The Fed Responds to Report that Fed Chair Powell Traded During FOMC Blackout Periods

 

The Fed Responds to Report that Fed Chair Powell Traded During FOMC Blackout Periods

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 11, 2022 ~

A Fed spokesperson has provided Wall Street On Parade with a detailed response to our article yesterday, which documented that trades were made in accounts in which Fed Chair Jerome Powell had a financial interest during a Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting in 2015 and another in 2019. Fed officials are clearly prohibited from trading before and during FOMC meetings because that is when they have insider, market-moving information.

Below is the full statement from the Fed spokesperson. Following the statement, we will explain its many, serious flaws.

“Chair Powell has not traded during FOMC blackout periods. The transactions that were reported occurred in family trusts over which he had no control. Chair Powell is not a trustee and did not direct or control the trades. He relinquished his previous role as a trustee in 2012 when he joined the Federal Reserve as a Board Member.

“These transactions were regular trades for the purposes of the trust, e.g., raising money for donations under the terms of a charitable trust. The trust is legally required to make certain charitable donations every year. In practical terms, this means that transactions must occur in order to free up funds for those donations.

“The trust financial advisor was advised of our blackout periods and was directed to avoid transactions during those blackout periods. Although they were aware of the FOMC blackout dates, the advisor mistakenly made some transactions during some blackout periods. These transactions were reported as part of his publicly available financial disclosures, which have been available regularly every year since he joined the Board. They are available to anyone through the Office of Government Ethics website, OGE.gov.”

Flaw Number 1: The 2015 trades occurred in “Powell Family Trusts” 3 and 4; the 2019 trades occurred in the “Powell Family Trust 3.” Powell’s financial disclosure forms, which he signed, define what has to be reported under “Part 7, Transactions” as follows: “Part 7 discloses purchases, sales, or exchanges of real property or securities in excess of $1,000 made on behalf of the filer, the filer’s spouse or dependent child during the reporting period.” Thus, Powell or someone in his immediate household had an interest in the assets being sold during two separate FOMC meetings. The assets were not held in Blind Trusts, so Powell – who has a law degree – should have been on top of what was happening in these accounts.

Flaw Number 2: Powell signed an Ethics Agreement in 2017 where he agreed to the following:

“If I have a managed account or otherwise use the services of an investment professional during my appointment, I will ensure that the account manager or investment professional obtains my prior approval on a case-by-case basis for the purchase of any assets other than cash, cash equivalents, investment funds that qualify for the exemption at 5 C.F.R. § 2640.201(a), obligations of the United States, or municipal bonds.”

It follows, logically, that Powell would do the same thing for sales transactions, i.e., give his approval on a “case-by-case basis.”

Flaw Number 3: The statement regarding the need to raise cash to fund charitable donations is not convincing. Many wealthy individuals gift appreciated securities to charity, obtaining a tax advantage in doing so. Regardless, in both 2015 and 2019, waiting one extra day to make the trades would have avoided running afoul of the Fed’s prohibition on trading during the blackout period around FOMC meetings.

Flaw Number 4: Powell signs all of his financial disclosure forms, including those for 2015 and 2019. Why didn’t he notice that there were trades listed that occurred on FOMC meeting dates and issue a timely public apology?

Flaw Number 5: According to the Congressional Research Service, this is the prescribed procedure at the Fed that is supposed to prevent the problems outlined above, as well as those of the three Fed officials that have resigned over their own trading scandals since last September:

“Financial disclosure reports from covered officials, including the original entrance reports and the annual reports filed by May 15, are to be reviewed by supervisory ethics personnel to identify potential ethics and conflict problems, and to resolve any conflict of interest issues that may be raised by the ownership of certain assets by a particular public official. Remedial action which may be required by ethics officials to resolve identified conflicts of interest with respect to certain assets may include divestiture, establishment of a qualified blind trust, procurement of conflict of interest waivers, specific written recusal instruments, and requests for voluntary transfer or reassignment.”

It was not an Ethics Officer at the Fed who disclosed to the public the fact that trades in Powell’s accounts occurred on an FOMC meeting date. It was an activist group called Occupy the Fed.

