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Recent Posts
- Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” Is a Grotesque Giveaway to Fossil Fuel Billionaires While Adding $3.3 Trillion to Nation’s Debt
- Senator Chris Murphy Charges that Trump “Has Opened a Channel for Bribery”
- Congressman Casten: Trump’s Assault on the Rule of Law Is Causing Capital Flight Out of U.S. by Foreign Investors
- Trump’s Approval Rating Drops to 80-Year Low; IMF Says U.S. Tariffs Now Exceed the Highs During the Great Depression
- Nasdaq Has Lost More than 3,000 Points Since Trump’s First Full Day in Office in 2025; the Pain Has Barely Begun
- The Bond Crisis Last Week Was a Global No-Confidence Vote in U. S. President Donald Trump
- Trump’s Tariff Plan Guts $5 Trillion in Stock Value in Two Days; Senator Warren Calls for Emergency Action Before Markets Open on Monday
- Trump’s Attacks on Big Law, Universities, and the Media Have a Common Goal: Silence Dissent Against Authoritarian Rule
- Trump Administration Gives All Clear to Laundering Money through Shell Companies and Bribing Foreign Officials
- Four Megabanks on Wall Street Hold $3.2 Trillion in Uninsured Deposits – Which May Explain Senator Schumer’s Pivot to the GOP to Stop a Government Shutdown
- Here’s What Came Crashing Down Yesterday for Trump’s “Genius” Guy, Elon Musk: Tesla Stock, Access to Twitter (X), His Years of Secret Calls with Putin
- After Banning the Associated Press, Trump Is Now Targeting Specific Journalists That He Wants to See Fired
- Closely Watched Atlanta Fed Model Predicts Negative U.S. Growth in First Quarter
- Trump’s Gangster Diplomacy Makes Front Page Headlines Around the Globe
- Who Benefits Alongside Elon Musk If He Succeeds in Killing the CFPB: the Megabanks on Wall Street that Underwrite His Tesla Stock Offerings
- In Trump 1.0, the State Department Used Taxpayer Money to Publish a Book Elevating Elon Musk to a Superhero; It Was Funded by USAID, the Agency Musk Wants to Quickly Shut Down
- News Host Joy Reid Raises Threat of Trump Selling U.S. to Putin; Ten Days Later Her Show Is Cancelled
- Elon Musk’s DOGE Appears to Be Violating a Court Order; It Has Taken Down Hundreds of YouTube Videos that Educate Americans on How to Avoid Being Swindled
- Barron’s Releases Audio of Jamie Dimon Cursing Out His Workers at a Town Hall, as Dimon Plans to Dump Another One Million JPM Shares
- There’s One Federal Investigative Agency that Neither Trump nor Elon Musk Can Touch: It Just Opened an Investigation into DOGE
- Elon Musk’s Companies Were Under Investigation by Five Inspectors General When the Trump Administration Fired Them and Made Musk the Investigator
- Donald Trump Gives the Greenlight to Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase to Return to Bribing Foreign Officials
- After Tech Geeks Built a Back Door to Loot Billions from FTX, Republicans Refuse to Investigate What Elon Musk’s Tech-Squad Did Inside the U.S. Treasury’s Payment System
- Former Prosecutor, Now U.S. Senator, Informs Tesla That CEO Musk May Be Violating Federal Law and to “Preserve All Records”
