By “selective universities,” I mean places like Ivy League schools, along with places like Stanford, MIT, Duke, and the Chicago. Such schools admit only a small fraction of their applicants. However, to reassure both insiders and outsiders that they are open to admitting a broad range of students–whatever their socioeconomic background–these schools also have large numbers of people working departments of admissions to screen and evaluate applicants.
Leadership positions in the United States are held disproportionately by graduates of a small number of highly selective private colleges. Less than half of one percent of Americans attend Ivy-Plus colleges (the eight Ivy League colleges, Chicago, Duke, MIT, and Stanford). Yet these twelve colleges account for more than 10% of Fortune 500 CEOs, a quarter of U.S. senators, and three-fourths of Supreme Court justices appointed in the last half-century.
From the abstract of the paper, they summarize the results this way (emphasis is mine):
We use anonymized admissions data from several colleges linked to income tax records and SAT and ACT test scores to study the determinants and causal effects of attending Ivy-Plus colleges (Ivy League, Stanford, MIT, Duke, and Chicago). Children from families in the top 1% are more than twice as likely to attend an Ivy-Plus college as those from middle-class families with comparable SAT/ACT scores. Two-thirds of this gap is due to higher admission rates for students with comparable test scores from high-income families; the remaining third is due to differences in rates of application and matriculation. In contrast, children from high-income families have no admissions advantage at flagship public colleges. The high-income admissions advantage at Ivy-Plus colleges is driven by three factors: (i) preferences for children of alumni, (ii) weight placed on nonacademic credentials, and (iii) athletic recruitment. Using a new research design that isolates idiosyncratic variation in admissions decisions for waitlisted applicants, we show that attending an Ivy-Plus college instead of the average flagship public college increases students’ chances of reaching the top 1% of the earnings distribution by 50%, nearly doubles their chances of attending an elite graduate school, and almost triples their chances of working at a prestigious firm. The three factors that give children from high-income families an admissions advantage are uncorrelated or negatively correlated with postcollege outcomes, whereas academic credentials such as SAT/ACT scores are highly predictive of postcollege success.
In the paper, they write:
We consider a counterfactual admissions scenario in which colleges eliminate the three factors that drive the admis- sions advantage for students from high-income families—legacy preferences, the weight placed on nonacademic ratings, and the differential recruitment of athletes from high-income families—and refill slots with students who have the same distribution of test scores as the current class. Such an admissions policy would increase the share of students attending Ivy-Plus colleges from the bottom 95% of the parental income distribution by 8.8 percentage points …
The selective private colleges that are the focus of this study are what economists sometimes call “donative nonprofits,” meaning that they rely on donations (and earnings from an endowment based on those donations) as a major form of income. From a financial point of view, it is unsurprising that a donative nonprofit–with the potential for large future donations in mind–would tend to favor children of alumni or those from the top 1% of the income distribution over other applicants with equivalent test scores. But it’s useful to be clear on what’s happening here: when these selective schools tell potential applicants that they don’t just look at test scores, but instead use a variety of nonacademic criteria like being “well-rounded” or “authentic” for admissions, the actual result of their process is that applicants from families in the top 1% of the income distribution are admitted at a higher rate than others with the same test scores.
Just days after DCReport revealed the New York Fed quietly removed caps on emergency lending, the central bank injected another $34 billion into Wall Street—amid rising turmoil in precious metals markets.
On Sunday evening the New York Federal Reserve made another gigantic infusion of cash into one or more Wall Street banks.
On Monday DCReport revealed that after going more than five years with little to no cash infusions from the New York fed, one or more of the big Wall Street banks has been requiring gigantic infusions of cash since Halloween. On the day after Christmas at 8:00 in the morning there was a $17 billion cash infusion, our economics correspondent James S. Henry discovered.
Things have taken a turn for the worse.
On Sunday December 28th at 5 PM, when banks are closed, the New York Fed infused one or more Wall Street banks with $34 billion of cash.
Soon after, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange tightened requirements to speculate in silver and gold. The CME, as it’s known to traders, said this was a routine action to make sure the silver and gold markets remain liquid and firm.
The CME said the tightening was in response to volatility in the market for those two precious metals. That announcement went to subscribers to its alerts and was not reported, as best we can tell, in major press reports.
