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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
The Fed Has Been Winging It for Eight Years; It’s Time for Congress to Step Up
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 18, 2016 Since the Wall Street crash in 2008 crippled the U.S. economy, Congress has played the role of a spectator at a big league baseball game – munching on popcorn and licking its greasy fingers soiled with corporate campaign loot – as the real players on the field, the Federal Reserve, controlled the action. The above chart shows the steady erosion of Capacity Utilization in the U.S. since Congress surrendered its job to the deeply conflicted Fed. The chart comes courtesy of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, which defines Total Industry Capacity Utilization this way: “the percentage of resources used by corporations and factories to produce goods in manufacturing, mining, and electric and gas utilities for all facilities located in the United States (excluding those in U.S. territories).” In November 2007, prior to the onset of the crash, Capacity Utilization … Continue reading
Wall Street’s Death Puts: Here’s What the SEC Didn’t Tell You
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 17, 2016 On Monday, the Securities and Exchange Commission released the details of an enforcement action it plans to bring before one of its own Administrative Law Judges against Donald (Jay) Lathen, Eden Arc Capital Management, LLC and a related hedge fund, Eden Arc Capital Advisors, LLC. Lathen is charged with using terminally ill patients in nursing homes, who were expected to die within six months, to reap profits from issuers of bonds or Certificates of Deposits (CDs) that had a death put feature (also known as a Survivor Option or SO). The bonds or CDs can be purchased in joint name and redeemed at the full face amount if one of the owners of the joint account dies. Lathen was racking up profits by buying the bonds or CDs at a discount from the full face amount. Naturally, the issuers of the … Continue reading
SEC and Stock Frauds: Can This Dog Hunt?
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 16, 2016 A dubious search engine company trading over-the-counter on Wall Street, with a felon as a “General Design and Marketing Strategist” who was banned from the industry for previous stock frauds, and with the craziest SEC filings and disclosure documents you’ll ever read in your lifetime, was finally halted from trading yesterday by the SEC – but only after reaching a market value of $35 billion. The SEC said in its announcement of the trading halt of the company, NeuroMama, Ltd., Inc., that it had “concerns” about “the identity of the persons in control of the company’s operations and management, false statements to company shareholders and/or potential investors that the company has an application pending for listing on the NASDAQ Stock Market, and potentially manipulative transactions in the company’s stock.” Yesterday’s SEC statement simply does not do justice to the insanity of … Continue reading
Swiss Central Bank Holds $5.3 Billion in Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook and Microsoft Stocks
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 15, 2016 At the end of the first quarter of this year, Switzerland’s central bank held $119.7 billion in publicly traded stocks. The Swiss National Bank’s (SNB) web site indicates that it is now allocating 20 percent of its foreign currency reserves to stock investing. Twelve days ago, SNB made its quarterly filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission showing large positions in individual U.S. stocks. In just five tech names, SNB held over $5.3 billion with $1.489 billion invested in Apple; $1.2 billion invested in Alphabet, parent of Google; $1 billion in Microsoft; $803 million in Amazon and $741.5 million in Facebook. Both Apple and Microsoft are among the 30 stocks that make up the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA), a heavily watched gauge of the U.S. economy’s health. The Swiss National Bank owns over $1 billion in two other names … Continue reading
Here’s Why Americans Are Mad as Hell at Wall Street and Washington
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 12, 2016 Yesterday we published our 1,007th article here at Wall Street On Parade on the insidiously corrupt financial system in the United States known as Wall Street. It’s a system that now operates as an institutionalized wealth transfer mechanism that is hollowing out the middle class, leaving one of every five children in our nation living in poverty, while funneling the plunder to the top one-tenth of one percent. Tens of millions of Americans clearly understand that an entrenched system of corruption such as this, perpetuated through a revolving door between Wall Street and Washington, while enshrined by a political campaign finance system that recycles a portion of the plunder to ensure greater plunders, will inevitably leave the nation’s economy in tatters — again. That’s because systemic corruption and legalized bribery within the financial arteries of the nation can only create grossly … Continue reading
Big Banks and Big Insurers Send Scary Signals
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 11, 2016 There’s something big and scary going on behind the scenes but, as usual, the public isn’t reading about it on the front pages of the newspapers. Yesterday, the broad stock market, as measured by the Standard and Poor’s 500 Index, declined a modest 0.29 percent while big Wall Street banks like Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase fell by triple that amount. Bank of America, which bought the big retail brokerage firm, Merrill Lynch, in the midst of the 2008 crash, fell by 8.6 times the rate of the decline in the S&P to give up 2.50 percent. Equally noteworthy, two major insurers, MetLife and Prudential Financial, saw percentage market losses far in excess of the S&P. MetLife declined by 2.74 percent while Prudential Financial lost 1.68 percent. Prudential Financial has been named a Systemically Important Financial Institution (SIFI) by the Financial Stability … Continue reading
Has Michael Bloomberg’s Praetorian Guard Moved to Bloomberg News?
