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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
How Did a Nation Crippled by Wall Street Billionaires End Up With Them Running the Country?
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 21, 2016 Donald Trump is increasingly looking like Wall Street’s back up plan in the event that the Wall Street Democrats didn’t triumph in the 2016 election. Trump has appointed two Goldman Sachs alumni and the current President of Goldman Sachs to top posts in his administration. On Monday, Trump announced that Vincent Viola, a billionaire who spent the bulk of his adult life trading oil and gas futures on Wall Street, would become Secretary of the Army – at a time when tens of thousands of service members rely on food pantries to get by. Forbes reports this about how Viola gets by: “Viola owns a 20,000-square-foot townhouse on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, near Central Park. In December 2013 he listed the home — complete with a giant red bow tied across its facade — for a staggering $114 million. … Continue reading
Virtu Financial Execs Were Major Donors to Clinton and Schumer as Trump Nominates Its Top Dog as Secretary of the Army
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 20, 2016 Something smelled unusually rotten in Trumpland when Democratic Senator from New York Chuck Schumer fell all over himself to endorse Donald Trump’s nominee, Vincent Viola, as Secretary of the Army. Viola has never served in battle and has spent the bulk of his adult life as an oil and gas futures trader. He became a billionaire from his stake in a high frequency trading firm, Virtu Financial, which he took public last year. Multiple media outlets reported that Viola was a donor to Donald Trump’s campaign. According to Federal Election Commission (FEC) records, however, Viola’s only Federal election contribution in the past two years was a $5,000 donation to the CME Group Pac in December 2015. Raising further questions about what is actually going on here, Virtu Financial’s CEO, Douglas Cifu, was a major donor to Hillary Clinton’s campaign, giving $10,000 … Continue reading
Has America Fallen? Krugman and Europeans Raise the Question.
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 19, 2016 Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman is raising a question in the pages of the New York Times this morning that has been on the minds of Europeans since Donald Trump won the U.S. presidential election on November 8: has America fallen? Krugman’s column came two days after we had heard the following story from a friend: a few days after the November 8 election, a young man in his twenties got into a cab in New York City heading for John F. Kennedy International Airport. The cabbie asks why the young man is leaving. The student explains that he has been attending a university in New York City but his parents in Germany had called and ordered him to come home immediately. Their exact statement to him was: “leave immediately, America has fallen.” What could cause this kind of reaction from parents … Continue reading
What’s Really Behind America’s Slumping GDP Growth?
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 16, 2016 On December 6, the Gallup organization together with the U.S. Council on Competitiveness published a jolting study demonstrating that the pervasive sense among Americans that the U.S. is in economic decline isn’t imagined. It’s real and it’s dangerous. The study was conducted by Gallup’s Senior Economist, Jonathan Rothwell, with other Gallup experts and external scientists serving as reviewers to “ensure statistical and theoretical accuracy and objectivity,” according to Gallup Chairman and CEO Jim Clifton. The problem, in a nutshell, is this: real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita ran at a rate of 2.4 percent per year from 1929 to 1979. But since 2007, real GDP per capita has been a negligible 1 percent. Since the depths of the Wall Street crash in 2009, it has been a paltry 1.4 percent. (GDP per capita is the value of all goods and … Continue reading
Senate Specifics on Why Goldman Sachs’ Gary Cohn Should Not Have a Role in the U.S. Government
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 15, 2016 With the news that Gary Cohn, the sitting President of Goldman Sachs, will join two other Goldman Sachs alumni to make up the economic, treasury and strategy team in the Donald Trump administration, we had a fleeting vision of retired Michigan Senator Carl Levin flinging open a window in Detroit and screaming obscenities into the wind. Cohn was the Co-President of Goldman Sachs who oversaw its trading business in the leadup to the 2008 crash as it offloaded billions of dollars of toxic subprime mortgage paper onto its customers, with employees even referring to one offering as a “shitty deal” in emails, while Goldman shorted the hell out of the paper (betting against it) to make massive profits for itself. Billions of dollars of this rotten paper was sold to retirement funds for low-wage municipal workers. On Wednesday, April 13, 2011, following … Continue reading
Still Unprosecuted for its Frauds in the Crash, Goldman Sachs to Be the Financial Brains of the Trump Era
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 14, 2016 Two former Goldman Sachs bankers and the sitting President of the Wall Street firm are taking high positions in Donald Trump’s administration despite the egregious role that Goldman Sachs played in the 2008 financial collapse that cost millions of Americans their homes and their jobs. Steve Bannon, who at one time worked in Mergers and Acquisitions at Goldman, will be Trump’s Senior Counselor and Chief White House Strategist. Steve Mnuchin, who joined Goldman in 1985 and worked there for the next 17 years, has been nominated by Trump to serve as U.S. Treasury Secretary. That post also entitles Mnuchin to Chair the Financial Stability Oversight Council, a body that frequently meets in secret to deliberate if the U.S. could be looking at another 2008-style meltdown. Yesterday, an article at Bloomberg News raised questions about Mnuchin’s qualifications to serve in one of … Continue reading
Who Will Protect the Whistleblower Under Trump’s Corporate Regime?