Cash infusions to banks are a standard operating practice. Sometimes banks get short on cash. But from early July of 2020 until Halloween there were virtually no such deals by the New York Fed helping Wall Street banks.
Then, in a scary move, one or more of the banks got $51 billion of cash on Halloween. The cash infusions from Friday and Sunday also equaled that amount. These huge cash infusions come after the New York Fed lifted the caps on how much the banking industry can get in emergency cash infusions.
The NYFed’s poorly worded Dec. 10 announcement went unreported by major news organizations.
At DCReport we think it’s an ominous sign that the NYFed is expecting more and larger cash calls soon. Why else would it make such a policy change?
The New York Fed does not disclose which banks benefit from these cash infusions, but people who follow precious metals markets and other speculative moves have been pointing for weeks to JP Morgan, the nation’s largest bank. One of JP Morgan’s units disclosed that it sold about 5,900 tons of silver it does not own in what’s known in the trade as a “short sale.”
Just as you can make money by buying something and holding on to it in the hope the price will rise, speculators can also do the opposite.
If you think the price of a commodity or any other assets are going to fall you can sell it at a high price hoping to buy it back at low price and profit off the price drop. The trading desks at the big banks do this by borrowing shares they don’t own or in some cases making “naked” sales of shares they don’t have at all.
The danger in a short sale is that if the price goes up there’s no limit to how much money you can lose.
Since the beginning of the year the price of silver has roughly tripled. That means those who sold short last year are in a squeeze and face cash calls that must be answered the same day if the price of silver or gold rises.
Christmas week the price rose to more than $84 on one of the metals exchanges and then fell 15% to a less than $72 a troy ounce. On another exchange the price didn’t rise quite as high before it fell 11.5% on the last day of 2025.
The concern here is not that the Fed can, and from time to time does, infuse banks with cash to cover shortfalls. It does this through a mechanism called a Repo in which the bank puts up collateral to cover the cash infusion. The rules include a sophisticated shield from federal Bankruptcy Court filings and with super low interest rates.
The issue is that after five years and three months with virtually no such cash infusions there’s suddenly a spate of them, three of them gigantic.
The Fed in New York has removed limits on the amount of cash it will provide the banking industry, although it is limiting individual banks to between $80 billion and $240 billion per day, depending on how you read its announcement.
Add the fact that the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, after reviewing silver and gold market volatility, tightened up on speculation in silver and gold and these are clear early warning signs of trouble.
The last time we saw big cash shortfalls on Wall Street we saw the collapse of the economy in 2008. By some measures the Great Recession was more damaging and more enduring in the harm it caused than the Great Recession that began in 1929.
Families whose head was 35 or younger in 2008 were essentially wiped out financially. Research by a California business school professor says the effect has been to wipe out the economy – the equivalent of two full years of all the economic activity in the U.S. since 2008. This means America is tens of trillions of dollars behind where it would be but for the misdeeds of Wall Street financiers during the George W. Bush administration, which basically let bankers ignore long established banking practices to minimize risk of systemic failures.
We still haven’t seen a word about this in any major publication that covers Wall Street.
Jim Henry and I know from experience that many of the journalists who cover Wall Street are masterful at developing sources and explaining what they’re told, but unlike DCReport they don’t routinely scour public disclosures, and they don’t have a deep understanding of the law and banking regulations, making them captive to their sources.
We also have yet to hear back from JPMorgan, five of whose spokespeople we reached out to for their side of this story. If and when they do reply, we will give you a full report of their stance.
Why This Matters
Emergency lending is a stress signal. Repo operations are routine—but sudden, repeated, and massive infusions after years of inactivity suggest acute liquidity strain, not normal operations.
The caps were lifted for a reason. Regulators do not remove limits on emergency funding unless they expect bigger and more frequent cash calls ahead.
Market volatility can trigger same-day crises. In commodities trading, losses—especially from short positions—can generate same-day margin calls with no grace period.
Precious metals are flashing warning lights. A rapid run-up in silver prices increases the risk of unlimited losses for short sellers, forcing urgent cash demands.