- Trump’s Hedge Fund Guy Is Now Overseeing the U.S. Treasury, IRS, OCC, U.S. Mint, FinCEN, F-SOC, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
- As Elon Musk Begins Shutting Down Payments to Federal Contractors, a Strange Money Trail Emerges to His Operatives Inside the U.S. Treasury’s Payment System
- JPMorgan Chase Charged by Yet Another Internal Whistleblower with Cooking the Books
- We Asked Google’s AI Search Model, Gemini, Questions About the Fed and Wall Street Megabanks: It Got the Answers Dead Wrong
- With Trump and Melania’s Crypto Coins Likely to Raise Legal Challenges, Why Didn’t Trump Fire the SEC’s Inspector General in His Purge of IGs?
- Fossil Fuel Industry Could End Up Paying Tens of Billions for LA Wildfires and Deceiving the Public on Climate Change for Decades
- It’s Being Called the Biggest Grift by a President in U.S. History: Trump and First Lady Launch their Own Crypto Coins
- Trump Plans to Install a Fracking CEO to Head the Energy Department and Declare a National Emergency on Energy to Gain Vast Powers
- Fossil Fuel Money Played a Role in the Los Angeles Fires and the Push to Install Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense
- When It Comes to Wealth Retention in Retirement, Concrete May Be the New Gold
- Wall Street Watchdog Warns “Clock Is Ticking on a Coming Catastrophic Financial Crash”
- Wall Street Is Sending the Same Message to Americans on Fossil Fuel Financing that It Sent on Cigarettes: Drop Dead
- In a Six-Week Span, this Dark Pool with a Curious Past Traded 3.7 Billion Shares
- Wall Street’s Lobby Firm Hired Eugene Scalia of Gibson Dunn to Sue the Fed for Jamie Dimon
- Postmaster General Louis DeJoy Made $561,051 in Compensation in 2024, as Mail Costs Spiked and Delivery Deteriorated
- Fed Chair Jay Powell Sends a Bold Message to Trump and Tanks the Dow by 1123 Points
- The Head of Fixed Income at T. Rowe Price Makes the Scary Case for the 10-Year Treasury to Spike to 6 Percent
- $663 Billion in Cash Assets Have Gone Poof at the Largest U.S. Banks
- Donald Trump to Ring Bell at New York Stock Exchange Today as Hit List Posters Appear in Manhattan Targeting Wall Street CEOs
- Trump Has a Slush Fund to Prop Up the Dollar – Will He Use It to Prop Up Bitcoin Instead?
- A CEO Assassination; a Billionaire Heiress/NYPD Commissioner; a Secret Wall Street Spy Center – Here’s How They’re Connected
- Despite More than 1600 Tech Scientists Signing a Letter Calling Crypto a Sham, Trump Names a Crypto Cheerleader for SEC Chair
- The Fed Rings a Warning Bell: Hedge Funds and Life Insurers Are Reporting Historic Leverage
- Trump’s Nominee for FBI Director, Kash Patel, Has Businesses Financially Intertwined with Trump
- Donald Trump Is at Risk of Getting Named in a Fossil Fuels Conspiracy Lawsuit
- Trump Is Having Difficulty Getting a Lawyer to Accept the Nomination for SEC Chair: Here’s Why
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Gold Has Set Historic Highs this Year as the Federal Reserve Has Reported Historic Losses

