Courtesy of Pam Martens
Jay Powell’s Home in Chevy Chase, Maryland Has No Mortgage, According to Public Records. Zillow Puts Its Value at $4.7 Million. Powell Could Have Taken a Home Equity Line of Credit If He Needed to Raise Cash, Rather than Selling a Stock Fund.
On Monday, October 18, the fearless Robert Kuttner at the American Prospect, broke the news that Fed Chairman Jerome Powell had sold between $1 million and $5 million of the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund on October 1, 2020, the same day that Powell had been on four phone calls with Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, who was coordinating the White House response to the financial crisis resulting from the pandemic.
The story went viral and forced the Federal Reserve to offer a preposterously lame excuse for what was obviously a desire by Powell to reduce his exposure to the stock market, despite his having access to more insider information than any other human on the planet.
The same day that Kuttner’s story ran, Mike Derby, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, wrote that a Fed representative had characterized the large Vanguard sale as “for family expenses.”
The very next day, Rachel Siegel, reporting for the Washington Post, flatly stated that the sale was for “family expenses,” while also suggesting that Kuttner’s article was an attack job on Powell’s record.
To further cement that contrived message in the minds of Fed watchers, the following day, October 20, the international wire service, Reuters, via their reporter, Howard Schneider, again quoted a Fed spokesperson stating that the Vanguard sale was to “cover Powell’s family expenses.”
…
