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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
Koch Fronted Regulatory Hit Woman Edges Closer to Seat on SEC
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 17, 2016 Democrats sitting on the U.S. Senate Banking Committee at Tuesday’s confirmation hearing to take testimony from President Obama’s two nominees for the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) must have felt like they were having an out of body experience — listening to the human personification of billionaire Charles Koch’s money aping his Ayn Rand, anti-regulatory double-talk from a witness seat. What had to be particularly nauseating to them was that this nominee was sent to them by President Obama who ran as a Democrat on a platform of hope and change. While the political makeup of the SEC is prescribed by law, so that one of these two nominees had to be a Republican, why pick this particular Republican? On October 20, 2015, President Obama announced that his nominee to fill a Republican seat on the SEC would be Hester Peirce, … Continue reading
Bloomberg’s Matt Winkler Tells Some Whoppers About Wall Street Reform
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 16, 2016 Since Wall Street’s felony counts last May (see “Related Articles” below) and the unleashing of ever more creative ways to fleece the populace, it’s getting tougher and tougher to find people willing to shill for the Wall Street claptrap that it’s been punished enough and it’s time to put the bashing to rest. It’s getting tougher — but not impossible. Matt Winkler, the Bloomberg News Editor-in-Chief Emeritus, wrote an opinion piece and appeared on Bloomberg TV last week to regurgitate the threadbare “Stop Bashing Wall Street. Times Have Changed” refrain. Winkler starts off with this premise: “One of the reasons the American economy is performing better than any of the largest in Asia and Europe is that its regulators have repaired the damage of the financial crisis and the worst recession since the Great Depression. Led by the Federal Reserve, they … Continue reading
The Untold Story of Why the SEC Paid Whistleblower Eric Hunsader $750,000
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 15, 2016 On March 8, 2016 the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) wired $750,000 into the bank account of Eric Hunsader as a whistleblower award for spotting and documenting an illegality at the New York Stock Exchange. Hunsader is a trading software and market data expert and founder of Nanex LLC, a market data company that also provides a boatload of free research on behalf of the public interest. Hunsader is one more thing: he’s the SEC’s biggest critic when it comes to its failure to restore integrity to U.S. stock exchanges and U.S. markets. The SEC doesn’t release the names of its whistleblowers but Hunsader alerted the media himself to his award in order to silence critics and one particular executive at the New York Stock Exchange who had, heretofore, disparaged in public Hunsader’s allegations about the NYSE’s discriminatory dissemination of market … Continue reading
Was the First Obama Election Fixed? New Book Raises Suspicions
By Pam Martens: March 14, 2016 At Wall Street On Parade we call it continuity government. Michael M. Thomas, in a new book of quasi-fiction, calls it Fixers, the idea that no matter who comes and goes in the Oval Office, Wall Street has a fix in to make sure it is protected. The Thomas book could not come at a more inconvenient time for outgoing President Obama and the next leg of the continuity government that Wall Street hopes to install in the White House – otherwise known as Hillary Clinton. Fixers notes that the characters with speaking parts in the book are “wholly creatures of the author’s imagination and invention” but the securities “transactions and situations” in which those characters are involved are “matters of historical record.” So what you’re getting in Fixers is a spellbinding analysis of the actual dirty deals that toppled Wall Street in 2008 … Continue reading
Is the White House Putting Its Finger on the Scale in the Clinton Email Investigation?
