Category Archives: Uncategorized

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 16, 2016  The old adage that when one is already in a hole, one should stop digging, has apparently not found its way to the corner offices of Deutsche Bank. After a non-stop two years of scandals, the Bank has decided to take its shareholders on another heart-thumping cop car chase by publicly feuding with the U.S. Justice Department. After the Wall Street Journal reported in the wee hours this morning that the Justice Department was proposing a fine of $14 billion for Deutsche Bank’s involvement in tricking investors with toxic mortgage backed securities, the Bank had the temerity to tell Reuters that it was planning to “fight” the demand. This negotiating tactic sounds a little like something that might have been taught at the Trump Institute.  In just the past two years, Deutsche Bank, Germany’s largest bank with a large trading footprint … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 15, 2016 While Elizabeth Warren attempted to deliver her keynote speech at the Democratic Convention in July, which included an unabashed endorsement of Hillary Clinton after Warren had failed to endorse Senator Bernie Sanders during the critical primary campaign, chants of “we trusted you” could be heard reverberating through the cavernous hall in Philadelphia. Warren rose to fame challenging the corrupt practices on Wall Street. She was now aligned with a Presidential candidate who was using Wall Street’s ill-gotten gains from the customers they had fleeced to finance her path to the Oval Office. There is no doubt that this has caused significant cognitive dissonance among Warren’s constituents in Massachusetts’ – the landing site of the Pilgrims and one of the original 13 colonies. This bit of background might help to explain why, with less than two months before the November 8 election … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 14, 2016 Last Thursday the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report showing that since President George W. Bush left office, lawsuits by persons who were unable to obtain Federal records that they believed belonged in the public domain grew dramatically. In 2008, the last year of Bush’s presidency, 321 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits were filed. By 2014, that number had spiked to 434 lawsuits and registered 456 last year, an increase of 42 percent over 2008. The numbers understate the public’s frustration with Federal government stonewalling on public record requests. According to the GAO report, 713,168 FOIA requests were made by the public last year. Before one can file a FOIA lawsuit, one must file an administrative appeal with the agency that denied or partially denied the records sought. Average citizens have inadequate time and resources to engage in fighting … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 13, 2016 Last Thursday, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) announced that Wells Fargo was paying $185 million in fines and penalties for allowing its employees to open “more than two million deposit and credit card accounts” that were not authorized by its customers. The employees were attempting to “hit sales targets and receive bonuses.” In one of the most audacious forms of bank fraud, according to the CFPB, employees actually “transferred funds from consumers’ authorized accounts to temporarily fund the new, unauthorized accounts.” This resulted in untold numbers of customers being charged for insufficient funds in their legitimate accounts or paying overdraft fees. If anyone ever doubted Senator Bernie Sanders when he repeatedly said during campaign stops that fraud has become a business model on Wall Street, that debate is over. According to the CFPB, this conduct at Wells Fargo went on for … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 12, 2016 European and Asian stock markets were firmly in the red overnight as Friday’s 394 rout in the Dow Jones Industrial Average fueled global concerns. The chart above shows how the Standard and Poor’s 500 Index of the biggest companies in America has, over the past five years, traded relatively in sync with Goldman Sachs (frequently called Government Sachs for the number of its partners it has placed in top money slots in both Democrat and Republican administrations). When there has been divergences in the chart above, the relationship has gravitated back to a converged path after a time. Inevitably, the health of the country’s banks plays a critical role in the health of the overall economy. If one ever doubted that, the Wall Street bank crash in 2008 and cataclysmic economic aftermath ended that debate. (And, yes, Goldman Sachs is now a … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 11, 2016 Today marks the 15th Anniversary of the tragic events of September 11, 2001 and yet the American public remains in the dark about critical details of hundreds of billions of dollars of financial dealings by the Federal Reserve in the days, weeks and months that followed 9/11. What has also been lost in the official 9/11 Commission Report, Congressional hearings and academic studies, is how Wall Street, on the day the planes slammed into the World Trade Towers, was on the cusp of being exposed by the New York State Attorney General, Eliot Spitzer, as the orchestrator of a fraud of unprecedented proportion against the investing public. That investigation was stalled for more than six months. It would have been politically incorrect to do perp walks outside Wall Street’s biggest investment banks as families mourned the loss of their loved ones; … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 9, 2016 Fifteen years after 9/11, an expanding international body of scientific researchers and legal experts continue to challenge the official narrative of 9/11. They will host a two-day symposium this Saturday and Sunday in the historic Great Hall of Cooper Union in New York City to present the science-based evidence they have compiled. Tickets will be available at this site for a limited period of time. (See the two-day program and lineup of speakers here, here and here.) Saturday’s program will include a presentation by Dr. J. Leroy Hulsey on the preliminary findings of a computer modeling study of the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7, a 47-story skyscraper in lower Manhattan that was not hit by a plane but collapsed to the ground within seconds at 5:20 p.m. on the afternoon of 9/11. The study is being conducted at the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: September 8, 2016 This Sunday will mark the 15th anniversary of the 9/11 tragedy – one of those seminal events in human memory that is seared forever on the brain. Because of the emotional toll 9/11 took on the human psyche — watching U.S. commercial airline planes converted to killing machines on U.S. soil — America’s collective memory of exactly what happened on 9/11 has more to do with repetitive TV clips of the Twin Towers collapsing and a rush to war than specific details of the actions of those pulling the monetary levers on Wall Street. The day’s events were so bizarre and triggered such cognitive dissonance that millions of Americans did not realize for years that a third World Trade Center skyscraper had collapsed in lower Manhattan that day. World Trade Center Building 7, a 47-story skyscraper not hit by a plane, collapsed at 5:20 … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 7, 2016 Wall Street was determined that a Democratic Socialist like Senator Bernie Sanders would never occupy the Oval Office. In hindsight, Wall Street may come to seriously regret that it and a full blown conspiracy at the Democratic National Committee blocked the ascendancy of one of the most popular and trusted presidential candidates in a generation. Trust and confidence are essential ingredients for a healthy stock market and U.S. economy. According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, U.S. consumers spent over $12 trillion last year “on all kinds of stuff, including new cars, furniture, clothes, groceries, beauty products, electronics, visits to doctors and dentists, and tickets to sporting events and movies.” The total U.S. GDP for 2015 was $17.947 trillion. That makes the consumer the Decider in Chief of what happens in the U.S. The consumer’s willingness to spend represented 66.86 percent … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 6, 2016 The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has set up an online database of financial horror stories that shows what happens when an average American interacts with one of the financial supermarkets (a/k/a universal banks) that grew out of the repeal of the investor protection legislation known as the Glass-Steagall Act. The complaints are concentrated against the biggest Wall Street banks. If you are one of the lucky Americans who has not already been mugged in the shopping aisles of the financial supermarkets, you should carefully browse through the database to see what awaits the unwary. Just go to the complaint archive, and place the name of any bank you want to examine in the upper right-hand search box. Searching under the name Citibank (part of the Wall Street behemoth Citigroup) will bring up 29,000 rows of complaints. A search under Chase, … Continue reading →