Category Archives: Uncategorized

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 3, 2020 ~ Lily Tomlin is credited with the quote: “No matter how cynical you get, it is impossible to keep up.” Wall Street regularly brings that message home. According to the latest derivatives report from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), Citibank, the federally-insured, taxpayer-backstopped bank owned by Citigroup, has sold protection to other banks, hedge funds, insurance companies or corporations on a staggering $858 billion of Credit Default Swaps. When a federally-insured bank sells protection to others on Credit Default Swaps, it is effectively taking on the risk of a default event. At a time of unprecedented levels of debt in the system and growing warnings about leveraged loans, that seems like a very unwise move by Citigroup. The OCC notes that Citibank has bought protection via a larger amount of Credit Default Swaps – a total of … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 2, 2020 ~ Consumers represent two-thirds of GDP in the United States. And yet, when consumers run into trouble, they don’t get a handout from the Federal Reserve – they are forced to file bankruptcy. There are no Fed handouts to small business owners, farmers, or main street merchants either. So why is it exactly that the trading houses on Wall Street, with a serial history of crimes and with the most overpaid and under-punished executives on the planet, are able to perpetually have secret communications with the New York Fed and magically turn on the flow of trillions of dollars of ridiculously cheap loans to bail out their hubris and corruption. The obscene money spigot from the New York Fed to Wall Street’s trading houses didn’t start with the epic financial crisis of 2008, as most Americans believe. It started following the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 31, 2019 ~ After the epic financial crash on Wall Street in 2008 – the worst since the 1929 crash and ensuing Great Depression – two key reforms were put in place in the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 to prevent another catastrophic meltdown on Wall Street. The first key reform was that derivatives were to be moved out of the federally-insured, taxpayer backstopped commercial banks, that had been bought up by Wall Street trading houses, into units that could be wound down in a bankruptcy proceeding. It was called the “Push Out” rule. That reform was also meant to prevent the New York Fed from ever again secretly pumping upwards of $29 trillion into Wall Street trading houses and their derivative counterparties in order to bail out a corrupt casino banking system. (And yet here we are … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 30, 2019 ~ Five days before Christmas, while the impeachment debate distracted voters, the President signed into law the so-called Secure Act – which was a sickening bi-partisan attack on the wealth-building capability of the middle class. Making the dirty deed even more Grinch-worthy, the attack on the assets of the middle class comes after the Trump tax overhaul in 2017 gave a windfall to the super wealthy by doubling their estate tax exclusion from $11 million per couple to $22 million. Now someone has to pay for that and both Democrats and Republicans in Congress have stealthily decided it’s going to be Millennials – who are already buried under student loan debt with a meager average net worth of $8,000. The only people that will gain security from the Secure Act are the Wall Street wealth advisors who are already looting two-thirds … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 27, 2019 ~ As Wall Street On Parade has previously reported, JPMorgan Chase has been fingered as the bank that contributed to the Federal Reserve having to intervene in the overnight loan market on September 17 of this year, and every business day since then. The Fed, through its money spigot, the New York Fed, has flooded Wall Street’s trading houses with hundreds of billions of dollars weekly in cheap loans over the past three months. That cheap, pre-announced source of liquidity has not only caused the stock market to set multiple new historic highs but has caused the stock of JPMorgan Chase to set multiple new historic highs as well. Jamie Dimon is the Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase. Dimon admitted on his quarterly earnings call with analysts that his bank had backed away from lending on September 17. That backing … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 26, 2019 ~ A week before Christmas when Americans were focused on either the impeachment proceedings or holiday preparations, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) quietly released its quarterly report on the trading and derivative activities of Wall Street’s casino banks. It contained a humdinger in, literally, red ink. The report showed that Goldman Sachs Bank USA, which is, insanely, a federally-insured bank backstopped by the U.S. taxpayer that is part of the Goldman trading colossus, had lost $1.24 billion trading interest rate derivatives during the third quarter of this year. According to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the bank only holds $149.8 billion in deposits while the OCC reports it has $49 trillion in notional derivatives (face amount). (See Table 7 in the Appendix at this link.) Profits in other derivative trading areas, like the $1.14 billion Goldman Sachs … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 23, 2019 ~ The S&P 500 Index and the Dow Jones Industrial Average set new record highs every single day last week. This occurred despite the Federal Reserve justifying its unprecedented hundreds of billions of dollars each week in cheap loans to Wall Street’s trading houses as necessary to stem a “liquidity” crisis. You can’t have a liquidity crisis when the stock market is setting record highs for an entire week. Those two things just don’t correlate. The Fed, through its money spigot, the New York Fed, began sluicing these funds to Wall Street on September 17, the day the overnight borrowing rate in the repurchase agreement (repo) loan market spiked from 2 percent to 10 percent. This was the first such intervention by the Fed since the financial crisis. The repo market is where banks, hedge funds and money market funds loan … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 20, 2019 ~ All three major stock indices set new highs yesterday. The Nasdaq led with a 0.67 percent gain; the Dow Jones Industrial Averaged closed with a 0.49 percent increase while the S&P 500 inched up 0.45 percent. Stocks have been setting new highs all week as the New York Fed funnels tens of billions of dollars each day to Wall Street’s trading houses to quench a “liquidity” crisis whose existence has seemed to escape stock trading desks on Wall Street. The stock markets’ week of new highs comes at a curious time. For only the third time in history, a sitting U.S. President was impeached this past week by the U.S. House of Representatives and the Democratic candidates for President wasted no time in last night’s debate drilling down to why this happened. The words “corrupt” and “corruption” were used repeatedly … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 19, 2019 ~  When it comes to Wall Street’s mindset, the thinking is that it’s legal if you can get away with it. That mindset seems to have captured the Federal Reserve Bank of New York which secretly pumped trillions of dollars into insolvent banks in violation of its statutory mandate during the financial crisis; is alleged to have fired a bank examiner for refusing to alter her negative examination of Goldman Sachs; and failed to investigate a litany of crimes to which it was made aware. (See U.S. Senate Tries Public Shaming of New York Fed President Dudley.) One of the crimes that the New York Fed failed to bring to the attention of U.S. law enforcement was mega banks cheating on the borrowing rates that they were reporting as their London InterBank Offered Rate or Libor, a benchmark interest rate used … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 18, 2019 ~ The Federal Reserve Bank of New York (New York Fed) seems intent on stonewalling Wall Street On Parade from receiving some very basic information on JPMorgan Chase’s rapid drawdown this year on its liquid reserves at the New York Fed – a matter which some on Wall Street have fingered as a contributing cause of the ongoing repo loan crisis. More on that in a moment, but first some background. For the past decade Wall Street On Parade has been keeping close tabs on the crony operations of the New York Fed. (See related articles below.) The New York Fed has effectively morphed into a key cog in Wall Street’s wealth transfer system – where the little guy’s pocket is picked daily in the service of minting billionaires on Wall Street – who now increasingly want to rule the rest … Continue reading →