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 11, 2016 This past Wednesday, the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing with U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch as part of its oversight of the Justice Department. One line of questioning concerned how the White House is suggesting it has an inside track on what the Justice Department plans to do regarding its investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private server in her house to transmit all of her government and personal emails while she served as U.S. Secretary of State. According to a January 14, 2016 unclassified letter from the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community, I. Charles McCullough III, to members of Congress, some of those emails have been deemed to have a classification of Top Secret. (Clinton has repeatedly asserted that no classified material was sent over her unsecure server originally but that it has been classified subsequently.) … Continue reading
Treasury Drops a Bombshell: Fed’s Stress Tests Get It Wrong
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 10, 2016 Four days after the Federal Reserve Board of Governors held an open meeting to propose a new rule to contain counterparty risk on Wall Street on a bank by bank basis, researchers at the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Financial Research (OFR) dropped a bombshell on the Fed. The researchers, Jill Cetina, Mark Paddrik, and Sriram Rajan, produced a study which shows, in their opinion, that the Fed’s stress test that measures counterparty risk on a bank by bank basis is all wet. The problem, say the researchers, is not what would happen if the largest counterparty to a specific bank failed but what would happen if that counterparty happened to be the counterparty to other systemically important Wall Street banks. The researchers note that the Fed’s stress test “looks exclusively at the direct loss concentration risk, and does not consider the … Continue reading
Bernie Who? Polls and Big Media Eat Crow This Morning
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 9, 2016 There is a lot of handwringing in the Hillary Clinton campaign this morning and a lot of head scratching in corporate media newsrooms over the egregiously flawed polls that predicted a double digit win for Clinton over Senator Bernie Sanders in the delegate rich state primary held in Michigan yesterday. With 97 percent of the vote counted this morning, CNN reports that Sanders took 50 percent of the vote to Clinton’s 48 percent. (Clinton easily won Mississippi as polls predicted accurately.) In a poll taken by Fox2 Detroit/Mitchell between March 3 to March 7, Clinton was said to be leading Sanders by 21.4 points in Michigan. An NBC/Wall Street Journal/Marist poll had Clinton leading by 17 points in a poll taken between March 1 and March 3. CBS/YouGov reported that their poll taken from March 2 to March 4 had Clinton … Continue reading
President Obama Calls Surprise Meeting With Financial Stability Oversight Council
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 8, 2016 Last Friday, the Obama administration announced that the President would be meeting at the White House with key Wall Street regulators yesterday. In fact, the meeting yesterday included 9 of the 10 voting members of the Financial Stability Oversight Council (F-SOC), the body created under the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation to prevent another catastrophic collapse of the U.S. financial system. The President also brought along a key group of his economic advisers and, interestingly, Neil Eggleston, the White House Counsel. (See full attendee list below.) F-SOC is chaired by U.S. Treasury Secretary, Jack Lew, who likely functions as President Obama’s eyes and ears on the Council and for financial stability issues in general. Lew attended yesterday’s meeting and sat across from the President at the press conference that followed. (See video of full press conference below.) Lew may have some … Continue reading
Theft of Your Money on Wall Street: Another GAO Report Won’t Help
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 7, 2016 It was considered big news last week that House members Maxine Waters of the Financial Services Committee and Al Green of the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations have requested that the Government Accountability Office (GAO) launch an investigation of “regulatory capture” on Wall Street. That news broke on Friday, one day after Senator Elizabeth Warren grilled the head of a Wall Street self-regulatory agency in a Senate hearing on a new study showing that stockbrokers with serial records of misconduct are allowed to remain in the industry. Warren also cited another recent study showing that even when investors prevail in arbitrations against bad brokers, they may never get paid. According to the study, over $60 million in fines owed to investors have not been paid since 2013. The individual that Senator Warren was grilling is Richard Ketchum, head of the Financial … Continue reading
Even When Bernie Sanders Wins, He Loses at the New York Times
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 6, 2016 The New York Times, which makes its bread and butter off of a high-flying Wall Street, has rewritten basic math in today’s digital edition to make Hillary Clinton’s loss to Bernie Sanders’ in yesterday’s Super Saturday states appear to be a big win. According to New York Times’ math, winning over the voters of one state is better than winning over the voters of two. Under a bold headline (“Decisive Win for Clinton in Louisiana”) that mentioned nothing about Bernie Sanders’ huge margin of victory by more than two to one in Kansas and decisive win in Nebraska, the Times said in its lead paragraph: “Senator Ted Cruz and Donald J. Trump each won two of the four states that had Republican contests on Saturday. Senator Bernie Sanders won two states, although Hillary Clinton captured the day’s big prize of Louisiana.” … Continue reading