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Recent Posts
- Sullivan & Cromwell’s Crypto Clients Are in Growing Distress
- Add 4,281 Hedge Fund Clients to What Makes JPMorgan Chase the Riskiest Mega Bank in the U.S.
- Numerous Big Law Firms Had Zero Ties to Sam Bankman-Fried; So Why Did John Ray Hire Two Deeply Conflicted Law Firms?
- Serious New Issues Emerge in Sullivan & Cromwell’s Deeply Conflicted Role in the FTX Bankruptcy Case
- A Federal Agency Wants to Hear Directly from the Public about Bad Practices at Credit Card Companies
- The U.S. Congress Twiddled Its Thumbs on Crypto while 10 Countries Banned It and 42 Others Placed Heavy Restrictions
- Bankruptcy Judge in Manhattan Rules that Crypto Customers Lost Ownership of $4.2 Billion When They Deposited It into “Earn” Accounts
- FTX Bombshell: Former FTX Lawyer, Daniel Friedberg, Alleges Fraud by Sullivan & Cromwell in Court Filing Today
- In 16 Years, the Fed Has Approved 4,506 Bank Mergers and Denied One
- Four Crypto-Friendly Banks Are Being Bailed Out with Billions from a Federal Housing Program
- A Sam Bankman-Fried Company Loaned or Invested More than $1 Billion in Clients of its Law Firm, Sullivan & Cromwell
- The Narrative Is that Two Women Under 30 Committed Fraud without Detection by Sophisticated Wall Street Law Firms
- FTX Bankruptcy Proceedings Thus Far Show a Shocking Miscarriage of Justice
- Bankruptcy Law Expert, Senator Elizabeth Warren, Asks FTX Bankruptcy Judge to Boot Sullivan & Cromwell from the Case
- Sullivan & Cromwell, FTX Lead Counsel in Bankruptcy, Says It Has No Adverse Relationships, Despite Representing Four of FTX’s Crypto Exchange Competitors
- JPMorgan Chase Hit with Lawsuit for Facilitating Jeffrey Epstein’s Crime Network; Similar Charges Were Brought Against It for Facilitating Madoff’s Ponzi Scheme
- Federally-Insured, Crypto-Focused Silvergate Bank Loses 43 Percent of Its Market Value Yesterday as Depositors Flee
- After 16 Months, There Are Still No Arrests in the Fed’s Trading Scandal
- The Fed, FDIC and OCC Issue New Warnings to Banks on Crypto Risks to Safety and Soundness
- Two Law Firms Played Key Roles in Sam Bankman-Fried’s House of Cards; One Is Now Collecting Upwards of $2,165 an Hour in FTX Bankruptcy Proceedings
- Sam Bankman-Fried’s Crypto Companies Bilked a Potential 10.3 Million User Accounts; That’s 250 Times More than Madoff
- Sam Bankman-Fried’s Criminal Trial Judge Is Married to Law Partner of Firm that Arranged the FTX-BlockFi Deal
- Mr. Gensler, the U.S. Stock Market Structure Is an Institutionalized Wealth Transfer System
- Congressman Brad Sherman Versus the Crypto Gang in Congress
- A Sam Bankman-Fried Company that Was Not in Bankruptcy Has Gone Poof; Regulators Are Drawing a Dark Curtain
- Senate Banking Hearing on FTX Collapse Pits a Courageous Law Professor Against Paid Shill Kevin O’Leary
- An Insider Blows the Whistle on How the Fed Has Allowed Crypto to Invade Federally-Insured Banks
- Sam Bankman-Fried Quietly Bought an SEC-Registered Stock Trading Operation; There Are Big Questions as to What’s Happening with Customer Accounts
- No One Trusts the FTX Bankruptcy Case: News Outlets Intervene; Justice Department Trustee Demands Independent Examiner; SEC Orders Disclosures
- Senate Banking Chair Threatens a Subpoena If Sam Bankman-Fried Doesn’t Show for Next Wednesday’s Hearing; Says SBF “Orchestrated a Coverup”
- JPMorgan Chase, the Largest Federally-Insured Bank in the U.S. with Five Felony Counts, Says 10 Percent of its New Hires Last Year Had Criminal Histories
- Secretary Yellen, We’ve Got a “Staggering” Problem: New Report Shows Foreign Banks Have Secret Derivative Debt that Is “10 Times their Capital”
- Sam Bankman-Fried: The Rigged Wall Street System that “Valued” His Company at $32 Billion
- Investors Head for the Exits at Illiquid Funds: Blackstone Limits Withdrawals from Giant Real Estate Fund
- Credit Default Swaps Blow Out on Credit Suisse as its Stock Price Hits an All-Time Low of $2.82
- Despite Being Called the Madoff of Crypto, New York Times Features Sam Bankman-Fried at $2500 a Person Event Today
- With Crypto Bank, SoFi, the Fed Is Setting the Stage for the Same Disastrous Decision It Made with Citigroup in 1999
- Sheila Bair, Former Chair of the FDIC, Is Now an “Organizer/Director” of a Cayman Islands Crypto Company that Got a U.S. National Bank Charter Last Year
- Evidence Grows that Crypto and Federally-Insured Banks Are a Combustible Mixture
- U.S. Justice Department Steps into the FTX Bankruptcy Case in Delaware
- FTX’s Latest Casualties: Federally Insured Crypto Banks
- The Latest Digital Token Scheme from Hell: New York Fed Teams Up with Citigroup and Sullivan & Cromwell
- FTX Was Creating Money Out of Thin Air Like the Fed; and Trading Its Own “Stock” Like the Wall Street Mega Banks in their Dark Pools
- This Is Where Bankrupt FTX’s Money Went: $74 Million for Caribbean Real Estate; $59 Million to Politicians; Tens of Millions to Big Law, Celebrity Endorsements…
- Big Law Firm, Sullivan & Cromwell, Did Significant Legal Work for Bankrupt Crypto Exchange, FTX
- FTX, Second Largest Crypto Exchange, Halts Withdrawals as Bankruptcy Nears and Justice Department Circles
- The Crypto Billionaire Featured on the Cover of Fortune in August Has Flamed Out in One Week
- Welcome to Election Day from Hell: Run on a Major Crypto Exchange; Hurricane Forecasted to Hit Third Most Populous State; Billionaires Behaving Badly
- Quietly, the Fed Releases Its Financial Stability Report and Lines Up a Scapegoat
- An Economist’s Chart Goes Viral: Shows Main Source of Inflation
Search Results for: rap sheet
A Private Citizen Would Be in Prison If He Had Citigroup’s Rap Sheet
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 27, 2017 Since its financial meltdown in 2008 and unprecedented bailout by the U.S. taxpayer, Citigroup (parent of Citibank) has been repeatedly charged by its Federal regulators with odious crimes against its pooled mortgage investors, credit card and banking customers, student loan borrowers, and for its foreclosure frauds. It has paid billions of dollars in fines for its past misdeeds while new charges pile up. In 2015, it became an admitted felon for participating in rigging foreign exchange markets. In short, Citigroup is a lawbreaking recidivist. If it were a mere human, it would be serving a long prison term. Instead, its fines for charges of egregious acts are getting smaller, not larger. Last Tuesday, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), which typically has a good track record of holding the big Wall Street banks accountable for their misdeeds, imposed an unusually feeble … Continue reading
DOJ Calls Out UBS Rap Sheet; Ignores Homegrown Citigroup’s Rap Sheet
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 22, 2015 When the U.S. Department of Justice held its press conference on Wednesday to announce that five mega banks were each pleading guilty to a felony charge, paying big fines and being put on probation for three years, Assistant U.S. Attorney General Leslie Caldwell specifically took a battering ram to the reputation of Swiss bank, UBS. Four banks — Citicorp, a unit of Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Royal Bank of Scotland and Barclays — pleaded guilty to an antitrust charge of conspiring to rig foreign currency trading while UBS pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud for its earlier involvement in rigging the interest rate benchmark, Libor. In explaining why the Justice Department was ripping up the non-prosecution agreement it had negotiated with UBS in December 2012 over its involvement in the Libor fraud and now charging it with a … Continue reading
Fed Data Shows a Half Century of Moderate Growth in the Fed’s Balance Sheet through Two World Wars – Then a Seismic Explosion Under Bernanke, Yellen and Powell

