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Recent Posts
- Three Megabanks Had Loans Outstanding of $1.832 Trillion to Giant Hedge Funds on March 31
- Jamie Dimon’s Washington Post OpEd Gets Pummeled at Yahoo Finance
- In the Span of 72 Hours, Four People Tied to a Hewlett-Packard Criminal Case Died in Two Separate Events
- Crypto Took Down Another Federally-Insured Bank and Just Handed Its CEO a 24-Year Prison Sentence
- All the Devils from 2008 Are Back at the Megabanks: Leverage, Off-Balance-Sheet Debt, Over $192 Trillion in Derivatives, Shaky Capital Levels
- New Study Says the Fed Is Captured by Congress and White House — Not the Megabanks that Own the Fed Banks and Get Trillions in Bailouts
- Data from the Fed’s Emergency Funding Program Shows Spring 2023 Banking Crisis Was Far Deeper than Americans Were Told
- These FDIC-Insured Banks Have Lost 69 to 40 Percent of their Market Value Year-to-Date
- Exposure at Hedge Funds Has Skyrocketed to Over $28 Trillion; Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Are at Risk
- We Charted the Plunge and Rebound in the Nikkei Versus Nomura and Citigroup; the Correlation Is Frightening
- Former U.S. Labor Secretary Says Billionaires Have No Right to Exist Because their Wealth Comes from Five Illegal or Bad Practices
- Citigroup Is Having a Helluva Summer: A Protest on Thursday Will Turn Up the Heat
- Nikkei Has Biggest Drop in History: Here’s What’s Causing the Global Market Selloff
- JPMorgan Is Tapping Illiquid Assets in its Global Collateral Program; the New York Fed Is Paying for Its Services
- Bank Regulators Issue Warnings on Fintech and Banking as Disasters Pile Up
- Donald Trump Gives a Speech on Not Letting China Win the Crypto Race – Not Realizing China Banned Crypto Mining and Transactions Four Years Ago
- The New York Fed Has Contracted Out Key Functions to JPMorgan Chase; We Filed a FOIA and Got These Strange Invoices
- On the Eve of Netanyahu’s Address to Congress, Senator Bernie Sanders Delivers a Breathtaking Assessment of His War Crimes
- Trump’s Sit-Down with Netanyahu at Mar-a-Lago Will Cost U.S. Taxpayers Millions While Profiting Trump’s Business
- Protecting Trump and His Jet-Setting Adult Children During His Presidency Cost Taxpayers Over $1 Billion
- A Congressman and a Doctor Reported a Woman Being Shot at Trump Rally: She’s Vanished from Official Reports
- Jamie Dimon Goes Missing from Earnings Call, After Dumping $183 Million of His JPMorgan Chase Stock Earlier this Year
- U.S. Senate Candidate Backed by Hedge Fund Billionaires Was Sitting in Front Row at Trump Rally as the Sniper Fired into the Bleachers
- Project 2025: The Fossil Fuel and Banking Money Behind the Madness
- The Fund Created to Unwind a Failing Megabank Has a Problem: There’s No Money in It
- Joe Biden Versus the New York Times
- Grand Jury Transcript in Jeffrey Epstein Case Is Released, Raising Questions about Epstein’s Darkest Secrets Being Protected in JPMorgan Cases
- The Supreme Court Crowns a King, Immunizing Future Criminal Acts Under Project 2025 – a Right Wing Manifesto
- The Debate Disaster and the Supreme Court’s “Chevron” Repeal Have a Money Trail Leading to Charles Koch
- Congressman Andy Barr Stacks a Hearing on the Fed’s Stress Tests with Lobbyists for Megabanks
- The Fed Posts Historic Operating Losses As It Pays Out 5.40 Percent Interest to Banks
- Goldman Sachs’ Bank Derivatives Have Grown from $40 Trillion to $54 Trillion in Five Years; So How Did Its Credit Exposure Improve by 200 Percent?
