The safeguards that failed at the Dallas Fed and the Boston Fed to stop their Presidents from trading like hedge fund wannabes should not have failed at the SEC-regulated Wall Street broker-dealers that placed these trades. The accounts at the trading firms for these two men should have been coded to indicate that the men came into regular contact with sensitive, market moving information. The nature and level of their trading should have triggered the immediate involvement of the firms’ compliance departments and a halt to the trading. (See our earlier report on how a dozen legal safeguards failed, that should not have failed, to stop these men from humiliating the central bank of the United States around the world.)
Newly unearthed documents now put Wall Street megabanks Goldman Sachs and Citigroup at the center of this trading scandal. Both Goldman Sachs and Citigroup are bank holding companies that are supervised by…wait for it…the Federal Reserve. (Their broker-dealer units are supervised by the SEC and other securities regulators.) The documents suggest that rather than functioning as an arms-length supervisor of the banks, some Fed officials have gotten cozy with Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, receiving perks from these supervised entities.