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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
Citadel’s Ken Griffin: Poster Child for Americans’ Anger in this Election
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 1, 2016 According to Forbes, Ken Griffin, CEO and founder of the hedge fund, Citadel, has a net worth of $7.6 billion. But unbeknownst to most Americans, Citadel received a windfall boost from the taxpayers’ pocketbook sometime between September 18 to December 12, 2008. That was during the Wall Street crash when the U.S. government had taken over the big insurer, AIG, and decided to pay 100 cents on the dollar on AIG’s obligations to Wall Street banks and hedge funds. Did the U.S. government have to pay 100 cents on the dollar when AIG was unable to pay what it owed. Absolutely not. It could have negotiated prudently on behalf of the taxpayer. Instead, it doled out at least $93.2 billion as payment in full to banks and hedge funds, of which Citadel received at least $200 million. We say, at least, because … Continue reading
Obama Video: President Has His Facts Seriously Wrong on Financial Reform
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 31, 2016 On March 7 of this year, President Obama called the full Financial Stability Oversight Council (F-SOC) to the White House for a meeting. F-SOC was created under the 2010 financial reform legislation known as Dodd-Frank to monitor systemic risks building up in the financial system and, ideally, nip them in the bud before they got out of hand. Every major Wall Street bank regulator sits on F-SOC. Immediately following his meeting with F-SOC on March 7, President Obama held a press conference (see video below) with the F-SOC members sitting around him at a large conference table. Sitting two seats away from the President was Mary Jo White, Chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Directly across the table was Thomas Curry, head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) that oversees national banks, and Jack Lew, U.S. … Continue reading
GAO Has Been Telling Congress that Financial Regulation Is in Disarray for 20 Years
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 30, 2016 Who could blame the researchers at the Government Accountability Office (GAO) for thinking that responding to Congressional requests for studies on how to repair the nation’s ineffective maze of financial regulation is an exercise in futility. GAO has been spending boatloads of taxpayer money for the past two decades to define the problems for Congress as our legislative branch has not only failed to take meaningful corrective measures but actually made the system exponentially worse through the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999. During the 20 years that GAO has been warning about an ineffective financial regulatory system, taxpayers have been looted through a nonstop series of massive Wall Street frauds: the Nasdaq price fixing scandal; the rigged Wall Street research scandal leading to the $4 trillion dot.com bust; the four-decade Ponzi scheme of Bernie Madoff that was defined in … Continue reading
New $25 Million Fraud on Wall Street Is Making Some Rich Guys Nervous
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 29, 2016 There were a lot of sweaty palms on Wall Street yesterday. As the Government Accountability Office released a report suggesting that regulation of Wall Street is a complex maze of inefficiency and fragmentation leaving gaping holes in which crooks can find fertile ground, the U.S. Justice Department was perp-walking a 2002 Harvard Law School graduate (whose family name resides on the student center there) on charges reminiscent of a Bernie Madoff startup. According to the unsealed complaint from the U.S. Justice Department’s regional U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, 39-year old Andrew Caspersen, whose father and grandfather were the former heads of Beneficial Corp., is alleged to have defrauded approximately $24.6 million from a charitable foundation by setting up a fake account, transferring $17.6 million of that amount to his “personal brokerage account” at an unnamed brokerage … Continue reading
Meet Donald Trump’s Money Men: Big Wall Street Banks in the Shadows
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 28, 2016 As with the current occupant of the White House, the narrative of fierce independence from Wall Street during the campaign season typically fails under deeper scrutiny. In 2008 we pulled back the curtain on Obama’s claim that he wasn’t taking money from Wall Street lobbyists and found quite a different set of facts. Today, the claim that Donald Trump is not connected to Wall Street and is actually frightening the mega banks is also totally dislodged from the facts on the ground. Five days ago, the Washington Post ran an article that was headlined “Why the rise of Donald Trump has even Wall Street worried.” It quoted an anonymous source who stated that “I can’t find connective tissue between the financial sector and Trump.” Similarly, eight days ago the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump’s creditors “mostly are small firms, from … Continue reading