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 6, 2022 ~ Last month the Federal Reserve Bank of New York released its 2021 annual report from its “Markets Group.” That’s the group that operates a trading floor (complete with speed dials to the trading houses on Wall Street) at the New York Fed, located not far from the New York Stock Exchange, as well as another trading floor on the premises of the Chicago Fed, which is not far from the futures exchanges in Chicago. That report showed that despite all of the recent talk about the Fed dramatically shrinking its balance sheet from its current size of $8.9 trillion, the internal Federal Reserve plan for the balance sheet is actually this: “After declining by about $2.5 trillion from the peak size reached in the first half of 2022, the portfolio stops declining in mid-2025, at which point it is held constant … Continue reading
The SEC Has a Graph of the Wall Street Short-Term Loan Market that Blew Up: It Needs a Surgeon General Warning Before Viewing

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 10, 2020 ~ If you suffer from chronic nightmares, experience migraine headaches from stress, or have anger management issues when confronted with abject stupidity, you probably want to avoid looking at the above graph that the Securities and Exchange Commission has created to show how one of the most critical financial markets in the United States functions. Or perhaps we should say, why it’s incapable of functioning when it’s most needed. The market is Wall Street’s Short-Term Funding Market which includes its integral repurchase agreement (repo) market. The repo market blew up in 2008 during the last financial crisis and required a Fed bailout. It blew up again on September 17, 2019 for reasons that have yet to be credibly explained and required at least $9 trillion in cumulative emergency loans from the Federal Reserve over the next six months. As we reported … Continue reading
Taxpayers Are on the Hook for 98 Percent of the Fed’s $6.98 Trillion Balance Sheet

