Even within economic circles, there is a growing nervousness that the Federal Reserve, the central bank of the United States – with the power to electronically create money out of thin air, bail out insolvent Wall Street megabanks, balloon its balance sheet to $8.8 trillion without one elected person on its Board while the U.S. taxpayer is on the hook for 98 percent of that, and allow its Dallas Fed Bank President to make directional bets on the market by trading in and out of million dollar S&P 500 futures during a declared national emergency – has carved out a no-law zone around itself.
The latest ruckus stems from the Fed’s release on December 30 of the names of the 23 Wall Street trading houses and the billions they borrowed under its cumulative $11.23 trillion emergency repo loan facility that the Fed launched on September 17, 2019 – four months before the first case of COVID-19 was reported in the United States by the CDC on January 20, 2020. (The $11.23 trillion figure represents the cumulative amounts borrowed from September 17, 2019 to the conclusion of the program on July 2, 2020. The Fed has thus far released the names of the banks and amounts borrowed for the last 14 days of September 2019 and the final quarter of 2019.)
On January 3, Wall Street On Parade published an article titled: There’s a News Blackout on the Fed’s Naming of the Banks that Got Its Emergency Repo Loans; Some Journalists Appear to Be Under Gag Orders.
The day after the article ran, we got a call from the well-known economist Michael Hudson. We explored the Fed’s actions in some detail with Hudson since he planned to discuss the article in an interview he had scheduled with Ed Norton on the topic of “What Is Causing So Much Inflation.” (You can watch the program and read the transcript here.)