Over the past week, Robert Kaplan, chairman of the Federal Reserve's Dallas Regional Fed, has been "on fire."
Since Friday, 11 of the 12 U.S. regional feds have disclosed the financial and financial transactions of their top officials in 2020, and these public disclosures have helped people understand the financial situation of those who set the central bank's monetary policy.
Then, Dallas Fed President Kaplan is on fire — the reason for the fire is his frequent huge transactions and huge investment returns in 2020, and the following is Kaplan's 2020 table on transactions.
As you can see from the table, Kaplan holds a total of 27 stocks, funds or alternative assets, each worth more than $1 million, while Kaplan has made multiple multi-million dollar buy-and-sell transactions in 2020 alone, including Apple, Google, Alibaba, Amazon, Facebook and other technology stocks, and he has also bought and sold iShares floating-rate bond ETFs, which track the price of bonds under five years and are directly influenced by the Fed's interest rate policies and expectations.
You know, Kaplan in 2020, but the Federal Open Market Committee voting committee. You decide the interest rate policy of the central bank yourself, and then you buy and sell stocks yourself, which is really a good time and place, no wonder you can make so much money!
Kaplan has always been one of the top financial elite in the United States, having worked for the well-known investment bank Goldman Sachs for more than 20 years, once rising to vice chairman and responsible for Goldman Sachs' investment banking business until his departure in 2006. He has been president of the Dallas Fed since 2015 and has also served as a professor at Harvard Business School.
Why have these deals in Kaplan in 2020 received so much attention?
You know, Richard Fisher, the former chairman of the Dallas Fed, has also had a lot of asset transactions, but none of them have attracted the attention of Kaplan.
Because, the Fed released a huge amount of money and credit in 2020, while the US stock market continued to refresh the record high under the release of liquidity.
Here, I would like to explain additionally the structure of the U.S. Central Bank.
According to the Federal Reserve Act, the United States is divided into 12 Federal Reserve Districts, each district set up a Federal Reserve bank in a designated central city, and the Federal Reserve System was established in Washington, D.C., which includes two bodies, the Management Committee and the Open Market Committee, which is commonly known as the "Federal Reserve".
The Fed Governing Council is composed of 7 members, including one Chairman and one Vice-Chairman and five members, who must be nominated by the President of the United States and approved by the U.S. Senate for a term of fourteen years (the President and Vice-President are elected for a term of four years and may be re-elected).
The Federal Open Market Committee is composed of 12 members, including all 7 members of the Federal Reserve Board, with the President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York holding a fixed seat and the remaining 4 seats rotated by the presidents of the 11 Federal Reserve Banks.
In 2020, Dallas Fed President Kaplan rotated the members of the Open Market Committee.
In the structure of the Central Bank of the United States, 12 Federal Reserve Banks, also known as the Federal Reserve, belong to the non-profit private institutions, which manage more than 4,000 commercial banks (all commercial banks in the United States are private banks), they are called "member banks", these 4,000 banks, is the real "shareholder" of the Federal Reserve, the following figure is where the 12 Federal Reserve banks are located.
On the other hand, the Federal Reserve, which includes the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Open Market Committee, belongs to government agencies, and these personnel will be questioned by the US Congress at any time as needed, so the Fed is a dual structure of government agencies + non-profit institutions, similar to public-private partnerships.
Because it holds a large number of Treasuries and real estate mortgage bonds (MBS), the Fed has a large amount of interest income every year, but almost all of this income is handed over to the U.S. Treasury Department — for example, in 2020, the Fed's net profit will reach $88.8 billion, and the U.S. Treasury will hand over profits of $88.5 billion.
Based on longstanding practice, the ethical agreements that the Federal Reserve Board and the Regional Fed adhere to are roughly similar:
1) Employees are prohibited from using non-public information for profit;
2) Officials cannot trade before and after the Fed decision, and many securities have a holding period of 30 days;
3) Prohibition of holding and trading in securities of regulated banks;
4) The chairman and the governor are required to disclose their financial activities every year;
……
To be sure, Kaplan's deals are legal — in line with Fed rules, and a Dallas Fed spokesman made it clear that the deals were "fully vetted and approved by the bank's legal counsel."
Although Powell has not yet spoken on the issue, John C. Williams, the fed's third in command and president of the New York Fed, expressed his views on the Kaplan incident: "Transparency measures regarding trading activities are crucial,......, but whether these policies should be reviewed or changed, I think this is a broader question, and I don't have a specific answer at the moment." ”
Faced with a wave of skepticism, Kaplan promised that he would sell his personal holdings by September 30.
But I think that today, when American politics is extreme, Kaplan's statement is probably far from enough, his behavior is destined to damage the fed's credibility, the Fed's crazy printing of money in 2020 has triggered extreme antagonism in the United States, and the Kaplan incident will be another weight.
You should say that even the central bankers who set monetary policy buy and sell their own stocks to make money, and US imperialism is really too dark!
What I'm trying to say is, don't you know that now?
The Kaplan affair doesn't make much sense other than to show that America's top financial elite sometimes "Too young, too simple."
With the deepening of the virtualization and financialization of the economies of various countries, the combination of the financial system and power is almost the same in any country, and only these big figures of US imperialism have honestly reported the asset information they trade in detail, which has triggered a blatant wave in the market.
A big man like Kaplan, I wonder, why doesn't he trade with the account of his sister-in-law and even a classmate? Do you have to choose to play in person? Is it that trust between people in the United States is too difficult to build, or is the supervision of american imperialism super strict?
Given the American cultural system, I personally suspect that the reason is the former.
In fact, I am 99.99% sure that the way the elites of various countries want people to make a lot of money in the financial market is almost always from the advantage of information, from the internal information they know, and the possibility of really relying on what ordinary people call "technical analysis" and "value investment" is almost zero.
Didn't you remember that just before the education and training stocks of China stocks plummeted in 2021, there was a famous fund that cleared its very high positions of education and training stocks, and not long before, the head of this fund also vowed on TV: "Education is an investment that never needs to be withdrawn!" ”
Why ordinary people in the financial market are generally very miserable, on the one hand, of course, because of human nature; on the other hand, because there are so many big people who make money in the financial market and make a lot of money, then most of the other ordinary people who have no information advantage and lack enough valuable insider information are not only one way to lose money to these big people.
Being born as human beings, participating in the financial markets, before going to the market, we first think clearly about our own leek essence, and trade on this basis, which may be more important than anything else.