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Friday, March 29, 2024

Quietly, the Fed Releases the Names of Banks that Got Billions in Emergency Repo Loans in 2019

Courtesy of Pam Martens

Jerome Powell, Chairman of the Federal Reserve

Jerome Powell, Chairman of the Federal Reserve

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York has quietly posted the names of the banks that grabbed billions of dollars under the Fed’s emergency repo loan operations that commenced on September 17, 2019 – months before there was a COVID-19 crisis anywhere in the world.

The emergency repo loans were made via Open Market operations at the New York Fed. Under the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation of 2010, the names of the banks, dollar amounts borrowed, interest rate and collateral posted must be made public “on the last day of the eighth calendar quarter following the calendar quarter in which the covered transaction was conducted.” Since the emergency repo loans were initiated in the third quarter of 2019, that meant eight quarters had passed and the public was entitled to the information for at least the month of September 2019. (The Fed has the power to release the information earlier if it chooses.)

We asked the Fed yesterday for the data and were stunned to learn that it had already been quietly posted on the New York Fed’s website with no media outlet being any the wiser.

The names of the banks and the eyebrow-raising amounts they borrowed from the New York Fed do not square with the official story at the time – that the liquidity crisis occurred because U.S. corporations withdrew large amounts from the banks in order to make quarterly tax payments. The fact that so many huge loans ended up going to foreign banks, as well as Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Securities, suggests that this was a derivatives counterparty problem, potentially triggered by Deutsche Bank’s crisis at the time.

Deutsche Bank is a major derivatives counterparty to Wall Street mega banks. It was having serious problems throughout 2019. Its attempt to merge with Commerzbank fell through in April 2019. It announced a plan to fire 18,000 workers in July 2019 and had plans to create a good bank/bad bank, isolating off toxic assets that it planned to sell. Deutsche Bank had incurred losses in three of the prior four years. Its share price had lost 90 percent of its value over the prior dozen years and was trading close to an historic low in September 2019. The Monday after the emergency repo loan operations began, Deutsche Bank announced that it would be moving clients and staff from its prime broker unit (that makes loans to hedge funds) to BNP Paribas along with its electronic trading operations.

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