In fact, the General Counsel and Ethics Officer of the Dallas Fed, Sharon Sweeney, allowed Dallas Fed President Robert Kaplan to trade in and out of “over $1 million” S&P 500 futures contracts from 2015 through 2020. These types of contracts can be used to make directional bets on which way the stock market is going to move. They trade during and after the stock markets in the U.S. have closed – almost continuously from Sunday evening to Friday evening. (See our report: Robert Kaplan Was Trading Like a Hedge Fund Kingpin for Five Years while President of the Dallas Fed; a Dozen Legal Safeguards Failed to Stop Him.)

Supervisory ethics personnel at the Fed also did not stop Fed Chair Powell from having upwards of $25 million of his family wealth managed by BlackRock while the firm was given three no-bid contracts by the Fed.

The Fed is not some mom and pop shop in Dubois. It’s the central bank of the United States with a current balance sheet of $8.9 trillion, 98 percent of which American taxpayers are on the hook for. It’s also in charge of supervising the most dangerous megabanks in the United States, which continue to be serially charged with crimes against the investing public while the Fed continues to bail them out.

Do we really want a man at the helm of this sprawling institution who can’t even own up to his failure to police his own trading activities?

LINK

Activist Group Reports that Fed Chair Powell Traded During FOMC Restricted Periods: We Fact-Checked It and It’s True

 

Activist Group Reports that Fed Chair Powell Traded During FOMC Restricted Periods: We Fact-Checked It and It’s True

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 10, 2022 ~

Fed Chair Jerome Powell Testifying Before Senate Banking Committee, November 30, 2021

An anonymous activist group called Occupy the Fed reported in a Substack article on Sunday that Fed Chair Jerome Powell traded on the final day of a Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting on April 29, 2015, when he was a Fed Governor, and also on the final day of an FOMC meeting on December 11, 2019, when he was Fed Chair. 

Powell’s trading directly violates the Fed’s written policy which prohibits trading “during the period that begins at the start of the second Saturday (midnight) Eastern Time before the beginning of each FOMC meeting and ends at midnight Eastern Time on the last day of the meeting.” The FOMC meetings are typically when the most sensitive and market-moving information occurs at the Fed, including votes on hiking or lowering interest rates and other confidential actions.

Dallas Fed President Robert Kaplan, Boston Fed President Eric Rosengren and Fed Vice Chair Richard Clarida have resigned over their own individual trading scandals and not one of them has been charged with anything as directly in violation of Fed policy as trading on the very day the FOMC is in session.

We fact-checked the Occupy the Fed report by downloading the dates of all FOMC meetings from 2015 through 2020 and comparing them to the trading transactions listed on Powell’s financial disclosure forms filed with the Office of Government Ethics (OGE) for years 2015 through 2020. We can verify that Powell traded on April 29, 2015 and on December 11, 2019. Both were the final day of the FOMC meeting. (You can read the minutes of those respective FOMC meetings here and here.)

The charts below show what Powell sold on those dates. We have eliminated any purchase transactions to avoid any possibility that the Fed would claim that these were made for dividend reinvestment purposes.

The FOMC meets eight times a year, roughly every six weeks. Multiply that by the six years of financial disclosures that the OGE has made available for Powell and you have a total of 48 FOMC meetings. Multiply the 48 meetings by two, since the FOMC meets for two days, and Powell had 96 opportunities to screw up and accidentally trade on an FOMC meeting date. But it happened on only two days during that six-year span of time – according to what we know thus far. And in both the years of 2015 and 2019, highly unusual activities were occurring at the Fed.

The year 2015 would mark the first time that the Fed had raised interest rates since it slashed them to the zero-bound range in 2008. There was a great deal of media talk in April regarding what was going to happen in various markets when the Fed raised its benchmark Fed Funds rates. The Fed didn’t raise its benchmark rate until December 17, 2015. 

The year 2019 marked the beginning of an unprecedented, emergency repo lending operation by the Fed. While the Fed made public that the repo loans were being provided to its 24 primary dealers, only the Fed knew that six large trading houses on Wall Street were getting the lion’s share of those loans. One of the six was Goldman Sachs. On December 11, 2019, the final day of the FOMC meeting, Powell sold between $115,000 and $300,000 of two Goldman Sachs proprietary mutual funds. The funds are listed as “GS” rather than Goldman Sachs on his financial disclosure forms. (See chart below.)

