Category Archives: Uncategorized

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 27, 2016 Typically, the bond market would be closing at 2:00 p.m. today, leaving the stock market rudderless and thinly traded. Typically, tens of thousands of Wall Street traders would have nothing more taxing than visions of barbecues and beaches and beer dancing about in their heads and would be sprinting out of the office to the Hamptons or Fire Island or Montauk as soon as the bond market closes at 2 p.m. But today is not typical thanks to Scrooge Yellen who will be speaking around 1:15 p.m today. This fact is furrowing brows on Wall Street and forcing traders to hang around to see what market-moving nuggets might be dropped by the petite central banker in chief. In reality, it’s Harvard that’s messing up the early holiday exodus on Wall Street. Harvard is giving Yellen the Radcliffe Medal for her “transformative … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 26, 2016  The release of the State Department’s Inspector General report unequivocally shreds Hillary Clinton’s repeated public pronouncements that she had approval from the State Department to use a private email server in her home for all of her government work while she served as Secretary of State. In the video of her press conference on March 10, 2015 (see below), Hillary opens the subject of the private server with this statement: “When I got to work as Secretary of State, I opted for convenience to use my personal email account, which was allowed by the State Department.” Before the video concludes, the former Secretary of State repeats two more times that she had approval for use of the private server. The Inspector General’s report now makes it crystal clear that this is yet another example of Hillary Clinton taking liberties with the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 25, 2016  There’s a lurking memo among government documents concerning the government takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac during the 2008 financial collapse on Wall Street that undermines the raging media propaganda wars now taking place. But first some necessary background.  Similar to Judith Miller’s shilling for the Iraq war in the pages of the New York Times, which spread like an uncontrolled virus to other media, hedge funds that hope to reap billions of dollars in windfall profits in the preferred and common stock of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which has continued to trade despite the government takeover, have set up a Machiavellian plot to get high-priced media real estate on board their scheme. Mainstream media as well as alternative media (that should know better) have taken the bait — hook, line and sinker. Two writers at the Wall Street … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 24, 2016 A growing number of red flags are cropping up around the charity operation known as the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation. The title tells you right off the bat that there is no anti-nepotism policy in place. Bernie Madoff didn’t believe in an anti-nepotism policy either: his brother, wife, two sons and niece worked for him. That didn’t work out so well for any of them. What is thus far beyond dispute regarding the Clinton Foundation’s finances is that Hillary Clinton’s political operatives have been on its payroll and that it failed to report tens of millions of dollars in foreign government donations on its 990 tax return to the IRS. As Reuters reported last year: “For three years in a row beginning in 2010, the Clinton Foundation reported to the IRS that it received zero in funds from foreign … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 23, 2016 Remember Harry Markopolos? That’s the tenacious financial expert that pounded on the door of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for years, providing it with detailed, written evidentiary support for the premise that Bernie Madoff, the respected former Chairman of the NASDAQ stock market, was running a massive Ponzi scheme. The SEC never confirmed the fraud before Madoff confessed as he ran out of money in December 2008 because it skipped the most basic of investigation techniques: it failed to verify if real stocks and bonds actually existed in Madoff’s client portfolios. They didn’t. There’s a new Markopolos in town with that same brand of leave-no-stone-unturned tenacity and he has his sights set on the charity operations of Hillary and Bill Clinton, known as the Clinton Foundation and its myriad tentacles. Ortel’s actions come just as Hillary Clinton makes her final … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 20, 2016  Wall Street On Parade has learned, by piecing together the SEC filings of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae and previous Federal Reserve studies, that these two companies that have been in U.S. government conservatorship since the 2008 financial crisis, continue to pay out billions of dollars to the biggest Wall Street banks on their derivatives contracts. This raises multiple red flags, not the least of which is how much does the U.S. public really understand about the 2008 financial crisis and what appears to be a continuing taxpayer bailout. It is well known at this point that AIG had to be bailed out because it owed over $90 billion on its derivative and security loan contracts to Wall Street and foreign banks. Now, it’s looking like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were also Wall Street’s derivatives patsies – or “dumb tourists” … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 19, 2016  The ink was barely dry on a proposal by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) to restore the rights of banking customers to take their grievances into a court of law instead of a system of forced arbitration, when House Republicans threw together a hearing yesterday to scaremonger over make-believe evils of the proposal. The hearing was convened by the Republican-controlled Financial Institutions and Consumer Credit Subcommittee of the House Financial Services Committee and not-so-subtly titled “Examining the CFPB’s Proposed Rulemaking on Arbitration: Is it in the Public Interest and for the Protection of Consumers?” The American Law Litigation Daily called the hearing “seriously lopsided.” ValueWalk called it “skewed.” We’re calling it brazenly rigged. In decades of watching Senate and House hearings, we have never seen a more unlevel playing field. Out of the four witnesses called to testify, three were … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 18, 2016 Last month the Washington Post compared the state of U.S. political campaigns to that of the Gilded Age, noting that 41 percent of the money raised by SuperPacs by the end of February came from just “50 mega-donors and their relatives.” New evidence suggests that tax avoidance may be at the center of what some of these mega-donors are expecting in return for that largess to Presidential and Congressional candidates. Take the case of Priorities USA, the SuperPac supporting Hillary Clinton’s campaign. It has already raised $67 million and just four hedge fund billionaires have ponied up 40 percent of that amount. Hedge funds already receive a perverse form of taxation known as “carried interest” that allows their winnings to be taxed at rates lower than those paid by some plumbers and nurses. This cozy tax scheme allows managers of hedge … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 17, 2016  Yesterday we read two articles: one made our blood boil, the other broke our hearts. Let’s start with the first. Bloomberg News seems to be on a roll with Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase. First it put him on the cover of its relaunched Bloomberg Markets magazine and then followed up with a Bloomberg TV promotion for the article, suggesting that Jamie Dimon is all about the customer – a concept so divergent from the facts on the ground that we devoted a column to it in March. Neither the article nor the TV promotion mentioned the fact that under Dimon’s leadership, the bank was been charged with three criminal felony counts between 2014 and 2015 for decidedly non-customer friendly behavior while simultaneously rewarding Dimon with obscene pay. Yesterday, former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, whose net … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 16, 2016 The Citigroup Private Bank at 201 South Biscayne Blvd. in Miami is located in a 34-story building in downtown Miami with breathtaking views of Biscayne Bay. It’s also the address for dozens of offshore companies whose agent is Mossack Fonseca, the law firm at the center of the Panama Papers scandal. The graph below shows just some of those companies, a number of which were incorporated as recently as 2013 through 2015. (Some companies indicate they are no longer active.) This new information comes from a search of the public database made available by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), which received more than 11.5 million leaked files from the Panama-based law firm, Mossack Fonseca, which ICIJ calls “one of the world’s top creators of hard-to-trace companies, trusts and foundations.” The full cache of records has yet to be made public … Continue reading →