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 13, 2016 Whistleblowers certainly haven’t enjoyed halcyon days under either Presidents Obama or George W. Bush (see related article below) but President-elect Donald Trump’s cabinet could actually produce an upsurge in corporate corruption by making whistleblowers fearful of coming forward at all. Now that Trump has announced his intention to put Big Oil in charge of the State Department; an executive opposed to the new overtime pay laws at the helm of the “Labor” Department; and the vampire squid Goldman Sachs’ alumni in charge of “anything that smells like money,” it seems safe to say this isn’t exactly the populist President the working class had in mind. In fact, it looks very much like a corporate coup d’état with three military generals thrown in to the mix as the Praetorian Guard in case the sold-out laborers grab their pitchforks. Trump’s nominee for Labor … Continue reading
Here’s Why Russia Wasn’t Behind the WikiLeaks Emails Leak
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 12, 2016 The Washington Post continues to double-down on its Red-baiting hysteria, reporting over the weekend as follows: “Intelligence agencies have identified individuals with connections to the Russian government who provided WikiLeaks with thousands of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee and others, including Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, according to U.S. officials.” The objective, according to the Post’s perpetually anonymous sources, was this: “Those officials described the individuals as actors known to the intelligence community and part of a wider Russian operation to boost Trump and hurt Clinton’s chances.” One aspect of the manner in which WikiLeaks released a specific subset of emails is almost certain proof that a sophisticated state-supported intelligence operation was not behind the alleged hack of the emails. The emails WikiLeaks released from Podesta’s email account didn’t just pertain to his work as Campaign Chairman for Hillary Clinton … Continue reading
If Trump Nominates John Allison as Bank Supervisor at the Fed, It Will Be a Triumph for Charles Koch and the Loony Ideas of Ayn Rand and Greenspan
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 9, 2016 On December 4 the Wall Street Journal reported that President-elect Donald Trump was considering the following three individuals for Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve for Bank Supervision: John Allison, the long serving head of BB&T bank and a Board Member of the right-wing Cato Institute which was half owned by the Koch brothers for decades; Paul Atkins, a consultant, former member of the Securities and Exchange Commission and a Visiting Scholar at the right-wing think tank, the American Enterprise Institute, which has heavy ties and financial backing from the Koch brothers. Also under consideration, and as far removed as one could possibly get from the other two, Thomas Hoenig, Vice Chair of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the former President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. Thomas Hoenig would deliver America from the stranglehold of the Ayn Rand lunatic fringe … Continue reading
Bombshell Dropped in Federal Court: Proof of a Silver Market “Mafia” Among Big Banks
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 8, 2016 Lawyers representing traders who allege they were ripped off by a group of colluding global banks filed eye-popping evidence in a Manhattan Federal Court yesterday showing that even as global banks were being criminally probed for rigging currency markets, they continued to engage in rigging the silver market, with a UBS trader referring to the group as the “mafia.” In order to settle the charges against it in the matter, yesterday’s filing shows that the beleaguered Deutsche Bank turned over to the plaintiffs’ attorneys “more than 350,000 pages of documents and 75 audio tapes” that implicate other banks in a very serious way. In addition to banks previously named in the lawsuit (Deutsche Bank, HSBC, The Bank of Nova Scotia and UBS), trader conversations captured in the material provided by Deutsche Bank seriously implicate Barclays, Standard Chartered, BNP Paribas Fortis and … Continue reading