By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 18, 2018 ~  Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein famously said in 2009 at the height of the financial crisis that he was “doing God’s work.” What Goldman Sachs was actually doing in secret at that time was receiving billions of dollars in undisclosed loans from the Federal Reserve – often at the insanely low interest rate of .01 percent. Goldman was also living off billions of dollars in publicly acknowledged taxpayer bailouts, while paying out obscene bonuses to its executives, including those who had shorted (made bets against) the U.S. housing market as it collapsed into the greatest disaster since the Great Depression. (See related articles below.) Last week we received an unsolicited direct mail offer from Goldman Sachs. It was offering us the ability to borrow a personal loan ranging from $3500 to $40,000 with rates ranging from 6.99 to 24.99 percent. The … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 15, 2018 ~  On Monday Reuters reported that “a judge in Mexico has issued an arrest warrant for the country head of U.S. investment bank JPMorgan for alleged fraud….” Details about the arrest warrant were provided the same day in a lawsuit filed in the Federal District Court for the Southern District of New York. The lawsuit explained that “…a prosecutor has conducted a criminal investigation into fraud by J.P. Morgan. Based on the preliminary evidence collected, the prosecutor recently (in June 2018) requested that a judge detain Eduardo Cepeda, the chairman of the board and chief executive officer of Defendant’s Mexican unit, and former J.P. Morgan managing director Miguel Barbosa. Upon review of the evidence presented by the prosecutor, a criminal court judge has found the elements of felony fraud in the amount of $100 million, and issued a detention order for … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 14, 2018 ~ Finance Professor John Griffin and fellow researcher Amin Shams, both at the University of Texas, released a study yesterday that is causing alarm bells to ring for investors in Bitcoin and other digital currencies. Titled “Is Bitcoin Really Un-Tethered?” the researchers found strong evidence that Tether, another digital currency, is being used to artificially support the price of Bitcoin when it comes under selling pressure. Griffin and Shams found further that “Tether seems to be used both to stabilize and manipulate Bitcoin prices.” Bitcoin soared over 1400 percent last year but has been selling off this year. It’s lost about 70 percent from the peak it set last year. The researchers write: “To illustrate the potential magnitude and predictive effect of Tether issuances on Bitcoin prices, we focus on the hours with the largest lagged combined Bitcoin and Tether flows on … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 13, 2018 ~  Yesterday the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) quietly dropped a bomb on the relationship that the behemoth Wall Street firm Merrill Lynch has with its institutional clients. For those willing to skip past the timid press release from the SEC and dig carefully through the Administrative Proceeding Order, there was this startling revelation: Merrill Lynch had charged obscene markups (profits for the house) on bond trades over a three and a half-year period that were in two cases cited 23 times and 3 times the industry prescribed legal limit of less than 5 percent. Merrill Lynch agreed to settle the charges by paying $10.5 million in disgorgement to its ripped-off customers and to pay penalties of $5.2 million to the SEC. Merrill Lynch is best known as a firm with 15,000 brokers (financial advisors) in branch offices across the United … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 12, 2018 ~ Last Friday, Steven Pearlstein, a Pulitzer Prize-winning business and economics columnist at the Washington Post, penned an in-depth article on the hubris of stock buybacks and the role they are playing in retarding future growth of the U.S. economy as well as fueling the next debt implosion. That dire warning was followed yesterday by equally ominous remarks delivered at the progressive think tank, the Center for American Progress, by newly appointed SEC Commissioner Robert J. Jackson, Jr. (Jackson was appointed by President Trump to fill a Democratic seat on the SEC.) Pearlstein outlined the looming problem as follows: “Last year, public companies spent more than $800 billion buying back their own shares and, thanks to all the cash freed up by the recent tax bill, Goldman Sachs estimates that share buybacks will surge to $1.2 trillion this year. That comes … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 11, 2018 ~   Most Americans are not aware that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) had the opportunity to stop Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme 16 years before he confessed in 2008. In 1992, the SEC settled an investigation against two Florida accountants, Frank Avellino and Michael Bienes. The duo had been raising money for Bernie Madoff to “invest” for their clients for 30 years by handing out promissory notes to investors that promised returns of 13.5 percent or higher. Avellino and Bienes sold over $440 million in these unregistered notes to thousands of unwitting investors. The Avellino and Bienes matter was settled by the SEC with an order for the accountants to stop selling unregistered securities and with Madoff returning the money. No inquiry was made into where Madoff obtained the funds to pay back investors. The SEC did not lay a finger on … Continue reading →

  By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 8, 2018 ~ A long-tenured cartoonist at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has recently had his anti-Trump cartoons censored by the editorial director at the newspaper. Yesterday the New York Times reported that the Justice Department has seized years of one of its reporters’ email and phone records. Before we get to those details, it’s important to look at the backdrop around these actions. Four days after Donald Trump’s inauguration as President on January 20, 2017 he began a propaganda campaign against a free press in the United States on his Twitter page, labeling major media outlets as “Fake News.” According to the searchable database of Trump Tweets, he has since that time posted a total of 230 Tweets calling out major media as “Fake News.” Former FBI Director James Comey wrote in a memo regarding a February 2017 meeting he had with the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 7, 2018 ~ Short memories are going to once again doom millions of stock market investors who are getting their advice from Wall Street’s minions of deeply conflicted analysts and brokers. This is a good time to reflect on the fact that when the dot.com bubble went bust from 2000 to 2002 it wiped 78 percent of the value off the Nasdaq stock index. In the midst of the crash, this is how Ron Chernow correctly described what was happening for New York Times’ readers on March 15, 2001: “Let us be clear about the magnitude of the Nasdaq collapse. The tumble has been so steep and so bloody — close to $4 trillion in market value erased in one year —  that it amounts to nearly four times the carnage recorded in the October 1987 crash.” Chernow characterized the Nasdaq stock market … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 6, 2018 ~  Several early warning signs emerged in the stock market yesterday. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index closed at a record high but every major Wall Street bank with large exposures to derivatives closed in the red yesterday. Leading the decliners were Deutsche Bank with a loss of 1.61 percent; Morgan Stanley closed down 1.49 percent; Bank of America lost 0.95 percent while Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase were in the red by less than one percent. But the red ink didn’t stop there. Five of the seven U.S. insurance companies that were singled out in the 2017 Financial Stability Report from the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Financial Research also closed in the red yesterday. The five insurers showing losses of less than one percent were Ameriprise Financial, Hartford Financial Services Group, Lincoln National Corp., Prudential Financial and Voya Financial. Two … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 5, 2018 ~ The Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation that was passed in 2010 required that publicly traded companies report publicly how much the CEO makes compared to the median salary of workers. The Securities and Exchange Commission, with its close ties to Wall Street, stonewalled for years in passing the final rule and had to be pressured and publicly embarrassed in open letters from members of Congress before it finally implemented the rule. As a result, eight years later, we are finally seeing the hard numbers that define CEO greed in America. In May, Democratic Congressman Keith Ellison from Minnesota’s 5th District released a study on the new data that was being released. The study was titled “Rewarding or Hoarding: An Examination of Pay Ratios Revealed by Dodd-Frank.” Among the key findings in the study were the following: Two-thirds of the richest 1 … Continue reading →