According to the Fed’s own H.4.1 report, on December 11, 2019, the same day that Powell dumped between $167,000 and $430,000 of predominantly stock mutual funds and ETFs, the Fed had an outstanding balance of $212.95 billion in emergency repo loans that had been used to prop up trading houses on Wall Street, including Goldman Sachs.

A larger question in all of this is why Powell is even allowed to be holding Goldman Sachs proprietary funds since Goldman Sachs is supervised by the Fed.

The Occupy the Fed report also makes the following charge against Powell:

“Instead of providing specific dates for the majority of his transactions, Powell improperly groups trades of like securities behind the phrase ‘Multiple’ on every OGE form he has filed.”

A report last year in the Washington Post indicated that a Fed spokeswoman had indicated to them that these “multiple” transactions “were for automatic dividend reinvestments – essentially transactions on autopilot and not subject to individual decisions.”

Very little is known about the Occupy the Fed group that scooped mainstream media with this story other than that it appears to be a fairly new group. Its Twitter account shows that it was opened in January 2021. Its Substack account shows it began on January 17, presumably of this year since only two articles are listed. Under “Who are we” on the Substack account, the following description is provided:

“We’re a group of like-minded regular people (workers, professionals, seniors, savers and others) who are disgusted and fed up with systemic corruption at the Federal Reserve and the total perversion of our American capitalist democracy. We’ve taken no money from special interests. We are doing this on personal time and expense because we’ve had enough.”

We have reached out to the Fed’s communications office for an explanation of Powell’s trading on these two FOMC meeting dates. We’ll update this article if we receive a response.

Powell’s term as Fed Chair expired this past Saturday and he is currently serving as Chair Pro Tempore. President Biden has nominated Powell to serve a second four-year term as Fed Chair but that requires an up vote by the Senate Banking Committee and the full Senate. Those votes have yet to happen, making Powell the first Fed Chair in a quarter century to be serving in a Pro Tempore capacity.

This latest report from Occupy the Fed simply adds to the withering criticism around Powell’s leadership of the Fed. Senator Elizabeth Warren, who sits on the Senate Banking Committee, called Powell a “dangerous man to head up the Fed” over his record of weakening Dodd-Frank legislative protections covering Wall Street megabanks. Powell has also presided over the worst trading scandal in the Fed’s history. His cozy relationship with Blackrock while the Fed awarded them three no-bid contracts has also raised eyebrows. Adding to all of this is the general consensus that Powell has fallen way behind the curve on the inflation that is ravaging Americans’ ability to make ends meet.

Trust in the Fed has been seriously weakened under Powell. That is reason enough for President Biden to reconsider this nominee.

Editor’s Update: The Fed has provided a detailed response. See the response and our critique here.

LINK

Jerome Powell’s Term as Fed Chair Ended Last Saturday. The Senate Has Not Reconfirmed Him. What’s Up?

 

Jerome Powell’s Term as Fed Chair Ended Last Saturday. The Senate Has Not Reconfirmed Him. What’s Up?

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 9, 2022 ~

Jerome (Jay) Powell

At 3:00 p.m. last Friday, the Federal Reserve quietly released the following statement:

“The Federal Reserve Board on Friday named Jerome H. Powell as Chair Pro Tempore, pending Senate confirmation to a second term as Chair of the Board of Governors. The action, effective February 5, enables him to continue to carry out his duties as Chair after the expiration of his term on the same day, and while the confirmation process is underway. In its annual organizational meeting in January, the Federal Open Market Committee separately named him as its Chair.”

This is the first time in a quarter century that a Fed Chairman’s term has lapsed before he was reconfirmed by the Senate. According to Reuters, the last time it happened was 1996 when Alan Greenspan served from March 3 to June 20 as Fed Chair Pro Tempore.

Powell has not even made it to a vote in the Senate Banking Committee, which has to happen before the full Senate can vote on his confirmation. So what’s going on? It appears that Democrats are playing hard ball since Republicans are waging a war against two of Biden’s other three nominees to serve on the Fed’s Board of Governors.

The two nominees under withering attack by Republicans are Sarah Bloom Raskin for Vice Chairman for Supervision and Dr. Lisa Cook for Governor. There is much less push back on the third nominee, Dr. Philip Jefferson.

