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Recent Posts
- After JPMorgan Threatens to Sue, the Fed Cuts Its Capital Requirement on the 5-Count Felon from a Planned 25 Percent Hike to Less than 8 Percent
- 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
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Trump and Brexit: Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower Gives Bombshell Testimony to British Lawmakers
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 27, 2018 Christopher Wylie, the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower who has thus far exposed how Steve Bannon and his money-backer, billionaire hedge fund manager Robert Mercer, created Cambridge Analytica, which harvested private data from 50 million Facebook users to help Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, testified for almost four hours this morning before British lawmakers in the Commons Culture Committee. His testimony was explosive at times. Wylie is testifying before the British lawmakers because the same people and companies involved in the social media data mining and micro-targeting for Trump’s presidential campaign were also involved in the June 23, 2016 Brexit vote in the U.K. where citizens voted in a referendum to take the U.K. out of the European Union. Wylie testified that a Canadian company, AggregateIQ (AIQ), developed the software for Cambridge Analytica, describing it as a “proxy” firm and “money laundering operation.” He … Continue reading
“Masking”: A Mass Conspiracy Inside Merrill Lynch
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 26, 2018 At last we know why the New York State Attorney General’s office has decided to sideline the Securities and Exchange Commission and U.S. Department of Justice and become the self-appointed watchdog over Wall Street’s Dark Pools: it’s helping its hometown industry by doling out tiny fines and never digging too deep. This past Friday’s fine against Merrill Lynch’s Dark Pool marks the fourth time since 2014 that the office of New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has leveled a meaningless fine of less than $50 million against the Dark Pools of Wall Street’s mega banks that are making billions of dollars in profits each year through what Senator Bernie Sanders calls a “business model of fraud.” (Schneiderman’s office brought earlier charges against Barclays, Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank.) On Friday, Schneiderman’s office issued a press release on its $42 million … Continue reading
Wall Street Is Winning By Going Dark
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 22, 2018 As front page news focuses more and more on the Russia-Trump investigation, there is rarely an in-depth journalistic investigation into the dangerous risks building up on Wall Street that makes front page news. And yet, as we know from the epic financial crisis of 2008, an unreformed Wall Street presents the gravest threat to America’s long-term vitality and economic might. Take, for example, what happened this past Monday. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) awarded a record $83 million to three whistleblowers from one of America’s largest retail brokerage firms, Merrill Lynch, part of the sprawling Bank of America. That bank holds $1.4 trillion in deposits, much of which is FDIC insured and backstopped by the U.S. taxpayer — the same taxpayer that bailed out Bank of America in 2008. The SEC maintains the confidentiality of whistleblowers who come to … Continue reading
Trump, Bannon and Cambridge Analytica: The Money Trail Leads to the Mercers
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 21, 2018 Last evening, the Washington Post reported that Steve Bannon was the individual overseeing the earliest collection of Facebook data for Cambridge Analytica in 2014. The company is under investigation in both the U.S. and U.K. for data mining private information on more than 50 million Facebook users to target voters for the 2016 Trump presidential campaign. Bannon, with funding from billionaire hedge fund manager, Robert Mercer, was involved in the launch of Cambridge Analytica in 2013. Both Bannon and Mercer served on the Cambridge Analytica Board after its founding. Bannon is the former executive chairman of Breitbart News which also received funding from Mercer. Bannon also served as CEO of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and as senior counselor to the 45th president for the first seven months of his term until a falling out last year. Robert Mercer was a … Continue reading
Has Facebook and Cambridge Analytica Put Democracy at Risk in Both the U.S. and U.K.?
