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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
U.S. House Financial Services Committee Needs New Leadership
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 12, 2017 When members of the U.S. House Financial Services Committee question Fed Chair Janet Yellen this morning following her testimony on monetary policy, many Republicans on the panel will be posturing for their money masters who fund their political campaigns rather than asking questions that benefit the average American. You can tell that there has been a Koch Network-corporate takeover of the House Financial Services Committee by the statement that its Chairman, Jeb Hensarling, plastered on the front page of the Committee’s web site following the heroic actions of the Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Richard Cordray, on Monday. Cordray reopened the nation’s courts to millions of Americans who have been the victims of predatory actions by the banks that fund Hensarling’s seat in Congress. On Monday, Cordray went up against the most powerful players on Wall Street and the … Continue reading
Court House Doors Will Reopen for Millions of U.S. Consumers
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 11, 2017 Yesterday, Richard Cordray, the Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) that was created in 2010 under the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation, did what few Americans thought he would dare to do: he stood up to threats of being fired; threats of backlash from Wall Street titans; threats of having his agency’s budget gutted; and Congressional threats of being put on a leash by a commission appointed by the President. Despite all of these threats and more, Cordray issued the final rule that allows consumers who have been defrauded in financial transactions involving credit cards and bank accounts to have access to file a group action (known legally as a “class action”) using the nation’s courts. The rule mandates the following wording in bank account and credit card contracts: “You may file a class action in court or you may … Continue reading
Flash Crashes Are a Permanent Part of U.S. Markets: Should You Worry?
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 10, 2017 Over the past year, there have been flash crashes in multiple markets, raising concerns that fat fingers, algorithms and/or rogue hedge fund traders are still running amok. We’ll get to the specifics in a moment, but to put the unusual trading patterns in context, you need some important background information. Wall Street On Parade began reporting on flash crash activity following the Granddaddy of all flash crashes thus far – the event on May 6, 2010 when the stock market did a bungee jump, briefly plunging 998 points, with hundreds of stocks momentarily losing 60 per cent or more of their value and knocking out stop-loss orders for retail investors. Former SEC Chair Mary Schapiro estimated at the time that individual investors had lost more than $200 million in these improperly triggered stop loss orders on May 6. (Read our skepticism … Continue reading
These Charts Show the Fed’s Stress Tests as a Dangerous Illusion
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 7, 2017 Sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words. The charts above show how four of the largest Wall Street banks traded like clones of one another yesterday. Their share prices rallied at almost identical times and the rallies faded at almost identical times. The chart contrasting the trading pattern of JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley is particularly interesting. JPMorgan’s Chase bank has thousands of retail commercial bank branches spread across the United States. Morgan Stanley, on the other hand, has approximately 17,000 retail stockbrokers, now known as financial advisors. What both firms have in common is that they are among the five banks in the country that control a monster pile of derivatives on Wall Street. Ditto for the other two banks illustrated above: Citigroup and Bank of America. According to the most recent data from the Office of … Continue reading
Financial System of U.S. Rests on Health of Just Five Mega Banks
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 6, 2017 According to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), as of March 31, 2017 there were a total of 5,856 banks in the U.S. operating under its Federal deposit insurance umbrella. But according to government financial researchers, five of those banks pose an ongoing material threat to the U.S. financial system. Not surprisingly, those five banks hold insured deposits for savers while simultaneously engaging in highly leveraged, high risk trading on Wall Street. On June 27, Janet Yellen, the Chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve (the nation’s central bank) spoke at an event at the British Academy in London. She stated the following about the U.S. financial system: “Would I say there will never, ever be another financial crisis? You know probably that would be going too far, but I do think we are much safer, and I hope that it will … Continue reading
Why Wall Street Should Be Viewed as a Major National Threat
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 5, 2017 The day before the 4th of July, when most Americans were hustling about preparing for family barbecues, the New York Times finally decided to publish an editorial warning about Wall Street’s potential threat to the nation. Unfortunately, it did so with the kind of timidity we see regularly from cowed or compromised Wall Street banking regulators. The editorial writers noted that: “It’s entirely possible that the system is more fragile than the Fed’s stress tests indicate,” and they called for “heightened vigilance of derivatives in particular” without providing any detailed data. A more accurate assessment of the situation would have been this: There is only one industry in the United States that has twice in a period of less than 100 years brought about a devastating economic crisis in the country. Wild speculation coupled with poor regulation of mega Wall Street … Continue reading
New York Times Runs Editorial Today on the Mega Banks: You Need to Pay Attention
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 3, 2017 We have frequently called out the New York Times for running sycophantic articles on the big, mean, untamed Wall Street banking behemoths which just happen to be one of its home town’s largest industries and source of the biggest paychecks, which, in turn, boost its real estate markets, restaurants and retail sales – not to mention its own ad revenues. According to the Federal government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, financial activities represented 468,600 jobs in New York City as of April 2017. According to a report from the New York State Department of Labor on New York City’s largest industries, as of 2014 the “average annual wage ($404,800) paid in the securities and commodity contracts industry is nearly five times the all-industry average annual wage ($84,752) for 2014.” But today, the New York Times’ Editorial Board has joined Wall Street On … Continue reading
Following Latest Woman Bashing, Growing Numbers Question Trump’s Fitness for President

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 30, 2017 “Donald Trump Is Not Well,” is the headline over an OpEd at the Washington Post this morning by Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough, hosts of the MSNBC show, Morning Joe. The OpEd comes in response to a sexist rant against Mika Brzezinski by the President of the United States yesterday on his Twitter page. Invoking for the second time his fixation about women and blood, the President called Brzezinski “low I.Q. Crazy Mika” and said that at a prior visit to his Mar-a-Lago residence in Palm Beach she was “bleeding badly from a face-lift.” (The hosts called the face-lift allegation a lie.) Adding some background evidence to their claim that the President “is not well,” the MSNBC hosts wrote: “From his menstruation musings about Megyn Kelly, to his fat-shaming treatment of a former Miss Universe, to his braggadocio claims about grabbing … Continue reading
After Passing Stress Tests, Wall Street Banks to Spend Like a Drunken Sailor – on their Own Stock Buybacks
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 29, 2017 Yesterday, the Federal Reserve announced the second leg of its 2017 stress tests for the nation’s most systemic financial institutions. Known as the Comprehensive Capital Analysis and Review (CCAR), the Fed said it “did not object to the capital plans of all 34 bank holding companies” although Capital One Financial will be required to “submit a new capital plan within six months that addresses identified weaknesses in its capital planning process.” That all clear from the Fed unleashed what JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon fondly refers to as “animal spirits” on Wall Street. The Fed had barely made its announcement when three of the biggest Wall Street banks announced they were earmarking about $47 billion to gorging on their own share buybacks. JPMorgan Chase led the pack with a potential buyback of $19.4 billion over the next 12 months, according to … Continue reading
Fed Chair Janet Yellen Seriously Misleads in London on U.S. Banking Reform
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 28, 2017 Yesterday the Chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve, Janet Yellen, was in London for a wide-ranging financial markets discussion with Nicholas Stern, the President of the British Academy. Making headlines from that discussion was Yellen’s stated belief that there will not be another financial crisis in our lifetimes. Yellen stated to Stern: “Would I say there will never, ever be another financial crisis? You know probably that would be going too far, but I do think we are much safer, and I hope that it will not be in our lifetimes and I don’t believe it will be.” While that remark has dominated the news, the more meaningful story is that Yellen (the top monetary authority in the United States; the head of the U.S. central bank; and the top dog at the Federal watchdog that regulates the largest bank holding … Continue reading