Opacity raises systemic risk. Because the New York Fed does not identify recipient banks, markets—and the public—cannot assess who is exposed or how concentrated the risk may be.
History offers a cautionary tale. The last time Wall Street faced cascading liquidity shortfalls, it preceded the 2008 financial collapse, whose economic damage is still felt today.
Silence from major outlets matters. When sweeping policy changes and emergency actions go largely unreported, early warning signals can be missed—until consequences spill into the real economy.
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New Year’s Day feels like a time to reminisce about times past, to speculate about times to come, and to reflect and worry about one’s place along the journey. A concern that I perhaps share with others is that the pathway to future happiness may seem like a narrow one, so that my choices could so easily turn out to be incorrect, with catastrophic long-term consequences. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1841 essay “On Self-Reliance” offers a number of reflections on this theme, include modern-sounding admonitions to trust your own intuition and ideas, and to push back as needed against social pressures and expectations.
The essay is perhaps best-known today for Emerson’s aphorism: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” In other words, feeling an internal pressure to “be consistent” is another of those social pressures and expectations that should be critiqued and reconsidered. (Of course, being automatically opposed to social pressures and expectations would be another example of a “foolish consistency.” And making a change rather than giving in to “foolish consistency,” but then feeling compelled to stick to the change as new experience and evidence emerges, may only exchange one foolish consistency for another. I suspect that Emerson underestimates the difficulties of discerning, enunciating, and believing in one’s own intuition and ideas. Also, the possibility of “foolish consistency” does not rule out the possibility that a wise consistency may be a hallmark of great minds. This stuff isn’t easy.)
But on this re-reading of Emerson’s essay, I was struck by a comment that he attibutes to Caliph Ali: “Thy lot or portion of life is seeking after thee; therefore be at rest from seeking after it.”
The phrase appears as the saying numbered XV in a 1717 manuscript Sentences of Ali, Son-in-law of Mohamet, and his fourth successor, translated from an authentick Arabick manuscript in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, by Simon Ockley. Caliph Ali (c 600-661) was a cousin and son-in-law of Muhammad.
Imagine that looking for your true long-term happiness, for your destiny, is like searching for a needle in a haystack. If so, the task may seem impossible. But now imagine that you are rolling around the haystack, or perhaps more apropos, that the haystack is also rolling around you. You become much more likely to be pricked with that needle, whether you are carefully searching for it or not, especially if you remain sensitive to the presence of the needle. I know that I’m a lucky guy. But many of the deepest connections and joys in my personal and work life in large part seemed to come seeking after me, and my task was to notice when they pricked my attention. May you experience your destiny seeking you in the year to come.
Everybody is doing their annual wrap-ups, cataloging the ups and downs of 2025, celebrating the rise of the resistance, predicting success in the midterms in November, trashing Trump and MAGA.
Fine. I’ll go along with all that, as far as it goes.
This year reminds me of the YouTube show “Fuck This House” created by comedian Deric Cahill, whose perpetual need to repair the baseboard beneath the kitchen sink resides at the front of his mind like the Supreme Court – it’s going to break your back, and still you can’t fix it.
That’s the way I feel about the whole year. Even the wins weren’t really wins. Every time a district court judge issued an injunction against some outrage by Kristi Noem or tried to stop the firing of several thousand civil servants from a damaged governmental department like Education, the Supreme Court would use its fucking rocket docket to dump a bucket of shit all over rationality and the rule of law.
Look out the window. We have masked Nazis running amok in our streets. Did you grow up thinking that one day, we too would have our own Gestapo terrorizing an entire population of people just because they’re not walking around with proof of citizenship? I thought we were done with stop and frisk. Now it’s stop and throw on the ground and stomp their necks and toss them in cages.
Overseas it’s been no better, in some ways, even worse. Israel quite literally bombed Gaza back to the Stone Age. Russia is still rocketing kindergartens and maternity hospitals and murdering civilians in their beds in Kyiv. If another war breaks out in Africa, the continent will detach itself and drift south until it hits Antarctica.
Vladimir Putin seems to be aspiring to evil heretofore achieved only by Hitler and Stalin. And Donald Trump? Don’t even get me started. His hands appear to be falling off, and he’s going to have to install Ted Nugent in a Vegas-style residence at the Kennedy Center if he wants the place to continue to provide “performing arts” as its purpose was envisioned when it first opened in 1971. If he adds any more gold leaf to the White House, they’ll have to jack the place up and drill holes for new concrete piers to keep it from subsiding into the land-filled coastal floodplain that it was built on.
I swore to myself at one point in my career that I would never write anything with the word “dystopian” in it, but that pledge is out the fucking window with this column. This country has dumbed-down and red-necked itself into a level of promiscuous depravity and dishonor that would have been unimaginable to my own parents and grandparents, not to mention my ancestors who were not only present at the country’s founding 250 years ago but helped to provide something that now seems almost quaint: moral principles.
We have work to do. That’s the best I can say. We still have enough good, thinking, reasonable people that we can get that work done. We are not yet doomed, but a lot of our fellow Americans want our dream of self-government to fail, and they’re coming close to making that happen. Our love of this country can save us, but we’d better get busy spreading it around.
I’m taking tomorrow off. I’ll see you next year. I need your support now more than ever. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber.
Do you know what week it is? It’s the week between Christmas and New Years. People are off work for the holidays. Lots of people on the slopes out in Colorado and Wyoming; thousands on Cruise ships enjoying the sun in the Caribbean; families gathering at home to celebrate the holidays.
It’s a happy season: sun, surf, slopes, golf…
But not at Mar a Lago. Down there in Palm Beach where Donald Trump goes to relax, there hasn’t been much relaxing and no golf at all over the weekend. Yesterday, Trump met with Volodymyr Zelensky for more than three hours to discuss how to bring an end to the War in Ukraine. Today, he met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to discuss… well, it wasn’t clear what they discussed or why the meeting even occurred in the first place.
The headlines out of both meetings were best described as blah. “Trump and Zelensky Meet to Iron Out Peace Plan, but Deal Remains Elusive,” the New York Times headlined yesterday. That headline could have been written six months ago. In fact, some version of it probably was. Today, the Times headline was even lamer: “President and Netanyahu Exchange Praise After Meeting Showing Few Signs of Strain.” Gee, I didn’t know Israel and the U.S. were getting along, did you? Trump is calling for his pal Netanyahu to get a pardon for his ongoing legal travails. There’s another forehead slapper I couldn’t have predicted, could you?
Trump’s meeting with the Ukrainian president was preceded and followed by lengthy conversations with his good buddy, Vladimir Putin. Yet another big surprise. And you’ll never guess what Putin was doing over the Christmas holidays: bombing the living shit out of Kyiv, Odessa, Kharkiv, and every other major population center in Ukraine, plunging hundreds of thousands into darkness by knocking out power. It’s what you do when you know peace is going to be on the table: unleash ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and swarms of drones. Then get on the blower and tell Trump how badly you want peace.
Listen to what Trump said about Putin’s desire for peace after wreaking four years of killing and destruction on his neighbor, Ukraine: “He wants to see it happen, he wants to see it. He told me very strongly,” Trump said of Putin’s desire for peace. “I believe him.”
Meanwhile, Putin sent out Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, to shoot down practically every idea discussed over lunch at Mar a Lago by Trump and Zelensky. No peacekeepers. No demilitarized zone. No “opportunity zone” in the Donbas, even after Trump has sent Witkoff and Kushner over to Moscow to talk business deals here, there, and everywhere.
Putin doesn’t want deals. He wants Ukraine.
Netanyahu is building military outposts from one end of Gaza to the other, and he’s got new settlements being built in the West Bank in areas they’ve never been before.
He doesn’t want peace with the Palestinians. He wants Gaza. He wants the West Bank. He wants the whole thing.
And we know all this. We know Putin doesn’t want peace; he wants more of Ukraine. He can’t settle for half a loaf now, after a million casualties, a broken economy, and pariah status for every Russian who wants to play in the villas they have on the Riviera or in condos in London that they can’t visit anymore. And we know Netanyahu isn’t going to let up after leveling Gaza and killing tens of thousands of civilians.
So what the fuck is Trump doing at Mar a Lago? The Golfer In Chief isn’t out there on the links. He’s meeting with Zelensky and Netanyahu and babbling to the press and doing his two-week thing that he always does when he has nothing to show for his peace-making. “It’s possible it doesn’t happen. In a few weeks, we’ll know one way or another.”
But he’s got his headlines. He’s got his photo ops. Hell, he pushed the Epstein files right out of the headlines.
You remember the Epstein files, don’t you? The day before Christmas…it seems like it was last month, but it was only five days ago...Trump’s DOJ found itself announcing that they had suddenly – surprise, surprise! – found one million new Epstein files. A million! And we know there’s good stuff in there, because most of them come from the Southern District in Manhattan out of the prosecution of Epstein in 2019 that put him behind bars for the first time since 2008. They presented evidence and testimony to a grand jury for three months. Can you imagine being one of 23 Manhattan grand jurors sitting in a room in a courthouse listening to prosecutors while they show you photos and papers and videos…all the stuff they found when they executed search warrants on Epstein’s townhouse in New York, and his Palm Beach mansion, and his ranch in New Mexico, and his island in the Caribbean.
Those million pages of Epstein files are crammed with the kind of stuff that Donald Trump doesn’t want anyone to see. Hell, today the New York Times published a long piece about Marjorie Taylor Greene in which she revealed that Trump told her if the Epstein files come out, “My friends will get hurt.”
Trump knew that profile of Greene was coming today. So yesterday and today he was doing one of the things he hates most in the world: He was holding meetings and listening to boring shit about making peace in Ukraine that he knows isn’t coming, and peace in Gaza that he knows is a pipe dream. And then he went before the press, which he hates, and he babbled a bunch of nonsense about his peace-making and his glorious conversations with his pal Putin, and he whined that after four years of Putin bombing and shelling and rocketing the shit out Ukraine, it was so unfair that Ukraine managed to hit one of Putin’s homes in the Novgorod region of Russia. “I was very angry about it,” Trump told reporters today at Mar a Lago. “It’s a delicate period of time. It’s another thing to attack his house.”
This after Putin over just the last couple of weeks sent thousands of missiles and drones across the border into Ukraine hitting apartment buildings, stores, rail depots, power stations, killing civilians, all with the purpose of terrorizing the people of Ukraine.
It’s been a delicate period of time for Ukraine for more than 1,400 days and nights since Russia invaded Ukraine in February of 2022. The houses of tens of thousands of Ukrainians have been destroyed by Russian bombs and rockets and drones. So, shut your fucking burger-hole about Putin and his fucking house.
Donald Trump doesn’t want peace in Ukraine or peace in Gaza. He knows what is in the Epstein files. He knows how many times they have found his name in there. He knows how many times he was on Epstein’s private jet. He knows where he went. He knows what he did. He wants to survive the biggest threat to himself and his presidency and his hold on the Republican Party that he has ever faced. He wants the whole Epstein files thing to go away.
But it’s not going away. He’ll probably make it to one of his golf courses tomorrow, but he’s going to be one miserable son of a bitch trying to hit that ball.
No rest for the weary here in Milford, either, covering Trump and Putin and the shit they’re doing day after bloody day. To support my work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.
Ominous signs that at least one of America’s “Too Big to Fail” banks is yet again seriously short of cash emerged this weekend in documents examined by James Henry, DCReport’s economics correspondent.
For the past two months the Federal Reserve has been silently injecting tens of billions of dollars of cash into banks. No one announced this. Henry found the evidence in public records that few, if any, Wall Street journalists consult, but that we routinely review at DCReport.
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York (NYFed), acting like a financial Santa Claus to recklessly naughty bankers, delivered $17 billion in cash to an unknown bank or banks at 8 AM the morning after Christmas.
That’s just the latest scary development that has gone unreported until now.
The sudden spate of cash shortfalls raises serious concerns about the stability of the largest banks and the utter failure of 21st Century regulators to identify problems and protect the public.
The sudden demands for cash to cover shortfalls began on Halloween. That day the NYFed injected more than $50 Billion into one or more unnamed banks. Since then, it has injected tens of billions into banks 14 times, delivering greenbacks galore roughly every third business day.
Contrast this with the five years beginning in July 2020. Virtually no such cash infusions were made during that time, as the graphic below from the NYFed website shows.