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 17, 2024 ~ According to Federal Reserve data, for the first time in its history, the Fed has been losing money on a consistent basis since September 28, 2022. As of the last reporting date of April 10, those losses came to a cumulative $162.9 billion. As the chart above from the Fed indicates, the monthly losses thus far in 2024 have ranged from a high of $13.4 billion in January to $5.5 billion in March. We are not talking about unrealized losses on the debt securities the Fed holds on its balance sheet, which it acquired under its various Quantitative Easing programs. (The Fed does not mark to market the gains or losses on those securities on the basis that it plans to hold them to maturity.) We’re talking about real cash operating losses the Fed is experiencing from earning approximately 2 percent interest on … Continue reading
Stanford Finance Professor Anat Admati Is Making Jamie Dimon Very Nervous – Again Calling His Bank “Dangerous”

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 16, 2024 ~ Stanford Finance and Economics Professor Anat Admati has been valiantly attempting to save the American financial system from the corrupting influence and disinformation campaigns of men like JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon for more than a decade. Her voice is gaining traction and that’s making Dimon very nervous. Dimon has admitted in his recent letter to shareholders that his federal banking regulators want the bank to raise 25 percent more capital. Making banks hold more equity capital (as opposed to debt) is an issue that Admati has made a central focus of her arguments for years. Dimon’s bank would have a lot more equity capital if Dimon had retained the bank’s earnings each year instead of tapping those earnings to boost the bank’s stock price by using $117 billion of the bank’s earnings for share buybacks over the past decade. (Retained earnings add … Continue reading
Jamie Dimon Dumped $150 Million of His JPMorgan Stock in February; Now He Says His Regulators Want 25 Percent More Capital at his Bank

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 15, 2024 ~ On October 27 of last year, JPMorgan Chase filed an 8K form with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) advising that, for the first time ever, its long-tenured Chairman and CEO, Jamie Dimon, and his family, intended to “sell 1 million shares” of his common stock holdings in the bank in 2024. The news made headlines because an insider selling a large amount of stock in any company – and particularly a bank with JPMorgan Chase’s serial history of running afoul of the law – can be a harbinger of bad news ahead for other shareholders. Dimon didn’t wait long into 2024 to start dumping stock. JPMorgan Chase filed another SEC form this past February showing that Dimon had sold 821,778 shares of the bank’s common stock for $150,167,222.52, or an average share price of $182.73 – which was suspiciously close to … Continue reading
The Black Swan Rears Its Head: The Fed Has Negative Capital Using GAAP Accounting

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 11, 2024 ~ The Fed’s unprecedented experiments with years of ZIRP (Zero Interest Rate Policy) and QE (Quantitative Easing), where it bought up trillions of dollars of low-yielding U.S. Treasuries and agency Mortgage-Backed Securities (MBS) and quietly parked them on its balance sheet, are now posing a threat to the Fed’s flexibility in conducting monetary policy. (Since 2008, the Fed’s concept of conducting monetary policy has come to enshrine serial Wall Street mega bank bailouts as a regular part of its monetary policy. Large and growing cash losses at the Fed may seriously crimp such future bailouts.) As of last Wednesday, according to Fed data, the Fed was sitting on $6.97 trillion of debt instruments it had predominantly purchased at very low fixed rates of interest. Because the interest rate (coupon) is fixed for these past purchases, when new bonds are issued in the marketplace … Continue reading
New York Fed Will Not Confirm or Deny that 5-Count Felon JPMorgan Chase Is Custodian of $2.4 Trillion of Its Securities

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 10, 2024 ~ As the financial crisis of 2008 was ravaging century-old financial institutions on Wall Street and collapsing the U.S. economy, the central bank of the United States, the Federal Reserve, launched an effort to restore market liquidity by becoming the buyer of the toxic sludge flooding Wall Street in the form of Mortgage-Backed Securities (MBS). On November 25, 2008, in delicately-parsed language, the Fed announced it planned to buy $500 billion of MBS that was backed by government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Ginnie Mae. That was the first of what would become Quantitative Easing (QE) to infinity at the Fed. The Fed’s MBS holdings have grown from the planned $500 billion to $2.4 trillion as of last Wednesday. Just as it did with the bulk of its $29 trillion bailout programs to Wall Street during and after the 2008 financial crisis, … Continue reading
For the First Time in History, the Fed Is Reporting Billions in Losses Weekly; It’s Still Paying High Interest Income to the Mega Banks on Wall Street

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 8, 2024 ~ As of April 3 of this year, the Federal Reserve (Fed) has racked up $161 billion in accumulated losses. We’re not talking about unrealized losses on the underwater debt securities the Fed holds on its balance sheet, which it does not mark to market. We’re talking about real cash losses it is experiencing from earning approximately 2 percent interest on the $6.97 trillion of debt securities it holds on its balance sheet from its Quantitative Easing (QE) operations while it continues to pay out 5.4 percent interest to the mega banks on Wall Street (and other Fed member banks) for the reserves they hold with the Fed; 5.3 percent interest it pays on reverse repo operations with the Fed; and a whopping 6 percent dividend to member shareholder banks with assets of $10 billion or less and the lesser of 6 percent … Continue reading
There’s a Revival of the Dotcom-esque Froth in Today’s Markets; Cathie Wood Is Standing in for Henry Blodget and Jack Grubman; Nasdaq Is Playing Nasdaq