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 19, 2020 ~ If there has been any positive outcome from the COVID-19 pandemic, it has been that the American people are beginning to take a cold, hard look at how the U.S. economy has been engineered as a vast wealth transfer system for the one percent. We have peeled back the dark curtain further today on how the Federal Reserve has been structured as an unlimited money spigot to enrich that one percent as it privatizes profits for the criminally-inclined Wall Street titans and socializes the losses to the law-abiding 99 percent of hardworking Americans. ~~~ The Federal Reserve Board of Governors consists of seven individuals appointed by the President of the United States and confirmed by the U.S. Senate. As of today, only five of those Governor seats have been filled. As of last Wednesday, these five unelected individuals were overseeing … Continue reading
These Two Graphics Show Why New York City Is the Virus Epicenter in the U.S.

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 23, 2020 ~ For want of a mask the largest economy in the world has been gutted, with Goldman Sachs now projecting that U.S. GDP could contract by as much as 24 percent in the second quarter. New York City, a major contributor to U.S. GDP, is now the epicenter of coronavirus cases in the U.S. We saw this as a likely outcome from the moment that we learned that droplets could be spread from person to person through the air. According to the Center for Sustainable Systems at the University of Michigan, “the average population density of the U.S. is 87 people per square mile.” But in New York City, “the population density is 27,012 people per square mile,” far greater than any other major city in America. Let that sink in for a moment. The population density in New York City … Continue reading
Fed’s Balance Sheet Spikes by $253 Billion, Now Topping $4 Trillion

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 18, 2019 ~ Shhh! Don’t tell Congress that the Federal Reserve is back to electronically creating money out of thin air to throw at a liquidity problem (of an, as yet, undetermined origin) on Wall Street. And be sure not to mention that the Fed’s balance sheet has shot up in a period of just 42 days by $253 billion. And, of course, don’t remind Congress that before the last Wall Street crisis was over the Fed had secretly, with no oversight from Congress, piled up a $29 trillion tab to bail out Wall Street — a fact it fought years in court to keep under wraps. On September 4, 2019, the Fed’s assets on its balance sheet stood at $3.761 trillion. As of October 16, that figure is $4.014 trillion, edging closer to the $4.5 trillion peak it reached in 2015 following the … Continue reading
Fed’s Powell Admits a Bigger Bailout for Wall Street Is Coming; Fed’s Balance Sheet Ballooned by $176 Billion Since September

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 9, 2019 ~ Yesterday, at a speaking event in Denver at the National Association of Business Economists, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell acknowledged that a larger, long-term bailout of Wall Street is coming. His two key points were buried in a subterfuge of puffery but came across loud and clear: “…my colleagues and I will soon announce measures to add to the supply of reserves over time.” And this: “As we indicated in our March statement on balance sheet normalization, at some point, we will begin increasing our securities holdings to maintain an appropriate level of reserves. That time is now upon us.” Let that final statement sink in for a moment. Under the previous Federal Reserve Chair, Janet Yellen, balance sheet normalization at the Federal Reserve meant reducing the Fed’s unprecedented $4.5 trillion balance sheet to get back to something near pre-crisis levels. … Continue reading
Wall Street’s Dark Pools Get a Bonanza Wrapped as Reform by the SEC

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 25, 2018 ~ The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which has had two separate Wall Street lawyers at its helm for the past five years (under both the Wall Street- friendly Obama administration as well as the current Trump administration), has released a 558-page document that attempts to pass itself off as reforming Wall Street’s Dark Pools. Instead, it simply tinkers around the meaningless edges of reform. Dark Pools are trading venues that should not exist in an efficient, transparent and honest securities market. They are effectively unregulated stock exchanges being run internally by some of the biggest Wall Street banks on Wall Street: The same banks (like Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch) that have been serially charged with abusing their customers. Instead of sending their stock trades to the New York Stock Exchange or another independent stock exchange, the … Continue reading
The New Banking Crisis — In Two Frightening Graphs
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 27, 2016 After repeated, but ignored, warnings over the past two years from researchers at the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Financial Research (OFR), the new banking crisis has arrived with a vengeance and at a most inopportune time – when confidence is already draining from the financial system because of two U.S. presidential candidates with the highest disapproval ratings in modern history. Yesterday, Germany’s largest financial institution, Deutsche Bank, lost 7.06 percent by the close of trading on the New York Stock Exchange. That plunge in one of the most globally-interconnected banks dragged down the shares of every major Wall Street bank yesterday: Bank of America lost 2.77 percent; Morgan Stanley declined by 2.76 percent; Citigroup lost 2.67 percent; Goldman Sachs shed 2.21 percent; and JPMorgan Chase closed down 2.19 percent. Deutsche Bank, whose shares traded at more than $120 pre-crisis in 2007, … Continue reading