Federal Reserve

Enthusiasm for using Platinum Coin Seigniorage (PCS) to produce a Trillion Dollar Coin, or coins totaling a few more »

More »»

A new survey showing the extent of bankers' criminal inclinations, together with the "LIBOR" scandal, gives us more insight into how deeply corrupt the banking industry has become. more »

More »»

On Monday, Bank of America (BofA) stocks briefly traded for under $5. Yes, you could buy a share of BofA for less than the noxious debit card fee they tried to force down your throat.

BofA is massive, with assets equivalent to 15 percent of U.S. GDP. So why is it trading for the price of a latte? more »

More »»

It took the journalists at Bloomberg News two years - and presumably lots of legal fees - to pry information out of the Federal Reserve that should have been made public long ago. We now know that the Fed's secret $7.7 trillion lending program wasn't just the most massive bank bailout ever seen, and it wasn't just free money for mega-bankers - though it was certainly both of those things. It was also the greatest hoax in stock market history.

No, scratch that. It was the greatest hoax in the history of money. And it was built on lies. How many? Let us count the ways.

Here's the first one: The banks paid back all the money back that they were given. No, they didn't. They paid back the principal on these loans. But by obtaining loans at rates far below market value, we now know they received the equivalent of $13 billion in cash giveaways.

Here's another lie: Fed economists support a free-market economy.

More »»

We've just learned about the Federal Reserve's extraordinary secret bailout of the country's big banks. We now know that the TARP bailout program was only the tip of the iceberg, and that financial institutions received a total of $1.2 trillion in loans and other funds while the rest of the country was left to struggle for economic survival.

We also know that, despite all that "we got our money back" rhetoric, these loans represent a cash giveaway to the banks that totals up to tens of billions of dollars - while homeowners and student loan borrowers continue to struggle.

Here's what we now know about this secret bailout, thanks to a Bloomberg report, along with what we already knew - and what we still don't know:

We now know that the 10 biggest banks in America received $669 billion in emergency loans from the Fed.

We already knew that the same 10 banks now own 77% of the country's banking assets, more than before the crisis, making them even more "too big to fail" than ever. more »

More »»

The other day we had an interesting discussion of that secret Fed bailout on Thom Hartmann's TV program, The Big Picture.  Here's the video. more »

More »»

Aspiring journalists are often advised to become multilingual so they can cover more stories. That's why I'm prepared to offer the first summer program in Federal Reserve as a Second Language ... once anybody turns up who can really understand it. more »

More »»

It's beginning to look like there's an economic shipwreck dead ahead. That plunging stock market is the wealthy passengers, trampling the children as they rush headlong toward the lifeboats. The nation's capital, the bridge of our ship of state, lies abandoned.

The officers have gone to their quarters, the wheel's left unattended, and nobody's trying to turn the ship around. If you're not sounding the alarm, you aren't paying attention. And it looks like a lot of people aren't paying attention.

Rough seas

Sure, this month's jobs report is slightly better than the last couple of months, but that just means the drowning passengers are a couple of inches closer to the surface. That's not much comfort to them, since they're still drowning, but it seems to cheer up the ship's officers. Now that Congress has concluded its debt-ceiling deal they've all gone home.

The President's economic advisor, Austan Goolsbee, is plaintively whispering the words "unemployment insurance" to their receding backs, but it wasn't important enough to be included in the deal. And the "bipartisan" mantra forced Goolsbee to mention two free-trade deals in the same breath. That's like throwing a brick to a drowning sailor, rather than a life preserver.

More »»

Ben Bernanke's voice has been known to put humans into a trance even under the best of circumstances, and I was under the influence of a fever and some cold medications. Still, other observers reported a similar reaction to my own. The Fed Chair's press conference felt like a sensory deprivation tank, but with extra-credit math questions.

Was Mr. Bernanke calm? Put it this way: I watched the video feed for several minutes before I realized it wasn't a photograph. A lizard can stay motionless for so long, you start wondering if it's real. It was like that. Then Bernanke turned his head, and I got the same feeling you get when the lizard finally blinks.

That's the Robitussin talking, not me.

Bernanke needed to do two things today: First, he needed to avoid making a careless remark that would roil the world's markets and set off a panic. Mission accomplished. And to avoid excessive scrutiny, he needed to be as placid and boring as possible. He might have overshot the mark on that one.

More »»

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is promising to unleash a cache of secret documents from the hard drive of a U.S. megabank executive. In 2009, he told Computer World that the bank was Bank of America (BofA). more »

More »»