The term “taper tantrum” was coined a decade ago in May 2013, when then U.S. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke announced that the Fed would start tapering its Quantitative Easing (QE) policy of asset purchases at some vague future date. Total Fed assets then stood at $3.4 trillion, according to the official FRED data published by the St. Louis Fed, having risen from under $1 trillion in mid 2008 as a result of the QE policy that was unleashed during the 2008 crisis to prevent a meltdown of the system.
The large Wall Street banks and other financial speculators threw such a tantrum that they forced Bernanke to return to full-throttle QE before he had a chance to even lightly tap the brakes. As a result, total Fed assets kept rising to reach a high of $8.965 trillion in April 2022, which, along with even more aggressive QE by the ECB and other central banks, unleashed a hyperinflationary explosion throughout the world financial system – with the sanctions policy and the Green Reset providing the icing on the hyperinflationary cake.
In the last year, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell’s tightening efforts – purportedly designed to forestall a blowout of this hyperinflationary bubble — have raised interest rates from 0.08% in March 2022, to 4.57% in March 2023. He has even managed to taper slightly, with the Fed’s asset book dropping from $8.911 trillion to $8.342 trillion — $569 billion – in that same one-year period.
But even that tiny tapering has been more than enough to panic the gargantuan Wall Street banks that hold the majority of the world’s derivative bubble of $727 trillion (as of July 2022, the latest figures available from the Bank for International Settlements), which grew from $693 trillion in July 2021 and $669 trillion a year before that, while Powell was tapering.
Powell’s Congressional testimony from March 7 and 8 was widely read by the markets as signaling that the next FOMC meeting on March 22 would raise rates by 50 points, rather than the expected 25 points, and that regular 50 point increases would continue throughout 2023. When Silicon Valley Bank went belly-up on March 10, and a mixed federal jobs report was published that day, the bankers’ media machine went into high gear to inform anyone willing to listen that this crisis now means, surely, that the Fed will back off, and only increase rates by 25 points as earlier expected.
In fact, there is some evidence to bolster the theory that the SVB bankruptcy was intentionally induced, or at least hastened, by JPMorgan Chase and other Wall Street giants, in order to create the crisis they needed to back Powell down from aggressive tapering. For example, a March 9 Bloomberg News story was headlined “SVB Races To Prevent Bank Run as Funds Advise Pulling Cash,” and TheInformation.com on March 10 reported “rival banks including JPMorgan sought to convince some SVB customers to remove their funds.” Bloomberg then cited that article March 10, reporting “mega institutions such as JP Morgan Chase & Co sought to convince some SVB customers to move their funds Thursday by touting the safety of their [JPMorgan’s] assets.”