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 3, 2024 ~ On Wednesday, April 3, Cathie Wood, CEO and Chief Investment Officer of ARK Investment Management, reiterated her price target of $2,000 on Tesla, the electric vehicle manufacturer. Tesla’s stock opened Wednesday at $164.02 and was trading at $168 by early afternoon. The average analyst price target on Tesla is $178.16 – more than $1800 away from Cathie Wood’s price target. Market Insider reported on March 14 that Tesla is the third-largest holding in Wood’s flagship ARKK fund, “with a value of $574.88 million.” In other words, Wood has a not so subtle incentive to want to boost Tesla’s share price. Tesla has lost $300 billion in market cap since June of last year and its share price is down more than 30 percent year-to-date. Tesla does have this going for it. It makes real things – autos – that are useful to … Continue reading
Study Finds Wall Street Mega Banks Have Overstated Income for Years on Commercial Real Estate Loans They Sell to Investors

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 2, 2024 ~ Last August, the Journal of Finance published a study by two finance professors that should have made bold headlines in every major business newspaper in America. It didn’t – suggesting that Americans will eventually learn about Wall Street’s chicanery in commercial real estate the same way they learned about Wall Street’s subprime residential mortgage scams after the 2008 financial collapse: from a movie like The Big Short or Inside Job. Wall Street On Parade only learned about this paper recently from one of our engaged readers. The paper was authored by John Griffin, Professor of Finance at McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas, Austin and Alex Priest, Assistant Professor of Finance at the Simon Business School at the University of Rochester. The paper takes a forensic look – from an exhaustive number of perspectives – at why the … Continue reading
Jamie Dimon Huddles in Private with Biden Bigwigs as His Bank Faces More Crime Charges

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 1, 2024 ~ Remember that time in 2016 when Attorney General Loretta Lynch decided she would take a private meeting with Bill Clinton on her plane as it was parked on the tarmac in Phoenix – while his wife, Hillary Clinton, was under federal investigation for using an unsafe private email server at her New York home to receive classified government emails when she was Secretary of State? What President Biden’s Vice President, Kamala Harris, and his Chief of Staff, Jeff Zients, did in mid-March was equally scandalous. Harris had a “one-on-one lunch at the White House” with Jamie Dimon, the Chairman and CEO of the most crime-riddled bank in the United States, JPMorgan Chase. Zients also separately met with Dimon. That reporting comes courtesy of reporters Joshua Franklin and James Politi of the Financial Times (paywall). It has not been disputed by the Biden … Continue reading
Report: Five Banks Have a Combined Half Trillion Dollars in Commercial Real Estate Loans; Number 1 is JPMorgan Chase

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 28, 2024 ~ Yesterday, American Banker released a report showing that five banks in the U.S. hold a combined half trillion dollars in commercial real estate (CRE) loans. It came as a big surprise to a lot of folks that the bank holding the largest amount of CRE loans is JPMorgan Chase – whose bank holding company is also exposed to $49 trillion in derivatives as of December 31, 2023 according to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. (See Table 14 at this link.) JPMorgan Chase is already considered the riskiest bank in the U.S. according to its regulators. American Banker reported the following CRE totals for the five banks: JPMorgan Chase, $173 billion; Wells Fargo, $139.65 billion; Bank of America, $82.8 billion; U.S. Bank, $55.66 billion; and PNC Bank, $48.89 billion. Some of the same hubris and willful blindness that prevailed in … Continue reading