- The Fed and FDIC Wake Up Suddenly to the Threat of Derivatives, Flunking the Four Largest Derivative Banks on their Wind-Down Plans
- Is the Stock Market Setting Investors Up for a Tech Bust Similar to the Dot.com Bust?
- Chase Bank Customers Are Reporting a Wave of Wire Fraud in their Accounts; the Bank Won’t Make Good on the Looted Funds
- The Senate Race in Ohio Is the Sickest in U.S. History in Terms of Billionaire Money from Outside the State
- Sullivan & Cromwell’s Legal Work for Sam Bankman-Fried’s Crypto House of Fraud Is Getting a Closer Look in Two Federal Court Cases
- Crypto Tries to Recreate the Koch Money Machine to Pack Congress with Shills
- French Fears Ignite Selloff in U.S. Megabanks and Foreign Peers
- Crypto Just Got Exponentially More Dangerous: Meet Fairshake
- Nvidia Hit a $3 Trillion Market Cap Last Week; Dark Pools Are Making Over 300,000 Trades in the Stock Weekly
- The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Is Making Enemies in All the Right Places
- A Former Exec at Citibank Raises Alarm Bells in Federal Court Over Failed Risk Controls Inside the Bank
- Charles Koch’s Money Is Being Used in Elections in Ways Only Orwell Could Have Imagined
- Freakonomics and Frankenbanks: JPMorgan Chase Sucked Up 18 Percent of All Profits of 4,568 FDIC-Insured Banks in the First Quarter
- Academic Study Provides Hard Numbers to the Sick, Revolving Door Culture at Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Citigroup
- $244 Billion of Treasury Debt to Hit the Market Today and Tomorrow as Interest Rates Spike on Ballooning Supply
- CFTC Fines J.P. Morgan Securities — a Fed Primary Dealer — $100 Million for Failing to Surveil Potential Spoofing and High Frequency Trading for Eight Years
- Another FDIC-Insured Bank Got in Bed with Fintech; It’s Now Got a Dumpster Fire and Desperate Pleas from Customers for their Money
- Citigroup Gets Fined $79 Million Two Years After It Caused a $300 Billion Flash Crash in European Stock Markets
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Derivatives: Donald Trump’s Most Dangerous Knowledge Gap
![](https://wallstreetonparade.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/President-Donald-Trump-Addresses-a-Joint-Session-of-Congress-February-28-2017-150x150.jpg)
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 15, 2018 ~ It has been soundly demonstrated that the President of the United States has a knowledge vacuum in proper presidential decorum, diplomacy, and accepted norms of behavior. Just yesterday the President Tweeted that a former black female colleague in the White House, Omarosa Manigault Newman, is a “crazed, crying lowlife” and a “dog.” On June 25, the President Tweeted that a sitting black female member of Congress, Maxine Waters, is “an extraordinarily low IQ person,” despite her being elected to 14 consecutive terms to the House of Representatives. There’s a serious danger that the current occupant of the Oval Office defines American etiquette so far down that we are shunned by enlightened countries as a backward, rogue nation. America has already gone rogue in withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accord, the United Nations Human Rights Council, and the Iran nuclear deal. … Continue reading
Meet Dark Money’s Secret $68 Million Donor
![Riverside County Sheriff officers guard the entrance to a Rancho Mirage, California luxury resort where the Koch brothers held their January 2011 political strategy confab.](https://wallstreetonparade.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/110130_8246-150x150.jpg)
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 14, 2018 ~ In 2010 we broke the news that a secretive nonprofit called Donors Capital Fund (with the fingerprints of billionaire Charles Koch all over it) had forked over $17,778,600 to fund a widely distributed race-baiting film in the weeks before the 2008 election – an election in which the first black man, Barack Obama, was the Democratic candidate for President. Donors Capital Fund accepts donations from multiple donors and keeps their identities secret, so exactly who funded the actual payment for the film is still unknown. Recently, we decided to see what Donors Capital Fund has been up to lately. We went to the publicly filed tax returns available online at the Foundation Center and Guidestar. The most recent available tax return is for 2016. Curiously, the schedule of the tax return that shows to whom disbursements were made was missing … Continue reading
The $4 Trillion Answer to Why Turkey Is Rattling Wall Street Banks and Insurers
![](https://wallstreetonparade.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Citi-BankAmerica-JPMorgan-Goldman-Logos-150x92.jpg)
