-
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
Puerto Rico Relief Efforts Pale to that for Just One Wall Street Bank
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 2, 2017 With 3.4 million fellow American citizens undergoing an epic humanitarian crisis in Puerto Rico, a United States territory, as critically-needed food and water remain undistributed for lack of manpower and proper logistical coordination by the Trump administration, there is no better time than the present to assess how corporate welfare trumps the rights of individual citizens of the United States. President Trump, the man who ran on a so-called populist agenda, has Tweeted the following regarding the situation in Puerto Rico (italic emphasis added below): September 25: It’s old electrical grid, which was in terrible shape, was devastated. Much of the Island was destroyed, with billions of dollars owed to Wall Street and the banks which, sadly, must be dealt with. Food, water and medical are top priorities – and doing well. September 29: The fact is that Puerto Rico has … Continue reading
Financial Times Columnist Skewers Wall Street Model in the New York Times
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 28, 2017 Rana Foroohar, an Associate Editor and Global Business Columnist for the Financial Times, penned an OpEd at the New York Times yesterday that was as audacious in its insults to the Times’ richest hometown industry, Wall Street, as it was brilliantly in touch with the abject dysfunction of the U.S. financial system. Foroohar’s thesis is this: “…there’s a core truth about our financial system that we have yet to comprehend fully: It isn’t serving us, we’re serving it.” Foroohar describes in specific detail what Wall Street On Parade has long described as Wall Street’s institutionalized wealth transfer system. (See our articles describing this system under the menu button above titled “Wealth Transfer Schemes.” You may find two particular articles of interest, here and here.) Just how high up the chain of command this “service” to Wall Street goes was deftly captured … Continue reading
Senator Elizabeth Warren Expresses Skepticism about SEC Chair’s Real Agenda
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 27, 2017 Donald Trump’s pick for Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Jay Clayton, had good reason to be nervous yesterday morning as he prepared to testify before the U.S. Senate Banking Committee. The ranking member of that Committee, Senator Sherrod Brown, had previously made his feelings known about Clayton’s fitness to serve as Wall Street’s top cop prior to Clayton’s Senate confirmation. Brown had stated: “It’s hard to see how an attorney who’s spent his career helping Wall Street beat the rap will keep President-elect Trump’s promise to stop big banks and hedge funds from ‘getting away with murder.’ I look forward to hearing how Mr. Clayton will protect retirees and savers from being exploited, demand real accountability from the financial institutions the SEC oversees, and work to prevent another financial crisis.” Wall Street On Parade did further investigation of Clayton … Continue reading
New Economic Study Presents a Disturbing Map of the United States
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 26, 2017 A new study backs up a theory that many Americans have long suspected: the U.S. is no longer the land of opportunity, despite what national statistics would have us believe. Rather, America is now narrowly constrained to zip codes of opportunity. The new research comes from the Economic Innovation Group (EIG), a bipartisan public policy organization funded by successful tech entrepreneurs. The study provides detailed data on the economically distressed communities that have fundamentally changed the economic landscape of America. The authors write: “A remarkably small proportion of places fuel national increases in jobs and businesses in today’s economy. High growth in these local economic powerhouses buoys national numbers while obscuring stagnant or declining economic activity in other parts of the country. EIG’s prior work shows that this trend represents a fundamental shift in the geography of economic growth in the … Continue reading
Technological Incompetence Appears to be Intentional at Wall Street’s Top Cop
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 25, 2017 When we created the website for Wall Street On Parade, it took us about 30 minutes to add a free plug-in function so that our readers could search the text of every article we have ever written. (See Search box in upper right-hand corner of our menu at the top of this website.) But at Wall Street’s top cop, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), if one wants to search corporate filings, one is limited to a four-year text search. This bizarre restriction inhibits investigative journalists from capably doing their job and connecting dots. This might sound like a small complaint were it not part of a larger pattern of technological failures by the SEC which have allowed Wall Street firms to run amok for decades. The biggest technological failure, of course, is the SEC’s inability to launch a Consolidated Audit … Continue reading
The U.S. President’s Role in a Time of Devastating Disasters
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 21, 2017 Today’s Houston Chronicle carries a photo and report of “thousands of piles of Hurricane Harvey wreckage on Houston curbs” still waiting for removal. The devastating flooding from Hurricane Harvey in late August has impacted low income families the hardest with another article in the paper reporting that residents of a public housing complex in Houston “have been asked to pay rent for flooded units deemed uninhabitable even as the mayor has condemned private landlords for similar practices.” In the Florida Keys, where major devastation occurred when Hurricane Irma hit the area on September 10 as a Category 4 hurricane, the schools remain closed and will begin to reopen on a staggered basis beginning Monday. The Miami Herald’s digital edition today shows a photo of the devastation unleashed on Big Pine Key by Hurricane Irma, which made landfall at Cudjoe Key, approximately … Continue reading
How Many of 2017’s Retail Bankruptcies Were Caused by Private-Equity’s Greed?