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 20, 2018 For over a year, Carole Cadwalladr has been reporting in the U.K.’s Guardian newspaper about the bizarre overlap between the people and companies involved in Donald Trump’s rise to the Presidency in the U.S. and the June 23, 2016 Brexit vote in the U.K. where citizens voted in a referendum to take the U.K. out of the European Union. Now, one of those companies, Cambridge Analytica, is the subject of intense focus on both sides of the pond. Last evening in the U.S., cable news aired video of Alexander Nix, the CEO of Cambridge Analytica, speaking with undercover reporters about a political dirty tricks campaign the company could run. Nix cited an example of setting up hidden cameras to catch a politician saying he would accept a bribe or the company could send in girls to seduce the politician. Nix said: … Continue reading
Trump’s Rise to the White House: Cambridge Analytica Targeted “Inner Demons”
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 19, 2018 According to news reports last Friday and over the weekend, Facebook has landed squarely in the middle of the next explosive leg of the Trump-Russia scandal. According to the Guardian’s Observer newspaper in the U.K., a digital data mining company known as Cambridge Analytica collected private information from approximately 50 million Facebook users in order to support Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016. Trump’s campaign hired Cambridge Analytica in the spring of 2016 and “paid it more than $6.2 million,” according to a Reuters report. A Cambridge Analytica whistleblower, Christopher Wylie, told the Observer that “We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles. And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons. That was the basis that the entire company was built on.” According to the reports, the “inner demons” were unleashed through personalized … Continue reading
The Deutsche Bank-Trump Connection: Why House Probe Abruptly Shut Down
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 14, 2018 It now appears that a major contributing factor to the abrupt shutdown of the Russia-Trump probe by the House Intelligence Committee was a fear that the Committee was getting too close to Trump’s dealings with Deutsche Bank and Deutsche Bank’s dealings with Russia. The draft report released by the Democrats after belatedly learning that their Republican colleagues had abruptly ended the probe, included this paragraph: “Donald Trump’s finances historically have been opaque, but there have long been credible allegations as to the use of Trump properties to launder money by Russian oligarchs, criminals, and regime cronies. There also remain critical unanswered questions about the source of President Trump’s personal and corporate financing. For example, Deutsche Bank, which was fined $630 million in 2017 over its involvement in a $10 billion Russian money-laundering scheme, consistently has been the source of financing for … Continue reading
This Is Not Normal: Markets, Elon Musk and Donald Trump
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 13, 2018 If Wall Street can glam up a story around a stock or a man or both, it can sell the hell out of the shares to the dumb money. If enough dumb money invests, the Dark Pools spring into action and drive the price even higher. That brings in hedge funds. Pretty soon you’re talking about real money. This is how we got the 1929 stock market crash, the Great Depression, the dot.com bust in 2000, the Enron, Worldcom and Tyco flameouts, and whatever we end up calling the bust that lies ahead of the current brainless bubble market. Take yesterday’s market, for example. Boeing lost 2.91 percent of its value, driving the Dow lower, while Tesla gained 5.61 percent driving the Nasdaq higher. Boeing turned 100 years old on July 15, 2016. It has a half trillion dollars in back … Continue reading
JPMorgan Paid a Board Member $532,500 in 2016; Now the Board is Getting a 25 Percent Cash Pay Hike
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 12, 2018 The illusions of the Trump era – spun as making America great again, while sluicing more and more wealth to the one percent – has revived citizen interest in what it would actually take to restore fairness and integrity to the nation. The first place to look is how to restructure the American corporation so that it is no longer poisoning our campaign finance system, our election outcomes, and perverting the legislative process in Washington. The majority of Congress now works for its corporate paymasters. That has resulted in perverse economic outcomes across the national landscape that have, in turn, created the greatest wealth inequality in America since the late 1920s. While reforming the way political campaigns are financed in America has received a great deal of attention, far too little attention has been given to the grotesque disfiguration of far … Continue reading
If Toys ‘R’ Us Closes Its Stores, 36,000 U.S. Workers Could Lose Their Jobs
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 9, 2018 After seven decades, Toys ‘R’ Us may have run out of options and be forced to liquidate all of its U.S. stores according to media reports. (The company called the reports “speculation.”) Toys ‘R’ Us had filed for bankruptcy protection on September 19 of last year, listing assets of $6.57 billion and debts amounting to an astounding $7.89 billion. If the news reports are accurate, more than 36,000 U.S. jobs could be at stake. According to the company’s 10K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on April 12, 2017, as of the beginning of last year, the company employed “64,000 full-time and part-time individuals worldwide, with 36,000 domestically and 28,000 internationally.” Those figures, the filing said, do not include the tens of thousands of part-time employees the company hires for the holiday season. The liquidation would also put a vast … Continue reading