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 decades by Wall Street banks that cigarettes are deadly, they have continued to finance cigarette manufacturers. According to MarketBeat, as of this October, Citigroup had a buy rating on Philip Morris International and JPMorgan Chase rated it “overweight.”
Philip Morris International is publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol PM. Its cigarette brands include Marlboro, Parliament, Virginia S., L&M, Lark, Merit, Muratti, Chesterfield and numerous others.
In a 2004 paper, two researchers, B. C. Alamar and S. A. Glantz, exposed how two Wall Street analysts became shills for the tobacco industry while representing themselves as independent Wall Street analysts. The researchers write:
“In particular, for the two analysts discussed in detail below, their conflicts of interest, in regards to their firms’ revenues attributable to investment banking relationships with tobacco companies, and their collaboration with the firms, are never noted in their role as policy advisers. The first analyst, David Adelman, worked for Morgan Stanley which, at the time of the activities described below, owned approximately $1.7 billion of Philip Morris stock and functioned as an underwriter on Philip Morris bond offerings. The second analyst, Martin Feldman, worked for Smith Barney, a subsidiary of Citigroup, which owned approximately $894 million of Philip Morris stock and also functioned as the underwriter on several Philip Morris bond offerings. We document how Philip Morris-USA (PMUSA) used these analysts, who represented themselves as independent, to advance the interest of the tobacco industry in public policy debates.” (Refer to the 2004 paper linked above for the specific details.)
Megabanks on Wall Street have taken a similarly reckless and irresponsible attitude toward financing fossil fuel companies that are responsible for deadly climate change. According to the Fossil Fuel Finance Report 2024, the largest bank in the United States, JPMorgan Chase, is the largest lender to fossil fuel projects, with $430.9 billion in financings since 2016. Citigroup is ranked as the number one lender to fossil fuel expansions since 2016, according to the same report, with $396.3 billion in financings.
Last month, 14 researchers from around the world published a paper in the BioScience journal under the title: “Perilous Times on Planet Earth.” They write as follows:
“We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster. This is a global emergency beyond any doubt. Much of the very fabric of life on Earth is imperiled. We are stepping into a critical and unpredictable new phase of the climate crisis. For many years, scientists, including a group of more than 15,000, have sounded the alarm about the impending dangers of climate change driven by increasing greenhouse gas emissions and ecosystem change (Ripple et al. 2020). For half a century, global warming has been correctly predicted even before it was observed—and not only by independent academic scientists but also by fossil fuel companies (Supran et al. 2023). Despite these warnings, we are still moving in the wrong direction; fossil fuel emissions have increased to an all-time high, the 3 hottest days ever occurred in July of 2024 (Guterres 2024), and current policies have us on track for approximately 2.7 degrees Celsius (°C) peak warming by 2100 (UNEP 2023). Tragically, we are failing to avoid serious impacts, and we can now only hope to limit the extent of the damage. We are witnessing the grim reality of the forecasts as climate impacts escalate, bringing forth scenes of unprecedented disasters around the world and human and nonhuman suffering. We find ourselves amid an abrupt climate upheaval, a dire situation never before encountered in the annals of human existence. We have now brought the planet into climatic conditions never witnessed by us or our prehistoric relatives within our genus, Homo…
“Last year, we witnessed record-breaking sea surface temperatures (Cheng et al. 2024), the hottest Northern Hemisphere extratropical summer in 2000 years (Esper et al. 2024), and the breaking of many other climate records (Ripple et al. 2023a). Moreover, we will see much more extreme weather in the coming years (Masson-Delmotte et al. 2021). Human-caused carbon dioxide emissions and other greenhouse gases are the primary drivers of climate change. As of 2022, global fossil fuel combustion and industrial processes account for approximately 90% of these emissions, whereas land-use change, primarily deforestation, accounts for approximately 10%….”
How is Wall Street responding to these very real threats to humans and the planet? According to a report by Reuters yesterday, the Wall Street megabanks are “rushing in recent weeks to leave one of the world’s top banking sector climate coalitions,” the Net-Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA).
The article suggests that Republican politicians warned the Wall Street banks that they might face antitrust challenges if they remained in the group.
That is a laughable threat and Wall Street knows it. Wall Street’s top lawyers have been meeting secretly for years with no pushback from these Republican lawmakers. The New York Fed has been blurring antitrust lines for decades with sponsored Wall Street megabank groups with no pushback from either political party.