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 20, 2017 According to S&P Global Market Intelligence, there have been 35 retail bankruptcies this year, almost double the 18 retail bankruptcies of last year. The filing by Toys ‘R’ Us this week was the latest. What many of these retailers have in common is that they were taken private in leveraged buyouts (LBOs) by private equity (PE) firms. Toys ‘R’ Us, Payless ShoeSource, The Limited, Wet Seal, Gymboree Corp., rue21, and True Religion Apparel were all LBOs. Gander Mountain can also be included in this list if you reach back to its 1984 LBO. Far too many LBOs are simply asset stripping operations by Wall Street vultures who load the company with enormous debt, then asset strip the cash from the company by paying themselves obscene special dividends and management fees. On June 12 of this year, the official committee of unsecured … Continue reading
Toys ‘R’ Us Bankruptcy: Another Wall Street Debt Slave Falls
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 19, 2017 The year 2017 is likely to be remembered for devastating hurricanes and storm surges, waves of retail bankruptcies amidst record-setting household debt and a stock market that carelessly sailed through these dangerous waters to record highs. Toys ‘R’ Us was the latest in a growing string of retail bankruptcies to hit the mat last evening. Its bonds have been telegraphing trouble for some time, with one bond due next year careening from 97 cents on the dollar to 22 cents in a little more than two weeks. On September 6, Wolf Richter at WolfStreet.com provided the short narrative of how Toys ‘R’ Us found itself driving toward the ditch. Citing its leveraged buyout in 2005 by private equity firms Bain Capital, KKR & Co. and real estate firm Vornado Realty Trust, Richter wrote: “So here’s what the three PE firms did … Continue reading
Obama Has the Same Retirement Plan as the Clintons: Lavish Speaking Fees from Wall Street
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 18, 2017 The “Wall Street Democrats” is the wing of the party created by the Clintons and nurtured further by Barack Obama. It takes money hand over fist from Wall Street for political campaigns, wags a warning finger at Wall Street from the public podium while stuffing its administrations with Wall Street execs, then its leadership reaps millions of dollars in personal speaking fees from the robber barons after leaving office. As of this morning, there’s no longer any debate that Obama is firmly entrenched in this cozy world of money. Bloomberg News is reporting that former President Obama has accepted upwards of $400,000 a clip to speak before Wall Street firms Northern Trust Corp. and Cantor Fitzgerald and an unspecified sum from Carlyle Group LP. The speeches at Northern Trust and Carlyle Group occurred over the past month and a half. The … Continue reading
Wall Street Flacks Have an Increasingly Murky Presence in U.S. Media
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 14, 2017 Yesterday, one of our readers sent us a link to an article at Real Clear Politics by Allan Golombek which makes the same error-filled assertions as those of Andrew Ross Sorkin at the New York Times: that the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act did not lead to the U.S. financial crisis of 2007-2010. Golombek’s bio at the end of the article says only that he is “a Senior Director at the White House Writers Group.” A check at the firm’s website shows it to be an organization that freely admits to being paid by corporations and other special interests to advance their position in the media. The firm states: “Whether in a campaign or a crisis, we help our clients determine how best to define their messages for media acceptance and then disseminate those messages for maximum exposure and impact.” There … Continue reading