by Pam Martens and Russ Martens
Wall Street on Parade
On March 26 Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell went on the Today show to deliver one message: “There is nothing fundamentally wrong with our economy.” Recently U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin has appeared on the White House lawn to tell reporters that this is nothing like the last financial crisis. Fed regional bank presidents have appeared on cable news asserting that the Wall Street banks have plenty of capital and today’s economic distress is caused solely by the coronavirus. Even New York Times columnist and perpetual Wall Street cheerleader, Paul Krugman, was on CNBC this week reassuring viewers that today’s problem was not like the last financial crisis.
And yet – the facts keep getting in the way of this “official” narrative.
The first coronavirus COVID-19 case was discovered in China in December 2019 and didn’t become a major issue in the United States until February 2020. But on October 7, 2019 we reported that Wall Street banks had announced a staggering 68,000 job cuts as the Fed pumped $310 billion more in unprecedented loans to Wall Street. That doesn’t sound like there was “nothing fundamentally wrong with our economy,” the narrative that Powell is pushing.