by Pam Martens and Russ Martens at Wall Street on Parade
It was one year ago that Wall Street On Parade raised a multitude of red flags about Raphael Bostic, the President of the Atlanta Fed. We have published the entirety of that article below so that our readers can see just how long it took both Bostic and the Atlanta Fed to come clean with the American people about his trading on Wall Street.
On Friday, Bostic released a seven-page statement in which he owned up to the following: failing to list a multitude of trades that were conducted on his behalf by trading firms on Wall Street over a period of five years; failing to properly report income on his assets on his financial disclosure forms; trading during blackout periods when trading was barred by the Federal Reserve; providing inaccurate values on his financial disclosure forms. The upshot was that Bostic had to restate his financial disclosure forms for the entire five-year period he has filed them at the Atlanta Fed , i.e., 2017 through 2021.
If a publicly-traded company had to restate its earnings and admit that it had lied to the American people for five straight years, you can bet that the CEO and CFO would be fired in short order by the Board of Directors. But the Board of the Atlanta Fed is sticking with Bostic – at least for now.
The Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, has referred the matter to the Fed’s Inspector General for an investigation. Unfortunately, that’s not a genuinely arms-length investigation since the Fed’s Inspector General reports to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. The Fed’s Inspector General is already investigating the trading conduct of at least two Fed officials: the former President of the Dallas Fed, Robert Kaplan, who traded in and out of S&P 500 futures contracts in lots of more than $1 million during the pandemic year of 2020; and the former President of the Boston Fed, Eric Rosengren, who traded Real Estate Investment Trusts and whose wife had a margin account with Citigroup, a mega bank supervised by the Fed. Both men resigned their posts when their improper trading conduct came to light. (See our in-depth archive on the Fed’s trading scandal here.)
Of particular note on the revised financial disclosure forms filed by Bostic are…
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