Category Archives: Uncategorized

By Pam Martens: March 18, 2019 ~ On April 19, 2018, JPMorgan Chase announced it would be opening “up to 70 new branches and hiring up to 700 new employees” in northern Virginia, Washington D.C. and Maryland.” In the same announcement, the bank said it currently had “5,130 branches in 23 U.S. states and plans to open up to 400 new branches…” At the time of that announcement, the bank was under a deferred criminal prosecution agreement with the U.S. Justice Department and on probation – a probation which continues to this day. Being prosecuted multiple times for felonies by the Justice Department does not appear to have clipped the wings of JPMorgan’s expansion plans under the Trump administration. According to current data from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, JPMorgan Chase’s domestic bank branches have already grown by 8 branches to a total of 5,138 since the end of 2017. … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: March 14, 2019 ~ A crony Federal regulator, or one perceived to be captured by the industry it polices, will eventually doom consumer confidence in the products and services of the industry to which it provides oversight. President Obama appointed Mary Jo White to serve as his Securities and Exchange Commission Chair for the final term of his presidency. White and her husband both worked for large law firms that together had represented every major Wall Street bank – the same ones that had created the largest financial collapse since the Great Depression in 2008. White’s supervision of Wall Street was so derelict that Senator Elizabeth Warren sent her a scathing 13-page critique of her performance. Warren called out the SEC’s practice of settling the vast majority of cases without requiring meaningful admissions of guilt and White’s repeated recusals from investigations because of her prior employment (and her husband’s … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: March 12, 2019 ~ Last Wednesday, the Federal Reserve Board of Governors rushed through a rule change to its stress test for the too-big-to-fail banks on Wall Street, putting it into immediate effect without the customary 30-day delay. It is further noteworthy that the Board did not get the customary unanimous vote to move forward with the rule change: Fed Board Governor Lael Brainard, arguably the smartest member of the Board, voted against the rule change while the four other Governors, including Chairman Jerome Powell, voted in favor. There is a strong case that can be made that the rushed rule change was to protect the biggest banks on Wall Street – the ones serially charged with crimes around the globe – while putting the public at risk of another epic financial collapse. What the rule change effectively did was to tell the recidivist banks that their … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: March 11, 2019 ~ The underlying theme that Wall Street’s Federal regulators have become whores for the industry permeates most of the well-researched books that have been written about Wall Street over the past decade. But no book has connected the dots to the nuances and subtleties of how this whoring works as effectively as Noncompliant: A Lone Whistleblower Exposes the Giants of Wall Street. Written by Carmen Segarra, the petite lawyer turned bank examiner turned whistleblower turned one-woman swat team, the 340-page tome takes the reader along on her gut-wrenching workdays for an entire seven months inside one of the most powerful and corrupted watchdogs of the powerful and corrupted players on Wall Street – the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. (The days were literally gut-wrenching. Segarra reports that after months of being alternately gas-lighted and bullied at the New York Fed to whip her … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: March 7, 2019 ~ Progressives have every right to harbor a seething contempt toward the Wall Street wing of the Democratic Party. Democrats controlled both houses of Congress in the last two years of George W. Bush’s presidency as Wall Street blew itself up and Congress passed the massive taxpayer bailout of the Wall Street mega banks. (Democrats held fewer than 50 seats in the Senate but they held operational majority since two Independents caucused with them.) In Obama’s first two years in office (January 2009 to January 2011), Democrats had increased their majorities in both chambers of Congress. Democrats were in charge when it became crystal clear from Congressional hearings that Wall Street mega banks had created, through unbridled greed and corruption, the most catastrophic financial crash since the Great Depression. Democrats were in charge when it became profoundly evident that Wall Street needed a major … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: March 6, 2019 ~ When you’ve studied stock market charts for three decades, you can’t help but notice that something very peculiar has been happening to the U.S. stock market in recent years. Rather than taking off at the opening bell and holding an upward bias or a downward bias for the balance of the trading day – the way stock markets historically behave – the Dow Jones Industrial Average frequently spends the morning hours rotating between sharp upward spikes and big drops as if an invisible force (say an algorithm, for example, operating in the futures market) has the controls. To see what we mean, take a look at the two charts below: one from March 27, 2018 and one from May 16, 2018. The same thing happened in the market yesterday combined with one more frequent oddity. The Dow Jones Industrial Average includes companies with … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: March 5, 2019 ~   According to the United Nations, Norway has a current population of 5.4 million people. That’s less than 2 percent of the population of the United States. The people of Norway don’t particularly like the United States right now, giving its leadership an abysmal 12 percent approval rating according to a recent Gallup survey. But according to data provided at the website of Norway’s central bank, Norges Bank, every man, woman and child in Norway has the equivalent of a $45,000 stake in U.S. stocks. The central bank manages the Government Pension Fund Global (also known as the Norwegian Oil Fund) which owned a whopping $245 billion of the U.S. equity market as of December 31, 2018. That $245 billion includes big chunks of change in U.S. social media/tech stocks and the mega banks on Wall Street. Here’s a sampling: $7.5 billion in … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: March 4, 2019 ~ In what has to be the most diplomatic understatement of the year, Jon Clifton, the Global Managing Partner of the polling organization, Gallup, had this to say with the release of the company’s 2019 “Rating World Leaders” report: “The image of U.S. leadership abroad is not good right now.” In reality, the U.S. had a 48 percent global approval rating in President Obama’s last year in office and that rating plunged to 30 percent in Trump’s first year in office. It now sits at 31 percent median approval across the 133 countries surveyed by Gallup. One of the most dangerous takeaways from the new Gallup report is that our closest allies think so little of the U.S. right now. The report notes that “Regionally, the image of U.S. leadership fared worst in Europe, where approval remained low and stable, dropping one percentage point … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: February 27, 2019 ~ Today will mark a new milestone in the nightmarish hostage-taking of the United States of America, from which there is no readily apparent means of escape, by a daily non-reality TV show known as the Donald Trump Presidency. Today’s episode began at 10 a.m. in the U.S. House of Representatives’ Oversight and Reform Committee and stars the President’s former confidante, lawyer and “fixer” Michael Cohen calling the sitting President of the United States and leader of the free world a “conman,” “a cheat,” and “a liar.” Cohen also compares Trump to an organized crime boss in his opening statement, saying that “Mr. Trump called me a ‘rat’ for choosing to tell the truth – much like a mobster would do when one of his men decides to cooperate with the government.” That’s a very telling point. Mr. Trump is the highest official in … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: February 26, 2019 ~ Yesterday, Congresswoman Maxine Waters of California, the Chair of the House Financial Services Committee, released the titles of the hearings she plans to hold during the month of March. Of the hearings held by this Committee in February, none addressed the systemic risk to the U.S. economy from the interconnected mega banks on Wall Street. According to the hearing list released yesterday for the month of March, systemic risks at the mega banks has again gone missing. The only mega bank to be grilled in March will be Wells Fargo, and that will focus on its “pattern of consumer abuses.” This lack of attention to the most dangerous, interconnected mega banks on Wall Street – JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley – by the newly installed Democratic Chair of the House Financial Services Committee does not bode well … Continue reading →