By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 9, 2024 ~ The swampiest trading house on Wall Street, Goldman Sachs, issued a press release on Tuesday which was revolting – even to Wall Street veterans who are familiar with its scandalous history. (See Related Articles below.) The press release stated that “Rob Kaplan will rejoin the firm as Vice Chairman of Goldman Sachs and a member of the Management Committee. He will be a member of the Executive Office and will be based in Dallas.” Robert (Rob) Kaplan is the man who scandalized the Dallas Fed and the Federal Reserve (the central bank of the United States) by flagrantly serving his own trading interests and violating financial reporting rules while trading like a hedge fund kingpin in S&P 500 futures for his own account during a declared National Emergency in 2020 (from the COVID-19 pandemic) while he was President of the Dallas … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 8, 2024 ~ Yesterday, the Big Law firm Cleary Gottlieb released its so-called “independent review” of charges of sexual harassment at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). Although no employee is charging Martin Gruenberg, the Chair of the FDIC, with sexual harassment, Cleary Gottlieb seems to go out of its way to paint Gruenberg in a negative light in the report – 108 times in fact. Gruenberg held the deciding vote at the FDIC last July when the bank regulator approved moving forward with proposed new rules to significantly raise the capital levels at the megabanks on Wall Street, particularly those holding trillions of dollars in derivatives off their balance sheet. These include the same banks that secretly received $16 trillion in cumulative emergency loans from the Federal Reserve from December 2007 to July 2010 because they were undercapitalized and teetering on insolvency, as … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 7, 2024 ~ Last Wednesday, JPMorgan Chase, the publicly-traded parent of the largest federally-insured bank in the United States as well as a five-count felon, revealed in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that on top of the $348 million it paid out in March to two of its banking regulators for sketchy trading violations involving “billions” of trades on 30 global trading venues, it “expects to enter into a resolution with a third U.S. regulator that will require the Firm to, among other things, pay a civil penalty of $100 million….” (See “Trading Venues Investigations” on page 168 of the SEC filing at this link.) JPMorgan Chase did not name this third regulator but Bloomberg News reported that it is the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The two federal banking regulators that imposed the trading fines in March are the Office of the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 6, 2024 ~ The pro-Palestinian protestors on college and university campuses across the U.S. have opened a pandora’s box for the Wall Street megabanks that underwrite billions of dollars in Israel bonds – including $8 billion in March of this year – at a time when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s conduct of the war in Gaza has come under broad condemnation. U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who is Jewish, described Netanyahu’s war operation as follows on the April 28 edition of CNN’s State of the Union: “Right now, what Netanyahu’s right-wing, extremist and racist government is doing is unprecedented in the modern history of warfare. They have killed in the last six-and-a-half months 33,000 Palestinians, wounded 77,000, two-thirds of whom are women and children. “They have destroyed over 60 percent of the housing. They have destroyed the health care system. They have … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 2, 2024 ~ When the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission released their final forensic report on the causes of the 2008 financial collapse on Wall Street – the worst collapse since the 1929-1932 collapse – it pointed to hidden leverage in off-balance sheet entities at the megabanks on Wall Street as a key driver of the crisis. It wrote: “From 2000 to 2007, large banks and thrifts generally had $16 to $22 in assets for each dollar of capital, for leverage ratios between 16:1 and 22:1. For some banks, leverage remained roughly constant. JP Morgan’s reported leverage was between 20:1 and 22:1. Wells Fargo’s generally ranged between 16:1 and 17:1. Other banks upped their leverage. Bank of America’s rose from 18:1 in 2000 to 27:1 in 2007. Citigroup’s increased from 18:1 to 22:1, then shot up to 32:1 by the end of 2007, when Citi … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 30, 2024 ~ The Office of Financial Research (OFR), the federal agency created after the financial crash of 2008 to keep federal banking regulators on top of threats to financial stability, has posted an interactive chart showing the largest managers of Money Market Mutual Funds in the U.S. Alarmingly, the parent of the largest and riskiest bank in the United States – JPMorgan Chase – is also the second largest Money Market Mutual Fund manager. According to the OFR, as of March 31, 2024, JPMorgan was managing $657.9 billion in money market funds, second only to Fidelity, which on the same date was managing $1.3 trillion in money market funds. The data comes from Securities and Exchange Commission Form N-MFP2. JPMorgan’s federal regulators have failed to stem the bank’s growth despite the fact that JPMorgan Chase has been tapping massive bailouts from the Federal … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 29, 2024 ~ Quietly on Friday, the FDIC announced the first federally-insured bank failure of 2024, the publicly-traded Republic First Bancorp (ticker FRBK) which did business as Republic Bank. In an unsettling sign of the times, this federally-insured bank was trading at 1-cent on Friday; down from 27-1/2 cents last September when we first reported on its dire condition. Do Americans really want to see a bank that’s holding their life savings to be trading as a penny stock? Yes, it’s true that no depositor has lost a penny in a federally-insured bank since the creation of federal deposit insurance in 1933 if they remained under the federal insurance cap on deposits. Currently, that insurance cap is $250,000 per depositor, per bank. But still, public confidence in the safety and soundness of the U.S. banking system would suggest that the phrases penny stock and … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 26, 2024 ~ Editor’s Note: This article has been edited and updated from an earlier version, published in 2020. Trump and Catch and Kill: Yesterday, David Pecker, the former Chairman and CEO of American Media Inc. (AMI), the parent company of the National Enquirer tabloid, testified for a third day in the 34-count criminal trial of former President Donald Trump in New York. Pecker continued to expand on the sordid details of a catch and kill operation he had agreed to operate with the active involvement of Trump and his then attorney, Michael Cohen. The operation involved buying up stories about Trump’s salacious affairs with women and then killing them from publication in order to help Trump’s campaign for the presidency in 2016. There was also an understanding that Pecker would run negative articles about Trump’s political opponents in the National Enquirer. During opening … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 25, 2024 ~ Sullivan & Cromwell, the go-to law firm for Wall Street in the past, has become a case study in how not to manage one’s corporate reputation. (See Wall Street’s Go-To Law Firm, Sullivan & Cromwell, Got in Bed with Crypto; Now Its Reputation Is Being Hammered.) Apparently, having previously represented FTX fraudster, Sam Bankman-Fried, and then grabbing FTX’s bankruptcy proceeding and billing $180 million, is not enough shame for Sullivan & Cromwell to heap on its reputation. It is now listed as the Big Law firm that filed a federal lawsuit yesterday on behalf of the corporate front groups, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, and others, to stop the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC’s) new rule banning non-compete agreements for most workers. (An 8-attorney law firm in Texas, Potter Minton, is also listed on the filing for the plaintiffs.) Sullivan … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 23, 2024 ~ Last Friday, the Federal Reserve released its semi-annual Financial Stability Report. In the prior five years, the spring edition of the Fed’s Financial Stability Report was released in May. This year, for reasons we can only guess at (nervously), the Fed released the spring edition early, in April. Given that last spring the second, third and fourth largest bank failures in U.S. history occurred, handing over $30 billion in losses to the federal Deposit Insurance Fund, and one of those banks (Silicon Valley Bank) experienced the fastest run on its deposits in U.S. history, one particular item in the new report that caught our attention was this: “Overall, estimated runnable money-like financial liabilities grew 8.8 percent to $21.3 trillion (75 percent of nominal GDP) over the past year, as a decline in uninsured deposits was more than offset by an increase in assets under management … Continue reading →