Category Archives: Uncategorized

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 13, 2017 Two events conspired this past week to force us to reassess if America can ever find its way home; (home being a nation that honors its citizens’ Bill of Rights — the amendments to the U.S. constitution that preserve the individual’s freedoms and protect the individual from abuse of power.) We have been contemplating how the best and the brightest could serve in Washington in dedicated service to the citizens of their country by watching Aaron Sorkin’s West Wing, the television series that ran on NBC from the fall of 1999 to the spring of 2006. (It perhaps speaks to where we are as a nation that its citizens must turn to fictional writing to imagine sanity in government.) There is a memorable scene in one West Wing episode where Jed Bartlet, the fictional President of the United States played by … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 9, 2017 Without holding as much as one public hearing, Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives are hoping to show their fealty to their corporate masters and make it next to impossible for citizens to bring class action lawsuits against corporate wrongdoers. A vote will be held today on H.R. 985, a bill with the Orwellian reverse-speak title of “Fairness in Class Action Litigation Act of 2017.” While the media is absorbed in the wild accusations-du-jour Tweeted out by the President of the United States, corporations are salaciously using the media distractions to repeal a century of hard-fought gains in labor and civil rights protections. The bill was introduced by Bob Goodlatte, a Republican from Virginia. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the largest donors to the Goodlatte political campaign in 2016 were multinational corporations and their trade associations. The legislation … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 8, 2017 Yesterday the Senate Banking Committee announced that the confirmation hearing for Trump’s nominee to Chair the Securities and Exchange Commission, Jay Clayton, will be held on March 23. Expect fireworks in the hearing from Democrats who are mad as hell at the myriad conflicts of this nominee. When Clayton’s name was first announced by the Trump camp, Senator Sherrod Brown, the Democrat’s ranking member of the Senate Banking Committee, sent out a press release with this statement: “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 … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 7, 2017 Yesterday, the German global bank, Deutsche Bank, fell by 3.82 percent by the close of trading on the New York Stock Exchange on news of a capital raising and revamp in strategy. That price action took down every major Wall Street bank stock and, interestingly, MetLife, which closed down 1.64 percent, beating out even Citigroup which closed down 1.18 percent. The rest of the major derivatives players fared as follows: JPMorgan Chase closed with a loss of 0.95 percent; Bank of America was off by 0.75 percent; Morgan Stanley closed down 0.56 percent; with Goldman Sachs down a meager 0.35 percent after infusing itself throughout the Trump administration’s corridors of power in Washington. Last June, Deutsche Bank found itself the subject of unwanted attention in a report issued by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The report looked at the “Financial System … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 6, 2017 Commander-in-Tweet Donald Trump has potentially dug a deep hole for himself. By publishing a Tweet over the weekend stating that President Obama had tapped his phones during the Presidential election campaign, Trump has simultaneously suggested that a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court (FISA court) found sufficient evidence to warrant a wiretap. (The wiretap would have been at the behest of an intelligence agency, not President Obama directly.) Chuck Todd, host of Sunday’s Meet the Press, summed up the mess as follows on his program yesterday: “It’s such a serious allegation. I mean it is either, if it’s true, it’s an extraordinary political scandal. And if it’s not true, it’s an extraordinary political scandal.” It should be noted that if it’s not true, it would be not so much a political scandal as it would be another in a long, long series … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 1, 2017 In President Trump’s speech last evening to a joint session of Congress, he described his plan to rebuild America’s crumbling infrastructure as follows: “To launch our national rebuilding, I will be asking the Congress to approve legislation that produces a $1 trillion investment in the infrastructure of the United States — financed through both public and private capital — creating millions of new jobs.” Financed through “both public and private capital” sounds a lot like a public-private partnership.  Here’s how those hybrid creatures have worked out so far for the American people. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were, effectively, public-private partnerships. (The government preferred to call them “Government Sponsored Enterprises” or GSEs.) Each company traded on the New York Stock Exchange and each company had private shareholders. Because Fannie and Freddie had a line of credit from the U.S. Treasury and … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 28, 2017 PwC, formerly known as PricewaterhouseCoopers, is one of the Big Four accounting firms created in 1998 from the merger of Price Waterhouse and Coopers & Lybrand. Its namesakes are more than a century old. Unfortunately, PwC will henceforth be known as the accounting firm that provided presenters Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway with the wrong red envelope at Sunday night’s Oscars. That mistake created a chaotic scene where two producers of the film “La La Land” were initially allowed to give speeches on stage for Best Film, then stunned with the news that “Moonlight” had actually won the award. At one point, producers and casts of both films stood in dazed confusion on the stage. According to the official report thus far, a PwC partner, Brian Cullinan, mistakenly handed the Best Actress award envelope (Emma Stone for “La La Land”) to … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 27, 2017 Warren Buffett, the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, authors an annual letter to shareholders that receives wide media coverage for the nuggets of wisdom dispersed to the masses. His latest letter, released on Saturday, trumpets American exceptionalism, the miraculous market system Americans have created, while it blithely dismisses the greatest wealth and income inequality in America since the 1920s. Buffett preposterously observes that “Babies born in America today are the luckiest crop in history.” Let’s start with that last statement. According to our own Central Intelligence Agency, there are 55 countries that have a lower infant mortality rate than the United States. Even debt-strapped Greece beats the United States. Much of what Buffett has to say in this letter sounds like unadulterated propaganda to reassure the 99 percent that his amassing of a net worth of $76.3 billion was a result of … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 24, 2017  The biggest banks on Wall Street, both foreign and domestic, have been repeatedly charged with rigging and colluding in markets from New York to London to Japan. Thus, it is natural to ask, have the big banks formed a cartel to rig the prices of their own stocks? This time last year, Wall Street banks were in a slow, endless bleed. The Federal Reserve had raised interest rates for the first time since the 2008 financial crisis on December 16, 2015 with strong hints that more rate hikes would be coming in 2016. Bank stocks never do well in a rising interest rate environment because their dividend yield has to compete with rising yields on bonds. Money gravitates out of dividend paying stocks into bonds and/or into hard assets like real estate based on the view that it will appreciate from inflationary forces. … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 23, 2017 On September 8, 2016, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) fined Wells Fargo $185 million following an investigation that found that its employees had engaged in a widespread practice of “secretly opening unauthorized deposit and credit card accounts” in order to meet sales quotas or qualify for bonuses. An estimated 2 million accounts were involved. One month later, the Chairman and CEO of Wells Fargo, John Stumpf, was gone. Consider that swift action to acknowledge and punish egregious abuse of clients with how the Boards of Directors of JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup have responded to criminal felony charges and seemingly endless regulatory fines for abusing clients’ trust. The Boards have kept their CEOs in place, paid the monster fines and moved on to the next settlement. Jamie Dimon became the CEO of JPMorgan Chase on January 1, 2006. At that point, … Continue reading →