by Pam Martens and Russ Martens
Wall Street on Parade
When the history books of this era are finally written, this will go down as a time when regulators allowed a no-law zone to be drawn around Wall Street. As the Federal Reserve Bank of New York is using taxpayer money to buy up junk bonds to shore up the sagging balance sheets of the behemoth banks on Wall Street and making ¼ of one percent interest loans to those banks against tanking stocks as collateral, those same Wall Street banks are trading their own bank’s stock in their own thinly-regulated internal stock exchanges known as Dark Pools.
It simply can’t get any crazier than this — and yet somehow it always does in this unprecedented era.
On June 2, 2014, to stem public outrage over claims of rigged markets, FINRA, the self-regulator and good buddy of Wall Street that conducts Wall Street’s private justice system, began to report publicly the three-week old trading data from the Dark Pools. But instead of providing daily reports with execution times for stock trades included, the data is lumped together for the entire week. That’s makes it a lot harder, if not impossible, to see if there is collusion happening by a banking cartel.