JPMorgan and Donald Trump Have Unusual Trading Patterns
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 24, 2016 Presidential candidate Donald Trump and the mega Wall Street bank JPMorgan Chase share a common trait: they can conduct themselves in a manner that insults the values of a civilized society and instead of losing ground, their star rises – or so it appears. Trump’s public vulgarity and anti-Presidential demeanor are perpetually on display at his Twitter page and in the Republican debates. In just the past month, Trump has called Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly “crazy”; boasted of the size of his “manhood” during a Republican debate; and promised to ramp up the use of torture – illegal under both domestic and international law. The typically staid Senator Elizabeth Warren even lost her cool with Trump on March 21, Tweeting that “his insecurities are on parade: petty bullying, attacks on women, cheap racism, flagrant narcissism.” In a new CBS News/New York … Continue reading
CBS Poll: Trump and Clinton Have Historic Unfavorable Ratings Among Voters
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 23, 2016 According to a CBS News/New York Times poll conducted between March 17-20, 2016 among a random sample of adults nationwide, 85 percent of which were registered voters, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have the highest unfavorable ratings (57 percent and 52 percent respectively) since CBS first began asking the question in its polls more than three decades ago. The CBS poll is in line with a Gallup poll taken in January, which showed 60 percent of Americans viewed Donald Trump unfavorably versus a 52 percent unfavorable rating for Clinton. Another noteworthy finding from the poll, which is consistent with numerous other prior polls, is that Senator Bernie Sanders would do better against Trump in a general election matchup. The CBS poll found that Sanders would beat Trump by 15 points versus a win of only 10 points for Clinton. The danger … Continue reading
Why We Support Bernie Sanders Over Hillary Clinton for President
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 22, 2016 Wall Street On Parade’s strong preference for a President Bernie Sanders over a President Hillary Clinton is based on a well-formed belief that the United States will experience another financial crisis on Wall Street within the next few years. That crisis will, in hindsight, be viewed as the direct failure of President Obama to enact meaningful financial reform legislation after the 2008 crash, when he had the will of the people behind him, rather than pandering to his overlords on Wall Street who financed his campaign. Nothing more clearly demonstrates who has been calling the shots in the Obama administration than the President’s nominees to oversee Wall Street at the U.S. Justice Department, U.S. Treasury Department, Securities and Exchange Commission, and his outrageous refusal for more than five years to even follow his own Dodd-Frank financial reform law and appoint a … Continue reading
Forbes Yanks a Negative Article on JPMorgan While the Bank Pays for Content
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 21, 2016 Americans have painful recollections of how allowing ratings agencies to take Wall Street money and dole out bogus triple-A ratings on subprime mortgages tanked the U.S. housing market in the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression. They fully understand that the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision that opened the floodgates to pay-to-play corporate financing of elections has grotesquely disfigured participatory democracy in America. Now they’re about to learn how America’s “free press” is able to be bought – literally. This past Friday, March 18, Laurence Kotlikoff, a Forbes contributor, Professor of Economics at Boston University and bestselling co-author of Get What’s Yours: The Secrets To Maxing Out Your Social Security, tweeted the headline of an article he had just posted at Forbes: “JPMorgan Chase – The True Story of America’s Most Corrupt Bank.” The Tweet linked to a two-page article … Continue reading
United Technologies: Boss Gets $192 Million, 110-Foot Yacht as 2100 Jobs Move to Mexico at $3 an Hour
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 18, 2016 A young black girl got a civics lesson in dystopian society sitting in the front row of the Senate Banking hearing this past Tuesday. Her expression was that of someone watching a Halloween horror film. The young girl was the daughter of Lisa Fairfax, a George Washington University law professor who brought her family members along to share her confirmation hearing to potentially become a Commissioner at the Securities and Exchange Commission. Hopefully, what the young girl observed will be enough to head her off in a career direction of white collar criminal law. Senator Joe Donnelly delivered a heartfelt review of what is going on in his home state of Indiana, asking the two SEC nominees, Hester Peirce and Fairfax, what role the SEC should play in the matter. Donnelly stated: “Ms. Peirce, I want to tell you a little … Continue reading