STOCK MARKET WATCH - Tuesday, 19 June 2012

[Demeter]

8. Robert Scheer: See You at the Club: Fed Fat Cats Dip Into the Till

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/see_you_at_the_club_fed_fat_cats_dip_into_the_till_20120614/

...On Tuesday, Sen. Bernie Sanders, acting under authority of the Dodd-Frank financial regulations, released the conclusions of a Government Accountability Office report showing that ” ... during the financial crisis, at least 18 former and current directors from Federal Reserve Banks worked in banks and corporations that collectively received over $4 trillion in low-interest loans from the Federal Reserve.”

One of those Fed directors, Jamie Dimon, chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, who has been on the New York Fed board since 2007, testified before Congress on Wednesday that he was sorry his company lost billions in risky trading even after all of the warnings concerning too-big-to-fail banks.

Dimon—whose company last year paid him $24 million, compared to the $45,800 median U.S. family income—testified that the bank could manage its own affairs. But that is hardly reassuring given that the Fed provided JPMorgan Chase $391 billion in total assistance as well as paying the bank to administer the government’s emergency lending program. It was the Fed that back in March of 2008 made $29 billion available to Dimon’s bank so it could acquire beleaguered Bear Stearns; the Fed also agreed to purchase Bear Stearns’ most toxic assets before the merger.

Such sweetheart deals are the norm, and they are further illustrated by the case of Stephen Friedman, chairman of the New York Fed board, on which Dimon serves. Friedman simultaneously was a director at Goldman Sachs when the N.Y. Fed allowed Goldman to become a bank holding company and thereby become eligible for cheap Fed loans. Thanks to a plea by then-New York Fed President Timothy Geithner that Friedman be granted a waiver from conflict-of-interest rules, he continued to own and buy additional Goldman stock. Friedman ended up with $13 million in stock whose value was bolstered by Fed assistance to Goldman totaling $814 billion. And Geithner ended up becoming President Barack Obama’s treasury secretary...

AND THERE'S SO MUCH MORE...SEE LINK