by Pam Martens and Russ Martens
Wall Street on Parade
Haven’t we learned anything about properly vetting people for the highest offices in the U.S. government?
Former Fed Chair and Treasury Secretary nominee Janet Yellen has failed to report the details of millions of dollars in fees that she earned in 2018, the year she stepped down as Fed Chair, as she went on a whirlwind of speaking engagements in foreign cities around the world. Yellen’s “leadership” role with the Bloomberg New Economy Forums which had the “active participation and support” of an organization openly tied to the Chinese Communist Party, raises further serious red flags. And yet, Yellen sailed through her Senate Finance Committee confirmation hearing this past week, gaining a favorable vote of 26-0. A full Senate vote to confirm Yellen as Treasury Secretary is expected to occur tomorrow.
What Yellen did disclose on her Office of Government Ethics financial disclosure form showed that in 2019 and 2020 she made a cash haul of more than $7 million in speaking fees, the majority of which came from Wall Street trading houses, mega banks and hedge funds. Yellen stepped down as Chair of the Fed on February 3, 2018. Over the next 10 months, in addition to her foreign gigs, Yellen also appeared at numerous stateside paid engagements for Wall Street firms like JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, and Jefferies. She has failed to make public the transcripts of her speeches at these events or the specific amounts she was paid.