500 futures. The precise dates of his transactions are unknown as his form declaring financial interests merely gives ‘multiple’ as the timeframe.”
Last Friday, this headline appeared at the Wall Street Journal: “Boston, Dallas Fed Banks Pledge Cooperation With Stock-Trading Probe.” But then the article revealed this:
“The Dallas Fed has declined multiple requests to fully disclose Mr. Kaplan’s extensive trading activity. For example, Mr. Kaplan’s disclosures list ‘multiple’ for trades in stocks and other investments without specifying the dates of the transactions.”
Screen Shot from Dallas Fed President Robert Kaplan’s Financial Disclosure Form
The financial disclosure form that Kaplan and every other Federal Reserve Bank President is required to file clearly indicates that the filer is required to give the month, day and year of each purchase and each sale. The form even provides an example of how it wants the date shown, e.g., 2/1/93. As a former CPA with Peat Marwick Mitchell and 22-year veteran of the trading powerhouse Goldman Sachs, Kaplan certainly knew, or should have known, that he was evading the prescribed rules of the Federal Reserve system when he substituted the word “multiple” for the specific dates of his trades. Kaplan didn’t do this just on his financial disclosure form for 2020, he did this on every financial disclosure form that he filed annually from 2015 through 2020. (See Kaplan’s 2015 through 2020 financial disclosure forms here.)
…
