Category Archives: Uncategorized

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 27, 2017 There are some very serious undercurrents at work in the U.S. financial markets but they are getting short shrift on the front pages of newspapers as the President’s travails dominate the news. That’s working out well for Wall Street, which wants to keep the public slumbering as long as possible in hopes of gutting more financial regulations. One of those serious undercurrents is the amount of risk being held by the biggest banks in the country. According to the Federal Reserve’s release of its Supervisory Stress Test, of the 34 Bank Holding Companies that are subject to its review, under a “severely adverse scenario,” meaning a deep recession, losses for the combined group are projected to be $493 billion. Not to put too fine a point on it but that’s just 34 banks out of a total of 5,856 FDIC insured … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 26, 2017 Jared Beck is not a lawyer likely to file a frivolous motion in Federal court. He’s an honors graduate of Harvard Law School, where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review, and a Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude graduate of Harvard College. Prior to setting up his own practice with his equally impressive wife, Elizabeth Lee Beck, he worked for two prominent corporate law firms where he represented clients like Cadbury, General Motors and Snapple. Jared Beck is one of the lead lawyers representing supporters of Senator Bernie Sanders in a Federal lawsuit that charges that the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and its former Chair, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, engaged in overt acts to undermine the Sanders’ presidential primary campaign while boosting the prospects of Hillary Clinton as the Democratic Presidential nominee. The lawsuit makes charges of fraud, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 23, 2017 Former FBI Director James Comey has testified to Congress that he was uncomfortable with the multiple contacts by the President. Comey was fired by Trump after declining to give a pledge of loyalty to the President. Now, official government emails have been released documenting that another top law enforcement official with jurisdiction to investigate Donald Trump and his business associates received “uncomfortable” contacts by the President and was then fired after declining to return a phone call. Yesterday evening, Jason Leopold and Claudia Koerner, reporters for Buzzfeed, released emails they had obtained under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the U.S. Justice Department. The emails documented concerns raised to Justice Department officials by Preet Bharara, at the time the top Federal prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, over a voice mail left … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 22, 2017  Four years ago Wall Street On Parade published an investigative report with the headline: “Jay Sekulow: The Man Pumping the IRS Scandal on Network TV Sits at the Center of a Web of Nonprofits That Have Paid Him, His Family and Related Businesses $40 Million Since 1998.” Add millions of dollars more to the above figure and you have an updated account of the man the President of the United States just added to his white collar criminal defense legal team. Oh yes, there’s one more update, Jay Sekulow has no white collar criminal defense legal experience. Sekulow also appears to be the new spokesperson for Trump’s legal team.  His tenure in that position may be short-lived given his recent roasting by comedian Stephen Colbert. (See video clip below.) This past Sunday, June 18, Sekulow made the rounds of the Sunday talk … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 21, 2017 You can tell a lot about a nation by the kind of research reports it spews out monthly or quarterly. In the United States, we are bombarded with Federal government reports on Gross Domestic Product (GDP), Durable Goods Orders, Retail Sales, Housing Starts and the like. If you want to know the price of gold or oil or thousands of corporate stock prices, you can get those numbers on a second by second basis on your laptop or mobile app. Research releases in the United States that measure how the nation is doing in the area of social progress are far fewer and less timely. You’re not going to find such data released monthly or even quarterly. Take, for example, Federal studies that measure homelessness among students in public schools. The most recent research we could find from the U.S. Department … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 20, 2017  In 2006 the Federal Reserve’s books were audited by PricewaterhouseCoopers. But beginning in 2007 and for every year thereafter through 2014, the Fed’s books were audited by Deloitte & Touche. That’s a very long eight years that just happen to coincide with the greatest economic upheaval in the U.S. since the Great Depression. (Since 2015, KPMG has issued the annual audited statement of the Fed’s books.) We’re not suggesting that Deloitte didn’t do its job properly but we are suggesting that the Fed benefited by not having a bunch of different prying eyes looking at its books during those bizarre years when its assets ballooned from $914.8 billion at the end of 2007 to $4.5 trillion in 2014. In just the single year of 2013 the Fed’s assets jumped by a staggering $1 trillion from $2.9 trillion at the end of … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 19, 2017 Mark this date on your calendar: Friday, June 9, 2017. That’s the date that the big downward move in the largest tech stocks began. The day also saw a rotation into big bank stocks (which is like swapping a land mine for a hand grenade — there’s going to be an explosion, it’s just a matter of degree). The selloff on Friday was triggered by a research report from Robert Boroujerdi of Goldman Sachs. The report compared today’s FAAMG tech stocks (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Google-parent Alphabet) to the highfliers in the tech bubble that crashed in 2000: Microsoft, Cisco, Intel, Oracle and Lucent. Boroujerdi used a lexicon that the market did not want to hear: “death,” “extremes,” and “difficult to decipher risk narratives.” The exact sentence went like this: “This outperformance, driven by secular growth and the death of … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 15, 2017 A new poll is out from the Associated Press/NORC Center for Public Affairs Research at the University of Chicago. It doesn’t bode well for Donald Trump’s presidency nor for the U.S. economy. Despite Wall Street’s century-old propaganda campaign to convince Washington that it controls the levers to economic growth in the U.S., and thus must be placated on its every desire, informed citizens understand that economic power rests in the hands of the consumer in a nation where two-thirds of GDP is consumer spending. Likewise, consumer confidence in the President of the United States impacts one’s willingness to open the purse strings and buy. The thinking is: if the country is headed in the wrong direction, how safe is my job? Perhaps I should stop spending and put money away for a rainy day. The new poll shows that 64 percent … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 14, 2017 The next leg of the insatiable Wall Street heist has begun under the new U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. Under the guise of empowering Americans “to make independent financial decisions,” the Treasury released its set of recommendations for financial reform on Monday. Far from empowering Americans, the new recommendations would effectively place a bigger blindfold on consumers, blocking further their ability to differentiate between serially corrupt financial institutions on Wall Street and those that make an effort at playing by the rules. (The latter being an almost extinct species.) Wall Street’s fingerprints are all over the Treasury recommendations. The report has singled out for particular scalpel treatment the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), which Wall Street loathes because of its independence. The acronym “CFPB” appears 315 times in the 147-page report. One passage reads as follows: “A significant restructuring in the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 13, 2017 If Goldman Sachs thinks this Russian computer genius is worthy of endless prosecution for the past eight years, despite two courts overturning their efforts, perhaps he’s just the man the Department of Homeland Security and FBI need to stop the Russian assault on the U.S. election system. This morning Bloomberg News is reporting that in the leadup to the Presidential election of 2016, Russian hackers hit voting systems in a total of 39 states, confirming other reports that the U.S. public has not previously been made aware of the extent of Russian hacking into state voting systems. In testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee on June 8, former FBI Director James Comey stated in regard to Russian interference in our elections that “They’re coming after America,” adding that “They will be back.” This is where computer experts on Wall Street could help the … Continue reading →