Raskin is more than qualified as a former Fed Governor and former Deputy Treasury Secretary. But as Vice Chairman for Supervision, she would be in charge of supervising the megabank holding companies on Wall Street. The Fed has effectively outsourced that job to the New York Fed and Wall Street likes it that way. The megabanks on Wall Street literally own the New York Fed and its perpetual bailout spigot, so they are not happy about any supervision coming from Washington.

Helping Wall Street out in its push against Raskin is the fossil fuels industry and their toadies. On February 2, the Wall Street Journal had the audacity to run a propaganda piece by executives of two fossil fuel trade associations, masquerading as an “opinion” article.

The two executives, Tim Stewart, President of the U.S. Oil and Gas Association, and Kathleen Sgamma, President of Western Energy Alliance, which represents oil and natural-gas producers in the West, wrote that Raskin believes that fossil fuels pose “climate-change-related risks to the economy.”

According to a Gallup poll released in April of last year, 43 percent of Americans “worry a great deal” about climate change and a majority of Americans worry “at least somewhat.” Raskin is simply responding to the legitimate concerns of the American people, something that the Fed has said its listening tours around the country have been all about.

The attacks on Raskin have more to do with the fossil fuel lobby groups wanting to flex their muscles for their clients and Wall Street fearing actual supervision and nothing to do with Raskin’s credentials for the job.

Republican Mitch McConnell of Kentucky took to the Senate floor last Thursday to excoriate Raskin with the old trope that she will “pursue liberal environmental goals.” Shouldn’t saving the planet for our children and grandchildren be a goal that we can all unite around?

The Ranking Member of the Senate Banking Committee, Senator Pat Toomey, Republican of Pennsylvania, spent much of his opening remarks at the confirmation hearing for the Fed nominees last Thursday to excoriate Raskin over her stance on climate change.

Jefferson and Cook are both Black nominees. Jefferson is Vice President for Academic Affairs, Dean of Faculty and Professor of Economics at Davidson College. Jefferson previously served as Chair of the Economics Department at Swarthmore College. He was also previously an economist at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.

Cook is Professor of Economics and International Relations at Michigan State University. She earned a Ph.D. in economics from the University of California, Berkeley with fields in macroeconomics and international economics. She was previously an adjunct professor at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.

If Lisa Cook is confirmed, she would be the first Black woman on the Fed’s Board of Governors in its 109-year history. (It seriously pains us to have to write that sentence.)

Last Thursday, Toomey criticized Professor Cook as a Fed nominee in his opening statement. He said “She has a Ph.D. but no academic work in monetary economics.” Jerome Powell, who has heavy Republican backing for a second term, has no Ph.D. in economics but instead has a law degree and got rich at the vulture fund Carlyle Group. Powell also presided over the largest trading scandal in Fed history. Exactly what his involvement in that scandal will turn out to be is unknown at this point because the results of the investigation, now entering its fifth month, are unknown.

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RSN: FOCUS: Robert Reich | The Fed Is About to Shaft American Workers – for No Good Reason

 

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FOCUS: Robert Reich | The Fed Is About to Shaft American Workers – for No Good Reason
Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog
Reich writes: "The January jobs report from the Labor Department is heightening fears that a so-called 'tight' labor market is fueling inflation, and therefore the Fed must put on the brakes by raising interest rates. This line of reasoning is totally wrong."

The January jobs report from the Labor Department is heightening fears that a so-called “tight” labor market is fueling inflation, and therefore the Fed must put on the brakes by raising interest rates.

This line of reasoning is totally wrong.

Among the biggest job gains in January were workers who are normally temporary and paid low wages (leisure and hospitality, retail, transport and warehousing). This January employers cut fewer of these low-wage temp workers than in most years, because of rising customer demand and the difficulties of hiring during Omicron. Due to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’s “seasonal adjustment,” cutting fewer workers than usual for this time of year appears as “adding lots of jobs.”

Fed policymakers are poised to raise interest rates at their March meeting and then continue raising them, in order to slow the economy. They fear that a labor shortage is pushing up wages, which in turn are pushing up prices — and that this wage-price spiral could get out of control.

It’s a huge mistake. Higher interest rates will harm millions of workers who will be involuntarily drafted into the inflation fight by losing jobs or long-overdue pay raises. There’s no “labor shortage” pushing up wages. There’s a shortage of good jobs paying adequate wages to support working families. Raising interest rates will worsen this shortage.

