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Recent Posts
- A Wall Street Regulator Is Understating Margin Debt by More than $4 Trillion – Because It’s Not Counting Giant Banks Making Margin Loans to Hedge Funds
- 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
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Constitutional Crisis Lurks Behind Trump’s Obsession With His Public Mandate
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 26, 2017 On Monday, Tyler Cowen, an economics professor at George Mason University, wrote an opinion piece for Bloomberg News that offered several thought-provoking reasons that Trump and his staff are willing to tell bald-faced lies that are easily debunked. The column came after a weekend where Trump and his staff appeared neurotically obsessed to convince big media that Trump is the most popular president in history, notwithstanding the hundreds of thousands of protesters against his presidency that filled Washington D.C. and other major cities around the country on Saturday. Trump’s press secretary Sean Spicer stated on Saturday that “This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration — period — both in person and around the globe.” Spicer went on to assail the media’s “attempts to lessen the enthusiasm for the inauguration” as “shameful and wrong.” The Washington Post easily debunked the … Continue reading
Wall Street’s Revolving Money Door: Ceresney and Cohn Take a Spin
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 25, 2017 It was announced yesterday that Andrew Ceresney, the head of enforcement for the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) since 2013, would be returning to Debevoise & Plimpton as co-head of its litigation department – a nice promotion. In 2009, one year into the biggest financial crash since the Great Depression, Debevoise & Plimpton’s Ceresney was lead author, with two of his colleagues, of a lengthy article for the American Criminal Law Review titled: Regulatory Investigations and the Credit Crisis: The Search for Villains. Debevoise & Plimpton, both then and now, represents some of the largest Wall Street banks that have serially engaged in fraudulent conduct against the investing public. The article seemed to be suggesting that prosecuting these banks would be too labor intensive and the facts too hard to prove because the deals were too complex. One paragraph reads as … Continue reading
Citigroup’s Crime Spree Against Americans Continues With Slaps on the Wrist
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 24, 2017 Yesterday, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) charged two units of the Wall Street mega bank, Citigroup, with insidious fraudulent acts against homeowners while it imposed a modest $28.8 million in relief and penalties. The penalty portion of $7.4 million is meaningless because this is a bank that serially breaks the law, laughs at its regulators, and, most outrageously, it was simultaneously engaging in heinous misdeeds against Americans while the U.S. government was using taxpayer money to bail out its failed business model of brazen financial frauds. The $7.4 million in fines also stands in contrast to the $14.9 billion that Citigroup reported as net income for 2016. We will get to the current CFPB charges in a moment, but first some necessary background. On May 20, 2015, Citigroup’s commercial banking unit, Citicorp, pled guilty to criminal charges brought by the … Continue reading
Is Your Corporate Pension Benefit Safe Under the Trump Administration?
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 23, 2017 Most Americans are unaware that the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, the Federal body that stands behind corporate pension plans known as defined benefit plans, has only three members and three votes on its Board of Directors: the U.S. Labor Secretary, the U.S. Commerce Secretary and the U.S. Treasury Secretary. Under the Donald Trump administration, all three votes could be problematic for workers’pension interests if Trump’s current nominees are confirmed by the U.S. Senate. Andrew Puzder is Trump’s nominee for Secretary of the Labor Department. Puzder is already on record as opposing a substantial increase in the Federal minimum wage and an opponent of making more workers eligible for overtime pay. Much less is known about Puzder’s eyebrow-raising earlier career. From 1978 to 1991, Puzder was a trial lawyer in St. Louis at the law offices of Morris A. Shenker, the man … Continue reading
Obama’s Perpetual Farewell Tour
By Pam Martens: January 19, 2017 The man who was compared to a Messiah when he won the presidential election in 2008 has been on an excruciatingly long goodbye tour. First there was his farewell speech to the United Nations in September. Next came his farewell tour across Europe in November – the Messiah’s last foreign trip. Then there was his farewell speech in the U.S. Yesterday, there was a tortuously vacuous farewell press conference, which toward the end, had the feeling that actors from central casting had replaced real journalists in the press room in order to memorialize the greatness of this President. Whenever I think about this President, I think of Bruce Dixon, the Managing Editor of the Black Agenda Report in 2008 during Obama’s first presidential campaign. The Black Agenda Report writes for black Americans. Dixon wrote the following in February 2008: “Whether it is truly possible … Continue reading
