Yesterday, the Daily Telegraph reported that an executive at banking giant ING has said that the US Federal Reserve (Fed) could be forced to bail-out Wall Street in the event of a stock market crash.
Bob Honan, global chief investment officer at ING, was reported as saying that the US central bank could go down the same road as the Japanese government in 2002 and 2009 when it was forced to rescue failing financial institutions during the banking crisis.
Asked whether the Fed might buy up stocks to prevent a meltdown on Wall Street, Honan said: ‘I think so. You saw it in Japan, where the government was at a certain moment holding 10% of all the equity in Japan.’
He continued: ‘Even with some market crashes, the Fed or the ECB (European Central Bank) step in. You don’t notice it but it acts like a kind of safety buffer.’
As the Telegraph article noted, an intervention by the central banks to buy up shares to try to prevent a stock market crash ‘would be highly controversial as it would effectively mean that soaring stock valuations are being underwritten by central banks.’
At present, the policy of the Fed is not to openly buy up stocks on Wall Street.
This was bluntly stated by its new chairman, Kevin Warsh, who, at the weekend, explicitly ruled out the central bank bailing out Wall Street or supporting inflated stock market prices.
In fact, the Fed has been quietly bailing out Wall Street since last year.
In January 2026, it was revealed that the Fed had ‘quietly delivered’ nearly half a trillion dollars to Wall Street, with virtually no strings attached, through an obscure governmental financial programme intended for banks struggling to make cash payments.
This vast sum, nearly equivalent to that handed out to prevent US banks from collapse following the 2008 banking crisis, is on paper intended to help banks that are short on cash so they can continue to lend to the public and businesses.
But such is the opaque nature of these transactions that there is the fear that all this money is instead headed straight into the hands of hedge funds and other financial speculators and used to make risky bets on the stock markets.
These ‘risky bets’ – mainly concentrated in the high tech AI industries – have led to the overvaluation of US stocks that has now soared past the level that brought Wall Street and the world stock market crashing down in 1929.
The fact that Warsh, appointed by Trump with the remit to prop up Wall Street and the US banking system, has so vehemently ruled out the Fed actively buying up stocks is a clear indication that this is uppermost in his mind.
The Bank of England and the ECB both declined to comment on the prospect of them intervening directly to try to prop up stock markets from a crash that is becoming inevitable.
Last month, the Bank for International Settlements (the central bank for central banks) issued a dire warning that the global financial system is at risk from the massive debt-fuelled speculative frenzy driving the AI bubble that dominates Wall Street and the entire economy of the US.
All these dire warnings about the impending crash of the world capitalist economy go unheeded by the multi-billionaire capitalists and bankers.
They are relying on the capitalist state to bail them out by forcing the working class internationally to pay the price by inflicting mass poverty and unemployment on them – far greater than that suffered in the aftermath of the 1929 crash and the Great Depression that followed.
Today, the powerful working class will never accept being driven into poverty and destitution by a bankrupt capitalist system that has reached the end of the road.
The working class has the power to resolve this crisis by demanding the trade unions act and call general strikes to bring down their capitalist governments and go forward to workers governments and socialism.
Putting an end to capitalism with the victory of the world socialist revolution is the only way forward.
