Category Archives: Uncategorized

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 8, 2018 Under the Obama presidency, a key executive of the scandalized Wall Street bank, Citigroup, was secretly in charge of selecting the people who would fill top administration posts in Obama’s White House and cabinet, while the bank was in the midst of the largest taxpayer bailout in U.S. history. The staffing recommendations included top posts at the Justice Department, which would fail to prosecute any major Wall Street executives for the crimes leading up to the financial crash of 2008.  (See our prior reporting on this here and here.) Under Trump, who ran on a populist platform, the top cop of Wall Street at the Securities and Exchange Commission, Jay Clayton, is a lawyer who had represented 8 of the 10 largest Wall Street banks prior to his nomination by Trump and confirmation by the U.S. Senate to become SEC Chairman. The U.S. Treasury … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 5, 2018 How does one make an unreleased book an even bigger bestseller than it already is? Threaten a libel suit and demand that the publisher not release the book – ever. Michael Wolff’s explosive book on the chaos and incompetency of the Trump administration, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, is now the number one bestseller on Amazon. Yesterday Wolff posted blistering excerpts from the book at the Hollywood Reporter. The President is variously characterized by his own appointees as “a moron,” “dumb as s**t,” “a hopeless idiot,” or someone who has “lost his mind.” Trump’s lawyer, Charles Harder of Harder Mirell & Abrams LLP, whipped off an 11-page letter to Wolff and Steve Rubin, President of Henry Holt and Company, the book’s publisher. Most of the letter consisted of boilerplate demands to retain documents and emails, an effort to strongly … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 4, 2018  On Monday, 37-year old Arthur Gregg (A.G.) Sulzberger took the helm as the new Publisher of the New York Times, succeeding his father, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., whose tenure in the post lasted for the past quarter of a century. A.G. has previously held positions at the Times as metro reporter, national correspondent, associate editor for strategy and deputy publisher. He marked the occasion of becoming the fifth generation of his family to assume the mantle of Publisher by invoking his great-great grandfather, Adolph Ochs, who promised readers he would “give the news impartially, without fear or favor, regardless of party, sect, or interests involved.” A.G. then added his own 900-word promise for “independent, courageous, trustworthy journalism” on his watch. In one particularly poignant passage from the missive, A.G. writes: “The Times will hold itself to the highest standards of independence, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 3, 2018  The sitting President of the United States, Donald Trump, is actively taunting North Korea on Twitter over who has the bigger, more powerful nuclear button. On September 23, Trump tweeted: “Just heard Foreign Minister of North Korea speak at U.N. If he echoes thoughts of Little Rocket Man, they won’t be around much longer!” Little Rocket Man is Trump’s preferred insulting moniker for North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un.  Yesterday, following a New Year’s speech by Kim in which he bragged about his country’s nuclear capability to hit the U.S. mainland, Trump had this to say on Twitter: “North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the ‘Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times.’ Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 2, 2018 The former FBI Director, James Comey, is set to release his new book, A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership on May 1. It is anticipated that it will provide titillating details from his career in public service, notably his career as FBI Director that ended abruptly on May 9 of last year when Comey was fired by President Donald Trump in the midst of an FBI probe into Trump campaign ties to Russia. A three-year span that is not likely to make it into Comey’s book is the time he spent as General Counsel of Bridgewater Associates, immediately preceding his nomination by President  Obama in 2013 to be FBI Director. Bridgewater Associates is the weirdly managed hedge fund that promotes “radical truth and radical transparency.” The firm has become notorious for videotaping all of its internal meetings, including at least … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 27, 2017 During Fed Chair Janet Yellen’s press conference on December 13, she had this to say about financial stability on Wall Street: “And I think when we look at other indicators of financial stability risks, there’s nothing flashing red there or possibly even orange. We have a much more resilient, stronger banking system, and we’re not seeing some worrisome buildup in leverage or credit growth at excessive levels.” Where does Fed Chair Janet Yellen get her information on financial stability risks to the U.S. financial system? A key source for that information is the Office of Financial Research (OFR), a Federal agency created under the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation of 2010 to keep key government regulators like the Federal Reserve informed on mounting risks. On December 5, the OFR released its Annual Report for 2017. It was not nearly as sanguine as … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 20, 2017 Like that box of macaroni in your kitchen cupboard, the U.S. stock market has become a lot more expensive but has actually shrunk in terms of quantity. In 1975, U.S. domestic companies that traded on U.S. exchanges totaled 4,819. Forty years later, the market has shrunk to less than 4,000, despite a tripling in GDP. If you take a shorter time span of  20 years, which included the dot.com craze of listing companies known to Wall Street insiders as “crap” and “dogs,” the numbers are worse. In September of last year, Jim Clifton, the Chairman and CEO of Gallup, the polling company, reported the following: “The number of publicly listed companies trading on U.S. exchanges has been cut almost in half in the past 20 years — from about 7,300 to 3,700. Because firms can’t grow organically — that is, build more business … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 18, 2017 On Saturday, the news broke that Kory Langhofer, counsel to Donald Trump’s transition team known as Trump for America, Inc. (TFA), had sent a 7-page letter to House and Senate Committees stating that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office had improperly received “tens of thousands of emails” from the General Services Administration (GSA), a Federal agency, that had been sent or received by members of Trump’s transition team. Both the GSA and Mueller’s spokesmen denied that there had been anything improper about the turnover of the emails. Peter Carr, a spokesman for Mueller, said that “When we have obtained emails in the course of our ongoing criminal investigation, we have secured either the account owner’s consent or appropriate criminal process.” Lenny Loewentritt, a veteran lawyer for the GSA told Buzzfeed that transition team members were told by the GSA that materials “would … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 15, 2017 During Janet Yellen’s last press conference as Federal Reserve Chair on Wednesday, Donna Borak, the Senior Economics Writer at CNN, asked Yellen a question regarding the proposed tax cut. Borak queried: “To return back to the prospective tax bill questions, in your view at all is the Republican tax bill an ill-timed fiscal stimulus, and are you concerned at all it will wind up squandering the tools both the Congress and the Fed have when it comes time to dealing with the recession?” Yellen answered as follows: “So look, I will just say that it is up to the administration and Congress to decide on appropriate fiscal policy, and our job is to maintain our focus on employment and inflation. We continue to think, as you can see from the projections, that a gradual path of rate increases remains appropriate even … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 14, 2017 The outgoing Chair of the Federal Reserve, Janet Yellen, held her last press conference yesterday following the Federal Open Market Committee’s decision to hike the Feds Fund rate by one-quarter percentage point, bringing its target range to 1-1/4 to 1-1/2 percent. Given the growing reports from market watchers that the stock market has entered the bubble stage and could pose a serious threat to the health of the economy should the bubble burst, CNBC’s Steve Liesman asked Yellen during the press conference if there are “concerns at the Fed about current market valuations.” Yellen gave a response which may doom her from a respected place in history. She stated: “So let me start Steve with the stock market generally. Of course the stock market has gone up a great deal this year and we have in recent months characterized the general … Continue reading →