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 10, 2016 Michael Bloomberg served three terms as the Mayor of New York City from January 2002 to January 2014. The last term was made possible by the Mayor spending an estimated $60-$90 million of his own money repealing the two-term limits – an act that outraged many New Yorkers. According to Forbes, during Michael Bloomberg’s 12-year stint as Mayor, his wealth exploded more than ten-fold, from $3 billion to $31 billion. The bulk of Bloomberg’s wealth has derived from leasing his Bloomberg data and news terminals at a cost of approximately $24,000 per terminal per year to tens of thousands of Wall Street trading desks and global banks around the world. The Mayor’s wealth and where it comes from is a reality that poses an inherent conflict of interest for any news outlet but it is especially so for a news organization … Continue reading
Death of Shawn Lucas Brings Attention to DNC Role of Prestigious Law Firm
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 9, 2016 A politically connected law firm in Washington, D.C., Perkins Coie, may find itself in the embarrassing and reputation-damaging position of being named a co-defendant in a high profile case where it is the sole legal counsel of record for the defendants. The Federal lawsuit was brought by Senator Bernie Sanders’ supporters against the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and its Chair, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, for overt acts to undermine the Sanders’ campaign while boosting the prospects of Hillary Clinton as the Democratic Presidential nominee. Under the DNC’s own bylaws, it must act in a fair and impartial manner to all Democratic candidates during the primaries. After the lawsuit was filed, Wikileaks released almost 20,000 emails that had been hacked at the DNC by an unknown party. The emails buttressed the allegations in the lawsuit and created so much media notoriety against the … Continue reading
Sanders Supporters Stunned by Sudden Death of 38-Year Shawn Lucas Who Served the Lawsuit on the DNC and Wasserman Shultz
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 8, 2016 On Friday, July 1, just ahead of the long Fourth of July weekend, a happy, exuberant process server, 38-year old Shawn Lucas of One Source Process, served a lawsuit at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington, D.C. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of Senator Bernie Sanders’ supporters and named the DNC and its then Chair, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, as defendants. It leveled the following serious charges: fraud, negligent misrepresentation, deceptive conduct, unjust enrichment, breach of fiduciary duty, and negligence. The suit seeks class action status and was filed in the Federal District Court in the Southern District of Florida. (Wilding et al v DNC Services Corporation and Deborah ‘Debbie’ Wasserman Schultz; Case Number 16-cv-61511-WJZ). A video of the service of process (see embedded video below) shows Shawn Lucas saying he was “excited” and “thrilled” to be the process server on … Continue reading
A Realistic Look at July’s Nonfarm Payrolls
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 5, 2016 The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released its nonfarm payroll data this morning, showing that 255,000 jobs were created in July. The unemployment rate remained at 4.9 percent. May data was revised up from the eyebrow-raising low number of 11,000 jobs to 24,000 jobs while June was also revised upward from 287,000 jobs to 292,000. That brought the monthly average to 190,000 jobs over the past three months. Unfortunately, drilling down into the more granular details, a far less rosy picture emerges; a picture which is far more consistent with an economy feeling the continued weight of unprecedented wealth and income inequality; a picture that is far more correlated to an economy where “58 percent of all new income since the Wall Street crash has gone to the top 1 percent,” to quote Senator Bernie Sanders. The data for July shows … Continue reading