By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 15, 2025 ~ The cognizant dissonance of watching scandal-ridden Fox News weekend host Pete Hegseth stonewall his way through a Senate confirmation hearing yesterday for the job of Secretary of Defense, as thousands of homes smolder in ruins in the suburbs of Los Angeles from a failure of the U.S. to properly address climate change, has a common thread – dark money from the fossil fuel industry. The science-fiction like world Americans now wake to each morning, which is set to become ever more surreal in five days, with 34-count convicted felon Donald Trump assuming the Presidency of the United States, is the product of four decades of the fossil fuel industry’s climate denial octopus of front groups. Two groups funded with fossil fuel money, the Heritage Foundation and American Leadership PAC are separately running ads pushing U.S. Senators to confirm Hegseth. (Watch the ads … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 13, 2025 ~ Most retirees have a significant part of their net worth in their homes. Until recent years, it was reasonable to assume that if you kept your home in good repair, your home would be standing for multiple generations. But as we learned from the impact of Hurricane Helene’s catastrophic rain events in North Carolina in September of last year, and from the ongoing devastating fires around Los Angeles today, a wood frame (a/k/a “stick-built”) home can be turned into a pile of smoldering rubble with little time to escape in this era of climate-change hellscapes. The main problem for Western North Carolina in September wasn’t wind speed – but over two feet of rainfall in some areas over three days that transformed scenic rivers into raging beasts that leveled homes, entire towns, roads, bridges, water mains and left some electric utility substations … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 10, 2025 ~ The indefatigable Dennis Kelleher, Co-Founder and CEO of the Wall Street watchdog, Better Markets, has just released his organization’s monthly newsletter for January 2025 and it’s a humdinger. Kelleher warns that the financial deregulators that incoming President Donald Trump has packed into his administration means “that the clock is ticking on a coming catastrophic financial crash that will likely be much worse than 2008.” Kelleher adds that this “is not hyperbole.” He cites evidence from past financial crashes, writing: “…there is always a lag after deregulation and the creation of artificial liquidity. That was true for ‘roaring ‘20s’ followed by the crash and Great Depression; the ‘great moderation’ of the early 2000s followed by the crash and Great Recession; the deregulation of the first Trump administration in 2017-2020 that led to the 2023 banking crisis when 3 of the 4 largest bank failures … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 7, 2025 ~ On July 31, 2023 the World Health Organization released a report on cigarette smoking. It noted the following: “The tobacco epidemic is one of the biggest public health threats the world has ever faced, killing over 8 million people a year around the world. More than 7 million of those deaths are the result of direct tobacco use while around 1.3 million are the result of non-smokers being exposed to second-hand smoke. “All forms of tobacco use are harmful, and there is no safe level of exposure to tobacco…. “Around 80% of the 1.3 billion tobacco users worldwide live in low- and middle-income countries, where the burden of tobacco-related illness and death is heaviest. Tobacco use contributes to poverty by diverting household spending from basic needs such as food and shelter to tobacco. This spending behaviour is difficult to curb because tobacco is so addictive.” Despite awareness for … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 6, 2025 ~ There is a precise date as to when the American public became overtly aware that the stock market structure had become outrageously rigged. That date is March 30, 2014 when famed author and former Wall Street veteran, Michael Lewis, went on 60 Minutes to proclaim: “The United States stock market, the most iconic market in global capitalism, is rigged.” When asked to explain just who it is that’s rigging the stock market, Lewis explained that it’s a “combination of these stock exchanges, the big Wall Street banks and high-frequency traders.” That 60 Minutes program occurred during President Obama’s administration. Not only was nothing materially done to stop the rigging during Obama’s eight years in office, but the rigging has grown in both size and complexity since then as hedge funds and Dark Pools take over large segments of stock market structure. Dark Pools are … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 31, 2024 ~ The Bank Policy Institute calls itself “a nonpartisan public policy, research and advocacy group…” In fact, it’s a registered lobbyist for the megabanks on Wall Street. The Chairman of its Board of Directors is Jamie Dimon, the Chair and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, the largest bank in the United States. The rest of its Board consists exclusively of the top executives of large banks, including Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Bank of America and Wells Fargo. So when the Bank Policy Institute decides to sue the Fed, one of the key regulators of the Wall Street megabanks, you can be certain that Jamie Dimon has a dog in this fight. (Plaintiffs in the lawsuit against the Fed, which was filed on Christmas Eve, include other bank-funded groups as well.) Dimon sits atop not just the largest bank in the U.S. but also the bank … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 30, 2024 ~ For the first time in decades of sending holiday gifts to family members through the U.S. Postal Service (USPS), the majority of the packages we sent did not arrive by Christmas Day, despite the fact that we mailed early. One package we sent to Minnesota from the east coast overshot its destination by 1,825 miles and went to California. It then had to travel all the way back. Other packages did not show up in the USPS tracking system for days, until we filed an inquiry with the U.S. Postal Service. One package that had to travel just four states away took 17 days. According to NASA, it takes approximately three days to travel 238,855 miles to the moon. (See thread posted below for how others describe the “wild journeys” their own USPS packages took.) Louis DeJoy, the Postmaster General, calls this … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 19, 2024 ~ If President-elect Donald Trump thought Fed Chair Jay Powell was going to be taking a loyalty oath to him, Trump got a rude awakening yesterday. The Fed cut interest rates by a quarter point yesterday but issued a statement suggesting that rate-cutting would be far more subdued next year than the market had expected. In response, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 1123 points, closing near its lows of the day and marking its 10th consecutive day of losses. The Dow gave up 2.58 percent of its value while the tech-heavy Nasdaq lost 3.56 percent. The megabanks on Wall Street were among the big losers of the day. Morgan Stanley dropped 5.25 percent; Goldman Sachs was down by 4.25 percent; Citigroup gave up 4.22 percent; Bank of America lost 3.44 percent while JPMorgan Chase shed 3.35 percent by the closing bell. These … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 17, 2024 ~ Arif Husain is the head of Global Fixed Income and Chief Investment Officer (CIO) of the Fixed Income Division of T. Rowe Price. He is also a member of the firm’s Management Committee. Husain holds a B.Sc. (honors) in banking and international finance from the City University London, Cass Business School. When Husain speaks, Wall Street listens. What Husain has been saying since October is that the U.S. is on a collision course with higher interest rates. In October, Husain released his interest rate outlook for the next six months, writing the following about the benchmark 10-year U.S. Treasury note, whose yield impacts mortgage rates and a wide swath of debt instruments: “I think that the 10-year Treasury yield will test the 5.0% threshold in the next six months, steepening the yield curve. There are three dynamics at play: 1. Fed rate … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 16, 2024 ~ According to the December 6 release of Federal Reserve H.8 data, cash assets at the 25 largest U.S. banks have dropped by a stunning $663 billion from their peak levels on December 15, 2021. (See chart above, taken from the St. Louis Fed’s FRED graph, which is updated on an ongoing basis. Put your cursor on the FRED chart line here to get the weekly dollar figures.) Notice also on the chart that cash levels at the largest U.S. banks were a sea of calm for more than two decades prior to the financial crash of 2008, but since that time cash assets have displayed wild gyrations, rising sharply then precipitously plunging. It should provide no comfort to Americans that the wild gyrations on the chart above are a product of the central bank of the United States (the “Fed”) inserting itself, … Continue reading →