New York Federal Reserve Cash Infusions to Banks since mid-July 2020.
While the NYFed doesn’t identify which banks benefitted, other records Henry found indicate that major beneficiaries are Bank of America, Barclays, Citi, HSBC, UBS, and likely of greatest concern the nation’s largest bank holding company, JP Morgan Chase & Co.
There’s more. Cash infusions are likely to grow enormously—and soon.
In a vaguely worded NYFed policy change on Dec. 10—which not one of the major financial news organizations has reported—the Fed flung its vaults wide open to troubled banks. The only reason the NYFed would do this is because it has good reason to expect that cash infusion demands are about to balloon.
Unlimited Cash
“Going forward, standing overnight repo operations will no longer have an aggregate operational limit,” the NYFed said.
The vaguely worded announcement seems to tell bankers that they can get up to $240 Billion in cash each day to cover shortfalls. Even if read narrowly, the policy would allow cash infusions twice per day, so up to $80 billion per bank on any one day with no overall banking industry limit.
To give you an idea of how much money is involved consider this: together the six biggest banks earned $152 billion in profits last year, less than any two of them could get in cash on a single day by a narrow reading of the new policy.
To get the cash, banks hand over Treasury notes and bonds, mortgages, and other securities, known as a “repo.” Then they get to borrow cash at face value.
The banks also pay super-low interest rates, noted Bill Black, who as a banking regulator uncovered the savings and loan scandals three decades ago that resulted in almost 900 high-level bankers going to prison. And, Black notes, should their corporate parents seek refuge in bankruptcy courts the normal rules don’t apply, another little-known government favor for misbehaving bankers.
Recurring Problem
“This comes up about every five years,” Black said of banks turning to the Fed for cash. Indeed, other Fed records we examined basically confirm this pattern.
But why? Henry and Black both argue, reasonably, that banking regulators aren’t doing their job. Previously Black showed that the much ballyhooed “stress tests” for banks are designed to ensure that no bank fails. Henry has shown that big banks flout rules and even court orders that conditioned forgiveness for past misconduct on no repeats.
American banking has what I call the appearance of regulation, an issue I explored in my 1992 casino industry expose´ Temples of Chance.
Both Henry and Black should be hailed as a national heroes for looking out for the public’s wallets. Instead, Black is persona non grata on Capitol Hill and at banking regulatory functions while I’ve dealt with public officials and academics who snarl at the mention of Henry’s decades of work without citing any flaw.
During the Great Recession of 2008-10, JPMorgan got billions in bailout money. The bank says federal rules forced it to take the money.
Should America face a new Wall Street debacle, JP Morgan would likely get all the help it wants, perhaps even by forcing it to accept cash infusions.
Tons of Silver
JPMorgan Chase & Co. , the bank’s parent, is of particular concern because in mandatory disclosures, that few journalists examine but our Jim Henry did, the company revealed it is on the hook to deliver more than 5,900 tons of silver it doesn’t have. Tradeable silver is relatively scarce right now, government data shows.
The bank sold contracts for silver it didn’t own, expecting the price would fall. Then it planned to buy the contracts back for less, making a profit by selling high and buying low. This risky practice is known as “short selling.”
Buying stocks or other assets and holding them in the hope the price will rise is called “going long,” which is what most investors do because its less risky.
JP Morgan got caught in a squeeze because the spot price of silver has nearly tripled since Donald Trump took office, creating an exposure that I calculate at up to $13.7 billion, roughly equal to the profits JP Morgan earns every 90 days, though likely just a costly fraction of that.
Silver Squeeze
A big problem is that there’s not enough actual silver available for trading to get JP Morgan out of the squeeze it got into through unbridled greed. The more silver prices rise the more JP Morgan gets hurt.
Compounding this, Samsung has developed a powerful battery for electric vehicles that can go a thousand miles and recharge in under ten minutes. It requires roughly a kilo of silver for each car or truck. And while EV sales are falling in America, they are soaring in China, the world’s largest car market, and other places. About 90% of new cars sold in Norway are electric.
A smaller problem arises from the Trump administration, which on Christmas Day alone lobbed at least a dozen Tomahawk missiles at supposed Muslim extremists in Nigeria. Each Tomahawk used about 500 ounces of silver, currently priced at about $80 per ounce or $40,000 per missile.
