by Pam Martens and Russ Martens
Wall Street on Parade
We knew Fed Chair Jerome (Jay) Powell was not on solid footing last Tuesday when he answered a question at his press conference from Washington Post reporter, Heather Long. She wanted to know how he felt about “rising concern about credit markets and possible insolvencies and defaults either from businesses or individuals from the coronavirus.” Powell answered Long with this: “financial markets are functioning in an orderly manner and all that sort of thing.”
That wasn’t true then and it certainly isn’t true as of noon today. The Fed Chair neglected to mention to Long that beginning on September 17, 2019, as a result of disorderly market functioning, it had started pumping out hundreds of billions of dollars in super-cheap loans each week to trading houses on Wall Street – the first time it had made such repo loans since the financial crash of 2008.