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 13, 2018 ~ On Friday the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed with a loss of 196 points as contagion jitters from Turkey’s worsening situation rattled markets. Among the big Wall Street banks, these were the biggest losers: Citigroup, down 2.39 percent; Morgan Stanley, down 2.12 percent; Goldman Sachs, down 1.78 percent; Bank of America, down 1.30 percent; and JPMorgan Chase closed off by 0.98 percent. Deutsche Bank, the big German lender whose U.S. subsidiary has a big footprint on Wall Street, lost 4.68 percent. Deutsche Bank has now lost 41 percent of its market value since February. But the selloff didn’t stop there. Two big U.S. life insurers also tumbled on Friday. MetLife lost 3.19 percent while Prudential Financial was off by 2.97 percent. What do Wall Street banks and U.S. life insurers have to do with a selloff in Turkey’s currency? Not … Continue reading
Yes, James Freeman, We Do Know How Bad the Federal Reserve Is
![](https://wallstreetonparade.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Federal-Reserves-FOMC-Meeting-in-March-2014-150x150.jpg)
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 10, 2018 ~ Earlier this week, James Freeman, the Assistant Editor of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, wrote an opinion piece headlined as “We’ll Never Know How Bad the Federal Reserve Is.” Freeman is also a Fox News contributor so one might be prone to suspect there is that typical right-wing bias to bash the Fed. Freeman, however, has a legitimate beef. His new book, “Borrowed Time: Two Centuries of Booms, Busts and Bailouts at Citi,” with co-author Vern McKinley was published this week and Freeman laments in the article about how the Fed “hides and then destroys documents.” If you’re a journalist attempting to compile a truthful and accurate account about a financial institution or a financial era and a key institution holding those documents refuses to release them, then the American people have lost the ability to exercise oversight of … Continue reading
Koch Advances Its Wall Street Playbook, Gutting the Office of Financial Research
![Dino Falaschetti, Donald Trump's Nominee to Head the Office of Financial Research, Has Close Ties to Two Koch-Funded Front Groups](https://wallstreetonparade.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Dino-Falaschetti-150x150.jpg)
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 9, 2018 ~ As we have previously reported, there is indisputable documentation that Charles Koch, the fossil fuels billionaire who sits at the helm of Koch Industries, is in charge of the de-regulatory agenda in the Trump administration through a web of front groups. More proof came yesterday. Reuters announced that the Trump administration had “formally told” around 40 staff members of the Office of Financial Research (OFR) that “they will lose their jobs as part of a broader reorganization of the agency….” Reuters also reported that the agency’s budget has already been cut by 25 percent “to around $76 million.” Imagine having only $76 million to police an industry where just one of the big Wall Street banks, JPMorgan Chase, had profits of $8.32 billion in its last quarter. Charles Koch has long understood that if you can’t repeal the legislation that … Continue reading
Donald Trump’s Campaign Is Writing Out Strange Checks
![President Donald Trump](https://wallstreetonparade.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Donald-Trump-150x150.jpg)
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 8, 2018 ~ One would think that if you are the President of the United States and the subject of a criminal investigation; and your former campaign chief is currently on trial for tax evasion and bank fraud; and your former personal attorney for a decade had his office, hotel room, home and safety deposit box raided by the FBI – you would make sure that your campaign committee would be crossing every T and dotting every I so that you didn’t land in more hot water. But if you are Donald Trump, living close to the edge is what you do best. A review at the Federal Election Commission (FEC) of the checks written from the Donald J. Trump for President, Inc. account, the principal campaign committee for Trump’s reelection, produces some doozies. Donald Trump was sworn in on January 20, 2017 … Continue reading
Facebook Opens Door to More Federal Probes by Asking Banks for Data
![Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Testifies Before Congress on April 10, 2018 on His Company's Technology Failings](https://wallstreetonparade.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Facebook-CEO-Mark-Zuckerberg-Testifies-Before-Congress-on__-April-10-2018-on-His-Companys-Technology-Failings-ii-150x150.jpg)
