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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
As Cable News Obsesses Over a Porn Star, Senate Prepares to Put the Next Wall Street Crash in Motion
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 8, 2018 The U.S. Senate is about to set in motion the next financial crash on Wall Street but you would never know it from watching cable news channels CNN or MSNBC last evening. Both news channels obsessed for endless hours over the Trump-Russia scandal and a hush money payoff to porn star Stormy Daniels, neglecting one of the most critical topics of the day: what was happening on the Senate floor this week. Some of the most informed Democratic voices in the U.S. Senate are making impassioned and heartbreaking appeals to their colleagues this week on the floor of the U.S. Senate to vote down Senate bill S.2155, which carries the Orwellian title: “The Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief and Consumer Protection Act.” The bill is a Republican/Wall Street lobbyist masquerade to ostensibly help small community banks but will effectively gut enhanced oversight … Continue reading
Will Gary Cohn’s Departure Lead Trump to the Full Koch Agenda?
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 7, 2018 Wall Street is losing its bedtime snuggly and comfort blanket in the White House. After a tortuous 14 months replete with crazy tweets from the President, Russia-probe indictments and guilty pleas, failure to talk Trump out of withdrawing from the Paris climate accord, revelations of hush money paid to a porn star by Trump’s personal attorney, and news of Trump campaign aides’ murky meetings with Putin operatives, Gary Cohn has finally called it quits over tariffs. It’s not like Cohn, the former President of Goldman Sachs who became President Donald Trump’s first Director of the National Economic Council, didn’t understand Trump’s obsessive demand for loyalty. Cohn has watched for more than a year as those who didn’t show adequate subservience to the President were shown the door. In the case of the former FBI Director James Comey, he was not only … Continue reading
Boeing Is the Elephant in the Room in Trump’s Tariff War
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 6, 2018 On January 20, 2017, the date of Donald Trump’s inauguration as President of the United States, the giant aerospace company, Boeing, closed the trading day at $159.53. Yesterday, it clocked in at $352.75 by the closing bell. The Trump era has added 122 percent to the pockets of Boeing shareholders, giving it a market cap of $207.6 billion. Trump’s erratic reign had been good for Boeing – right up until Thursday, March 1, when Trump announced that he would be imposing 25 percent tariffs for foreign-made steel and 10 percent for aluminum. The stock market took a dive along with Boeing on the announcement. Boeing is not just your average publicly-traded stock. It’s one of the 30 components in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which is an index that affords greater weight to a stock based on its price. At yesterday’s … Continue reading
Democrats Gutting Wall Street Reform? Follow the Money.
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 5, 2018 Today’s front page of the print edition of the New York Times has articles on the Oscars, the election in Italy, Ben Carson’s reign at HUD and the death of an elderly Briton who once broke the four-minute mile among numerous other less than urgent news pieces. What it does not have on its front page is any headline showing concern that the seminal piece of Wall Street reform legislation of the Obama era, which already has enough loopholes to set off champagne corks on K Street, may be dismantled this week by a vote in the Senate. The move would come in the midst of the 10th anniversary of the greatest Wall Street collapse and economic catastrophe since the Great Depression, both of which were underpinned by casino capitalism — Wall Street banks making obscenely leveraged bets for the house … Continue reading
Citigroup’s Loan to Kushner: The Devil Is in the Details of Citi’s Sordid History
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 1, 2018 Last evening, the front page digital edition of the New York Times dropped another bombshell in what increasingly feels like a badly scripted daily soap opera that could perhaps be called “As the White House Turns” or “Days of Our Messed Up Lives.” The Times report focused on big loans that were made to Jared Kushner’s family business by two financial firms after he met at the White House with executives from those firms. There was a $184 million loan from private equity firm Apollo. There was also a $325 million loan by mega Wall Street bank Citigroup shortly after a visit by Citigroup’s CEO Michael Corbat to Kushner’s office at the White House in the spring of 2017. Despite nepotism laws governing the Executive Branch, Kushner is both the son-in-law to President Trump as well as a Senior Advisor. Despite … Continue reading
Stockman: $1.8 Trillion in New Treasury Debt Will Hit Bond Pits “Like a Tornado”
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 28, 2018 Investors have been whiplashed so far this week and it’s only Wednesday morning. On Monday, the Dow rocketed ahead by 399 points. On Tuesday, it plunged by 299 points. What changed investor sentiment so dramatically in 24 hours? David Stockman, the former Director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan who blogs at Contra Corner, appeared on CNBC yesterday to size up the situation. Commenting on the new Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, who gave testimony for the first time in his new role before the House Financial Services Committee yesterday, Stockman said he thinks Powell is “missing three giant skunks sitting on the wood pile.” The biggest skunk according to Stockman is an “epic monetary fiscal collision” that Stockman says he hasn’t seen before in his lifetime. Stockman explained that starting this October, which … Continue reading
Is Dow Component GE the Victim of Wall Street’s Dark Conflicts?
