Tag: Commercial Paper Funding Facility

Fed Chair Powell Misleads House Hearing on Wall Street’s Bailout Programs

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

Fed Chair Powell Misleads House Hearing on Wall Street’s Bailout Programs

It’s factually incorrect for the Fed Chairman to say that it can only make emergency loans with the approval of the Treasury. Months before there was any case of COVID-19 anywhere in the world the Fed was making hundreds of billions of dollars a week in emergency repo loans to Wall Street trading houses. The emergency loans started on September 17, 2019 – four months before the first reported case of COVID-19 in the United States. By January 27, 2020 the Fed’s ongoing cumulative loans to bail out Wall Street’s hubris tallied up to an astounding $6.6 trillion. (See Fed Repos Have Plowed $6.6 Trillion to Wall Street in Four Months; That’s 34% of Its Feeding Tube During Epic Financial Crash.)

Fed Chair Powell Opens a Big Can of Worms at His Press Conference

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

Fed Chair Powell Opens a Big Can of Worms at His Press Conference

What the Fed did back then, which it knows it can still do at the drop of a dime today, is to demand an adequate amount of securities as collateral from the Wall Street firms that request its emergency loans. There is zero need or rational reason to make the U.S. taxpayer backstop potential losses on Wall Street – particularly when today’s Wall Street funding problems began months before COVID-19 reared its head in the United States.