Category Archives: Uncategorized

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 27, 2016 In 1934 the U.S. had 14,146 commercial banks holding insured deposits. By 1985, that number had barely budged, standing at 14,417. Then came the Bill Clinton administration in the 1990s and its reckless and unprecedented banking deregulation which allowed the giant Wall Street banks to swallow up, or drive out of business, thousands of banks across America. According to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), as of December 22 of this year, there are only 5,927 FDIC insured banks left in the U.S., a stunning decline of 59 percent from 1985. But those numbers are just the tip of the iceberg. Banking concentration in the U.S. has reached an unprecedented crisis level when it comes to deposits. Out of the dramatically shrunken base of 5,927 FDIC insured banks which were holding a total of $11.2 trillion in total deposits (insured and … Continue reading →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →