Category Archives: Uncategorized

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 22, 2018 President Donald Trump’s persistence on his Twitter page in touting how well the stock market is doing is distracting investors from a scary, negative indicator for stocks – rising yields on U.S. Treasury securities. Since September of last year, yields have been on a steady and sharp upward trajectory, reminiscent of standing at the base of a mogul run in Colorado and craning one’s neck toward the summit. The complacency the stock market is showing toward the fierce rise in yields may also turn out to be a dangerous, slippery slope for those heavily weighted in stocks. On November 9, 2016 the two-year U.S. Treasury Note closed the day with a yield of 0.8942 percent. One year later, on November 9, 2017, it finished its trading session with a yield of 1.64 percent. As of 6:50 a.m. this morning, the yield … Continue reading →

By Richard Bowen: January 20, 2018 This past Sunday the PBS documentary produced by WNET, New York, about Sherry Hunt, one of my former chief underwriters (Sherry blew the whistle on Citigroup four years after I was thrown out for warning about their bad mortgages), and myself aired on KERA Channel 13, Dallas PBS. The documentary, entitled “The Whistleblower,” is the first episode in a three-part PBS series called Playing by the Rules: Ethics at Work. It has aired in New York and several other cities around the country and in Dallas this past weekend, with most of the PBS stations airing it this month. You can watch it here and on the WNET website. Sherry Hunt was a vice president and chief underwriter at CitiMortgage in O’Fallon, Missouri. Since 2005 she had flagged defects; 50 % of the loans she saw had defects, fraudulent defects. She complained and was ignored. I became her boss in 2006 and … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 19, 2018 Since the inauguration of Donald Trump on January 20, 2017, the stock market has performed as if it is operating in an alternative universe, regularly setting new record highs despite unprecedented chaos coming from the White House. Now, a new Gallup poll is calling into question how long the divergence between the market’s view of Trump and the world view of Trump can continue. A new Gallup poll released yesterday puts global approval of US leadership at just 30%, behind China at 31% and Russia at 27%. Germany has moved into the top slot in the world with a leadership approval rating of 41%. One of the most striking findings from the poll is how far America’s leadership approval has fallen among our closest neighbors. According to Gallup, Canada led declines with U.S. leadership approval sinking 40 points from 60% in … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 18, 2018 To understand how the U.S. central bank, known as the Federal Reserve, is influencing the froth of the stock market, you need to take a few moments to understand the interaction of bond yields with stock prices. Sophisticated investors who predominate in the markets compare the yield on bonds to the cash dividend yield on stocks to determine which is a better value. Following the financial crash of 2008, the Federal Reserve began buying up Treasury bonds and mortgage-backed bonds in the marketplace to the overall tune of more than $3 trillion. This has driven down bond yields and provided an artificial boost to the stock market. The Fed’s assets swelled from $914.8 billion at the end of 2007 to $4.5 trillion in 2014 from its bond buying program. In just the single year of 2013 the Fed’s assets mushroomed by … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 17, 2018 If you are raising children, caring for aging parents, working multiple jobs to pay the mortgage or simply spending your free time protesting the policies of the current administration, you may have missed the latest series of scandals swirling around the so-called leader of the free world. Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Donald Trump’s longtime personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, “arranged a $130,000 payment” to a former porn star just weeks prior to the 2016 presidential election as part of a gag order meant to silence her from disclosing to the public an “alleged sexual encounter” with Trump while he was married to his current wife, Melania. The former porn star is Stephanie Clifford whose stage name is Stormy Daniels. Jacob Weisberg, Editor-in-Chief of the Slate Group, appeared on MSNBC last evening and had this to say about the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 16, 2018 Nomi Prins’ latest book, Collusion: How Central Bankers Rigged the World, ensures her place as one of this century’s most informed Wall Street historians. It’s the perfect segue from Prins’ earlier “It Takes a Pillage,” and her 2014 book All the Presidents’ Bankers. If you are serious about understanding the corrupting influences that have left the U.S. vulnerable to another epic financial crash, buy all three books and read them as one. Prins is a veteran of Wall Street who has now written six books and dozens of articles to help Americans navigate the snake pit that has replaced the financial system of the United States. It all started with her first book in 2004, Other People’s Money: The Corporate Mugging of America, where she explained her motivation as follows: “When I left Wall Street, at the height of a wave … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 12, 2018 On Wednesday, the House Financial Services Committee held a hearing on a topic of critical importance to all Americans: restructuring the Federal Reserve into a modern day central bank instead of a captured regulator controlled by the very banks it purports to supervise. Dean Baker, the Senior Economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, presented an important assessment of reforms needed at the Fed but you will be hard pressed to find any mainstream media coverage of his testimony. Instead, President Trump’s characterization yesterday of Haiti and African nations as “sh**hole countries” is dominating the news. How much critical work is falling by the wayside because mainstream media, dependent on ratings, elects to pursue only the most sensational stories – which they have no shortage of finding under President Trump. Congress began its latest push to reform the Federal … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 11, 2018 The arrogance of the captured Wall Street regulators in Washington grows exponentially with each passing day. The only Wall Street bank which has admitted to three criminal felony charges – all coming within the past three years – has been allowed to send one of its trading executives to head a key post at Wall Street’s top cop – the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Failing up continues to be the business model in the nation’s capitol. The Trump administration, in its continuing Swamp-filling mandate from the billionaires behind the dark curtain, has elevated Brett Redfearn as Director of the Division of Trading and Markets at the SEC. Redfearn has worked at JPMorgan Securities from November 2004 to October 2017 when he was named to the new SEC post. In 2014 the U.S. Justice Department slapped JPMorgan with two criminal felony … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 10, 2018 On Monday, Institutional Investor’s Jonathan Kandell wrote a fascinating profile of Citigroup. He tried in every conceivable way to be kind to the company but the facts just kept getting in his way. Interestingly, the official name of the behemoth bank holding company, Citigroup, appears just once in the article. Its homey, cuddly moniker, “Citi,” appears 84 times. As the bank’s public relations legions attempt to erase the stain of Citigroup’s performance during the 2008 financial crisis and its Frankenbank birth in 1998 in violation of the Glass-Steagall Act and Bank Holding Act of 1956, changing the bank’s name is likely in the cards. When Sandy Weill and John Reed proposed to merge the disparate parts of Weill’s Travelers Group, which owned an insurance firm (Travelers), investment bank (Salomon Brothers) and retail brokerage (Smith Barney) with Reed’s Citicorp, parent of the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 9, 2018 Today’s print edition of the New York Times carries an OpEd by Thomas Chatterton Williams with the terse headline, “Oprah Don’t Do It.” The column follows a powerful speech delivered by Oprah Winfrey at the Golden Globe Awards on Sunday evening. (See video below.) That speech set Twitter and cable news ablaze with talk of an Oprah run for President in 2020. By Monday evening, CNN was reporting that she is “actively thinking” about a Presidential run. In hearing that pronouncement on CNN, our first thought was that media outlets wouldn’t have the guts to tell a black female celebrity with the stature of Oprah Winfrey that she could doom the already shaky credibility of the Democratic Party with a run for the White House; that her lack of prior government service and national security naiveté would be weaponized against her … Continue reading →