DCReport emailed and texted five JPMorgan spokespeople on Sunday afternoon but has not heard back. That’s what we experienced in the past, but if the bank gets in touch we will promptly give you a full report on their stance.
Bad Bets
JP Morgan has a well-documented history of making wildly bad speculative bets, including a 2012 deal that ballooned into a loss of $6 Billion or so, a disaster it initially passed off to leading financial journalists as a minor matter.
The bank claimed that a hedge that was meant to reduce risk had “morphed” into a speculative and unauthorized bet by a London office trader, who was cashiered.
The reality, as I reported at the time, is that a hedge—a complex legal contract—can no more “morph” into a speculative bet than my marriage can morph into a dog. But go-along-to-get-along Wall Street journalists faithfully repeated the bank’s nonsense.
Deep concerns
The sudden spate of cash shortfalls raises serious concerns about the stability of the largest banks and the utter failure of 21st Century regulators to identify problems and protect the public.
Will Wall Street soon seek another huge bailout of the kind that the George W. Bush administration forced on the public in its final months? Congressional leaders from both parties insisted in 2008 and 2009 that such a debacle would never again be allowed or become necessary. Do you believe that?
If you think there’s little to no chance that the Trump Administration will give Wall Street whatever it wants, keep in mind that Donald Trump just blew nearly $40 billion dollars of your money bailing out Argentina.
There’s an obvious question raised by the sudden need for serial and now unlimited cash infusions now: are we facing a repeat of the economic collapse of 2008, which by some measures caused deeper and more lasting harm than the Great Depression?
Huge Cost
The Great Recession cost America the value of two years of economic output, known as Gross Domestic Product, according to Prof. Alexander J, Field of Santa Clara University’s business school. His estimate fits my own back-of-the-envelope calculations back then when I was one of the few journalists critical of the bailout terms.
Ponder Prof. Field’s assessment for a moment – two years of all the economic activity of economic everyone in America down the drain, tens of millions of people wiped out financially with many yet to recoup, while instead of being prosecuted, or at least fired, the top bankers remain in power, their gigantic pay packages growing larger each year.
Henry calls these cash infusions “bankster socialism.” Henry is referring to the de facto policy of letting banks reap outsized profits when their speculative bets win big and shoving the losses onto the rest of us when they sour.
I agree. So long as shareholders aren’t at risk of being wiped out, top bank executives will keep engaging in financially dangerous behavior, aided by dubious accounting, and so called “stress tests” that were designed to ensure that the banks would pass no matter how shaky their financial condition. The winning bets, and Fed bailouts, increase the value of executive and board stock and stock options, the losses cost them noting.
Moral Bankers?
In a heads-we-win, tails-the-public picks up the losses, who but that rarest of rarities, a deeply moral banker, would do otherwise?
Henry views the recent cash infusions as eerily reminiscent of the NYFed bail-out of child rapist Jeffrey Epstein’s strange offshore firm Liquid Capital Funding 17 years ago. When Epstein’s capital evaporated, the New York Federal Reserve Bank stepped in with cash. Epstein’s firm failed anyway.
But why did NYFed intrude into a routine business failure? After all, capitalism is based in good part on the idea that businesses fail while better managed operations prosper. And why try to save an offshore firm?
Henry, a Yale University Global Justice Fellow who has spent decades exposing illicit financial transactions, notes that Bear Stearns, a venerable Wall Street investment house, owned 40% of the illiquid Liquid Funding. JP Morgan was also involved in the firm, which was partly a criminal tax dodge. Bear Stearns soon collapsed, costing many investors the bulk of their fortunes, as did the collapse of Lehman Brothers. In both cases rampant speculation, weak internal financial controls, and see-no-evil regulators bear the blame.
Let’s hope Wall Street journalists, and politicians, get onto this story now that DCReport has broken it. But don’t hold your breath.
“FREEDOM OF THE PRESS IS NOT JUST IMPORTANT TO DEMOCRACY, IT IS DEMOCRACY.” – Walter Cronkite. CLICK HERE to donate in support of our free and independent voice.
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