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 27, 2018 MarketWatch’s Tomi Kilgore reported on February 13, 2018 that JPMorgan analyst Stephen Tusa “became even more bearish” on General Electric (which has been a component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average since its creation in 1896). Kilgore reports further that the JPMorgan analyst had “slashed his stock price target to $14” from his previous target of $16. Only Deutsche Bank’s stock analyst, John Inch, says Kilgore, has a lower target, at $13. JPMorgan, along with all of the other major Wall Street firms, is still allowed to issue research ratings on stocks despite the firms being charged by the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2003 in the epic research scandal on Wall Street. Yesterday morning, as the Dow was on its way to closing up a whopping 399 points, GE plunged to a nickel below the JPMorgan analyst’s prediction, touching an … Continue reading
What Was JPMorgan Doing in its Dark Pools During the 2,000-Point Plunge Week?
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 26, 2018 On Monday, February 5 and again on Thursday, February 8, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed the day with more than 1,000-point losses. We decided it might be instructive to see what JPMorgan’s Dark Pools were up to that week now that the three-week old data has been released by the self-regulator FINRA. We’ll get to that shortly, but first some necessary background. Dark Pools are effectively unregulated stock exchanges that operate in darkness inside Wall Street’s largest firms. If you have been following the past decade of criminal felony counts for colluding in market rigging and multi-billion dollar fines for abusing the public against these same firms, you might be forgiven for thinking that Federal regulators have lost their minds to allow these same firms to operate Dark Pools. But it’s actually worse than it first appears: not only are … Continue reading
Puerto Rico – Here’s Why the New York Fed Does Not Feel Your Pain
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 24, 2018 On Thursday, the President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, William C. Dudley, held a press conference to effectively tell Puerto Ricans to suck it up as they attempt to recover from an epic humanitarian crisis caused by Hurricane Maria, which devastated infrastructure and wiped out electricity to the entire Island in September. When it comes to corrupt Wall Street banks that are in the process of failing, the Federal Reserve can always find trillions of dollars to funnel into the banks’ coffers at almost zero interest rates to prop them back up. It does that through its power to electronically create money out of thin air. Take, for example, the $16 trillion it secretly lavished on Wall Street banks and their foreign counterparts during the financial crash of 2007 to 2010. For deviant banks and their shareholders, the … Continue reading
An Open Message to Parkland Students: Don’t Underestimate the Enemy
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 22, 2018 Carmen Schentrup would have celebrated her 17th birthday yesterday had she not been gunned down in a hail of bullets from an AR-15 semi-automatic assault weapon on February 14 at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida by an expelled student who had bought the gun legally when he was just 18 years old. Last evening her brother, Robert, appeared at a CNN Town Hall that was convened to discuss the shooting. He posed the following question to Congressman Ted Deutch who was present at the Town Hall: “If a majority of Americans have long supported stricter gun control regulations, but our elected officials who are supposed to represent the people have done nothing, does this mean that our democracy is broken?” Congressman Deutch, a Democrat who does support strong gun laws, told the anguished young man that our … Continue reading