Political Revolution Sprouts New Shoots Outside Goldman Sachs
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 18, 2017 Sometimes all it takes to win a war is a rallying cry. That cry started in the bowels of Wall Street on September 17, 2011 with the takeover of Zuccotti Park by grassroots protesters calling themselves Occupy Wall Street. The thunder clap from that movement, “we are the 99 percent,” reverberated around the world. Occupy focused the public’s attention on the insidious wealth transfer system that has been institutionalized by Wall Street on behalf of the 1 percent – a system which has minted dozens of billionaires and thousands of multi-millionaires while collapsing the U.S. economy from 2008 to 2010 and leaving millions of Americans homeless and jobless. (See our past coverage of Occupy in related articles below.) Yesterday, green shoots from the Occupy movement sprouted in a light falling rain outside the headquarters of Goldman Sachs at 200 West Street … Continue reading
Draining the Swamp in Washington Through Community Banking
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 17, 2017 The currency of Washington’s power politics is campaign money. Much of that campaign money flows from Wall Street’s biggest banks: its lobbyists, its Political Action Committees, its employees and their spouses. After flooding the presidential campaign with money, Wall Street is then rewarded by being allowed to make cabinet hiring decisions as part of the new President’s transition team, ensuring continuity government and an incurable malignancy on American democracy. To begin the process of draining the corrupt swamp in Washington, it means cutting off the money flow from Wall Street – not looking for a new savior who is deeply indebted to the same Wall Street banks. Tens of millions of U.S. consumers have the power to pull the plug on the swamp by moving their deposits from big Wall Street banks to their local community banks or their credit union. … Continue reading
Fed Chair Janet Yellen Channels Bernie Sanders in Speech to Teachers
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 13, 2017 Last night the Federal Reserve convened a Town Hall meeting via webcast with K-12 teachers and college educators of economics and history. Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen delivered a speech and then took a series of questions from teachers. It was during the Q&A period that Yellen gave a sobering assessment of the long-term prospects for the U.S. At numerous points, Yellen echoed the income inequality themes that Senator Bernie Sanders raised repeatedly at his rallies around the country during the presidential primaries. When asked about the biggest obstacles to the U.S. economy over the short and long term, Yellen said she did not have serious concerns over the short term but was worried about the longer term. In addition to productivity concerns, Yellen stated: (See video clip below.) “We have seen over many decades now that the returns – the wages … Continue reading
Trump, Spy Stories, Prostitutes and the U.S. Dollar
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 12, 2017 The President of the United States is typically viewed as the person whose top job is to inspire confidence in the dignity, integrity and sanity of his leadership of the country. But the presser held by President-elect Donald Trump yesterday, the first in six months and likely viewed by world leaders around the globe, was short on confidence building and long on slandering the American media and U.S. intelligence agencies. In short order, the U.S. dollar took a dive. Trump has yet to assimilate the concept that his words no longer belong just to him but attach themselves like flypaper to the credibility of the most powerful nation on earth. At times, the press conference felt more like an unruly street fight than a media Q&A by the man who will be sworn in as the 45th President of the United … Continue reading
Financial Crash Analysis: $22.6 Billion in Homeowner Relief; $7.8 Trillion to Four Wall Street Banks
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 11, 2017 As Goldman Sachs guys prepare to take the reins of power in Washington under the Trump administration, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) provided a tragic reminder on Monday regarding the power of the U.S. citizen versus their Wall Street overlords. The GAO released a study showing that as of October 31, 2016, the government “had disbursed $22.6 billion (60 percent) of the $37.51 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) funds” that were directed at helping distressed homeowners as a result of the 2008 Wall Street financial crash and the resulting housing bust. Those paltry billions stand in stark contrast to the $7.8 trillion in near-zero interest loans that the Federal Reserve secretly funneled to just four Wall Street banks from 2007 to 2010. The Fed funneled $2.5 trillion to Citigroup; $2 trillion to Morgan Stanley; $1.9 trillion to Merrill Lynch; and … Continue reading