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 7, 2018 ~ Facebook is beginning to resemble one of those frat boys at a boozy party who keeps asking guys to punch him in the stomach to prove his masculinity. At a time when it’s under scrutiny on multiple continents for sharing its users’ personal information without their consent, it has decided to ask big U.S. banks to share their customers’ financial transaction information with Facebook, according to a report yesterday in the Wall Street Journal. The Journal reported that “The social-media giant has asked large U.S. banks to share detailed financial information about their customers, including card transactions and checking-account balances, as part of an effort to offer new services to users.” Three of the banks mentioned, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and Wells Fargo, have been serially in trouble with Federal regulators for abusing their customers. The idea that these Wall Street … Continue reading
Financial Health of U.S. Consumer Will Determine Severity of the Next Recession
![Total U.S. Household Debt and its Composition as of First Quarter 2018 (Source -- New York Fed)](https://wallstreetonparade.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Total-U.S.-Household-Debt-and-its-Composition-as-of-lst__-Qtr-2018-Source-New-York-Fed-ii-150x150.jpg)
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 6, 2018 ~ Approximately two-thirds of U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) derives from the consumer. Without financially healthy consumers, the economy cannot prosper. In a July 30 interview on the cable news channel, CNBC, Jamie Dimon, the Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, the largest bank in the U.S., said that “the consumer’s in good shape; their balance sheet’s in good shape.” On May 17 the Center for Microeconomic Data at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York released its Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit which raised some notable questions as to whether Jamie Dimon actually has his finger on the pulse of the U.S. consumer. According to the report, “aggregate household debt balances increased in the first quarter of 2018, for the 15th consecutive quarter. As of March 31, 2018, total household indebtedness stood at $13.21 trillion,” which is $536 billion … Continue reading
Banking in the U.S. Got a Lot More Dangerous this Week
![Joseph Otting, Comptroller of the Currency](https://wallstreetonparade.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Joseph-Otting-Comptroller-of-the-Currency-ii-150x150.jpg)
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 3, 2018 ~ The Trump administration seems hellbent on turning every Federal regulator into a snake oil salesman. The latest scandal du jour comes yesterday from Politico’s Ben Lefebvre who reports that the Inspector General of the Interior Department is investigating whether the Interior’s head honcho, Ryan Zinke, colluded with the head of Halliburton to build him his dream brewery in his hometown of Whitefish, Montana. Against that backdrop, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) announced on Tuesday that financial technology companies, known as fintech, which provide various types of banking activities other than accepting insured deposits, will now be allowed to apply for a special purpose national bank charter and operate across state lines. The OCC announcement promptly followed a report from the U.S. Treasury which recommended that the OCC make the charter available. The immediate impact of gaining such a charter would … Continue reading
Wall Street’s Former Timid Cop, Mary Jo White, to Investigate Sex Allegations Against Les Moonves
![](https://wallstreetonparade.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Les-Moonves-150x150.jpg)
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 2, 2018 A few minutes before midnight last night, CBS News announced that the Board of its parent corporation, CBS Corp., was putting two outside law firms in charge of investigating the sexual harassment allegations against its Chairman and CEO, Leslie (Les) Moonves and other executives in its CBS News division. Those two law firms are Covington & Burling and Debevoise & Plimpton. According to the statement from CBS, the investigation at Covington & Burling “will be led by Nancy Kestenbaum and at Debevoise & Plimpton it will be led by Mary Jo White.” The selection of Mary Jo White is not likely to instill confidence among institutional holders of CBS stock who are familiar with her tenure as Chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) during the Obama administration. The sexual allegations were revealed in an in-depth article by Ronan Farrow … Continue reading