Category Archives: Uncategorized

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →