-
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
Can a Serially Troubled Wall Street Bank Grow By Shrinking?
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
We Agree: Oprah Don’t Do It
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
Shhh! Trump’s Wall Street Regulators Keep Public in the Dark
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
Trump’s Lawyer Threatens a Book Publisher: It Backfires Big Time
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
Wall Street On Parade Responds to New Publisher at New York Times
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
Protest Planned for 5:30 Today at Twitter HQ Over Trump Nuclear Tweet
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
Fascinating Stuff that Won’t Be in Former FBI Director James Comey’s Book
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
It’s Official: Government Report Says Market Risks are “High and Rising”
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
Despite Record Levels, the Stock Market Is Actually Shrinking in Size
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
Trump Transition Team Emails: Here’s Why Washington Insiders Are Freaking Out
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