- Financial Survival Network
- Posts
- After Two Years, There’s Still No Law Enforcement Report On Former Dallas Fed President Robert Kaplan’s Trading Like a Hedge Fund Kingpin
After Two Years, There’s Still No Law Enforcement Report On Former Dallas Fed President Robert Kaplan’s Trading Like a Hedge Fund Kingpin
by Pam Martens and Russ Martens Wall Street on Parade
To understand how truly bizarre and alarming the trading scandal case involving former Dallas Fed President Robert Kaplan is, some important background is necessary:
Kaplan didn’t just trade in and out of stocks while a voting member of the interest-rate setting committee of the Fed (known as the Federal Open Markets Committee or FOMC); Kaplan also traded in and out of $1 million+ lots of S&P 500 futures. That is astonishing; unprecedented; and lacks any viable justification for a sitting Fed official. (See Kaplan’s financial disclosure forms from 2015 through 2020 while employed at the Dallas Fed.) Kaplan resigned from the Dallas Fed in September 2021, the same month that the trading scandal went viral in the news.
S&P 500 futures allow an individual to trade almost around the clock from Sunday evening to Friday evening, unlike stock exchanges in the U.S. which are open only on weekdays from 9:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. ET. S&P 500 futures gave Kaplan access to making directional bets on where the market would go after the stock market closed, which is typically when the Fed makes market-moving announcements.