There’s no “wage-price spiral,” either (even though Fed chief Jerome Powell has expressed concern about wage hikes pushing up prices). To the contrary, workers’ real wages have dropped because of inflation. Even though overall wages have climbed, they’ve failed to keep up with price increases – making most workers worse off in terms of the purchasing power of their dollars.

Wage-price spirals used to be a problem. Remember when John F. Kennedy “jawboned” steel executives and the United Steel Workers to keep a lid on wages and prices? But such spirals are no longer a problem. That’s because the typical worker today has little or no bargaining power.

Only 6 percent of private-sector workers are now unionized. A half-century ago, more than a third were. Today, corporations can increase output by outsourcing just about anything anywhere because capital is global. A half-century ago, corporations needing more output had to bargain with their own workers to get it.

These changes have shifted power from labor to capital — increasing the share of the economic pie going to profits and shrinking the share going to wages. This power shift ended wage-price spirals.

Slowing the economy won’t remedy either of the two real causes of today’s inflation – continuing worldwide bottlenecks in the supply of goods, and the ease with which big corporations (with record profits) are passing these costs to customers in higher prices.

Supply bottlenecks are all around us. (Just take a look at all the ships with billions of dollars of cargo idling outside the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, through which 40 percent of all U.S. seaborne imports flow.)

Big corporations have no incentive to absorb the rising costs of such supplies — even with profit margins at their highest level in 70 years. They have enough market power to pass these costs on to consumers, sometimes using inflation to justify even bigger price hikes. “A little bit of inflation is always good in our business,” the CEO of Kroger said last June. “What we are very good at is pricing,” the CEO of Colgate-Palmolive added in October.

In fact, the Fed’s plan to slow the economy is the opposite of what’s needed now or in the foreseeable future. COVID is still with us. Even in its wake, we’ll be dealing with its damaging consequences for years — everything from long-term COVID, to school children months or years behind.

The January jobs report shows that the U.S. economy is still 2.9 million jobs below what it had in February 2020. Given the growth of the US population, it’s 4.5 million short of what it would have by now had there been no pandemic.

Consumers are almost tapped out. Not only are real (inflation-adjusted) incomes down, but pandemic assistance has ended. Extra jobless benefits are gone. Child tax credits have expired. Rent moratoriums are over. Small wonder consumer spending fell 0.6 percent in December, the first decrease since last February.

Many people are understandably gloomy about the future. The University of Michigan consumer sentiment survey plummeted in January to its lowest level since late 2011, back when the economy was trying to recover from the global financial crisis. The Conference Board’s index of confidence also dropped in January.

Given all this, the last thing average working people need is for the Fed to raise interest rates and slow the economy further. The problem most people face isn’t inflation. It’s a lack of good jobs.

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Week in Review: Workers, Once Again, About to Get the Shaft

 

The Week in Review

Restaurant Owners Got 30 Times More Federal Covid Aid Than Workers: Report "If the subminimum wage for tipped workers persists, the restaurant industry is unlikely to recover from its growing labor crisis, regardless of how much money the federal government hands out to business owners." by Kenny Stancil 'DeJoy Has to Go Right Now': Fury Over Postal Service Failure to Electrify Truck Fleet Rep. Gerry Connolly warned that DeJoy is aiming to "spend billions on gas-powered vehicles despite clear goals set by President Biden and Congress to electrify the federal fleet." by Jake Johnson Paid Leave for All: Worker Advocates Demand Expanded Protections "The call for paid leave has never been clearer or louder from all corners of our country," said a pair of Senate Democrats marking the 29th anniversary of the Family and Medical Leave Act. by Andrea Germanos 'I Remember WMDs in Iraq': Reporter Calls Out US Official on Russian Intel Claims "You just come out and say this and expect us just to believe it without you showing a shred of evidence that it's actually true," said Associated Press reporter Matt Lee. by Jake Johnson

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Opinion

The Federal Reserve Is About to Give US Workers the Shaft The last thing average working people need is for the Fed to raise interest rates and slow the economy further. The problem most people face isn't inflation. It's a lack of good jobs. by Robert Reich Senators Have Re-Introduced the Highly Unpopular EARN IT Bill That Would Scan All Online Messages Let's be clear: the new EARN IT Act would pave the way for a massive new surveillance system, run by private companies, that would roll back some of the most important privacy and security features in technology used by people around the globe. by Joe Mullin

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