Category Archives: Uncategorized

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 4, 2016  There are 15 U.S. Senators who are members of the U.S. Senate Banking Committee’s Subcommittee on Securities, Insurance, and Investment that has been investigating the charges that the stock market is rigged by the stock exchanges along with dark pools run by large broker-dealers that are operated as opaque, unregulated quasi stock exchanges, high frequency traders at hedge funds, conflicted payment for order flow, and tricked-up order types – to mention just a few of the ways the public investor is getting fleeced. The Subcommittee held a critically important hearing yesterday to review what progress the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), the self-regulatory Wall Street watchdog, were making to rein in the abuses on Wall Street. Despite the lack of trust the public feels toward Wall Street and the abysmal 14 percent approval rating … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: March 3, 2016  The Washington Post is reporting this morning that the FBI is conducting a criminal investigation of Hillary Clinton’s handling of emails during her tenure as Secretary of State. Clinton substituted her own private server in place of the government’s secure system. The Post also reports that the FBI has “secured the cooperation of Bryan Pagliano, who worked on Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign before setting up the server in her New York home in 2009.” According to the article, Pagliano has been given a grant of immunity by the Justice Department. While Hillary Clinton has said that none of the emails were classified at the time they were sent, the Post notes that “I. Charles McCullough III, the inspector general of the intelligence community, has indicated that some of the material intelligence officials have reviewed contained information that was classified at the time it was … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 2, 2016 Two interesting things happened this week in Jamie Dimon’s world: two gutsy attorneys, Helen Davis Chaitman and Lance Gotthoffer, published a book comparing JPMorgan Chase to the Gambino crime family, explaining how the bank could and should be prosecuted under RICO statutes for serial frauds against the investing public. Taking a diametrically different tack, Bloomberg Markets magazine editor, Joel Weber, fawned over Dimon in a Bloomberg TV interview, repeatedly asserting that Jamie Dimon is all about the customer. This Bloomberg video is so hilarious we had to watch it several times to make sure it wasn’t satire.  As Weber makes his case that Dimon is all about the customer, his Bloomberg colleague, Stephanie Ruhle, is having none of it, reminding the obviously star-struck Weber that the big banks are hated in this country for good reason. Instead of acknowledging the serial frauds … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 1, 2016  Landing in the midst of the most critical election season since the New Deal era of the 30s, comes a masterpiece of labor history and political strategy from the prolific author, Robert W. McChesney, and John Nichols, the popular national affairs correspondent at The Nation.  Both McChesney and Nichols are co-founders of Free Press, a national media reform organization. People  Get Ready: The Fight Against a Jobless Economy and a Citizenless Democracy provides the reader with, first, an exquisite understanding of how the U.S. evolved into a society where the citizen has been kicked to the curb in their “democracy” and, next, a strategic road map for a peaceful revolution. The authors write that “The United States retains the façade of democracy. It remains a democracy on paper and in our hearts. But ours is, increasingly, a citizenless democracy…Oligarchs and their … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 29, 2016 You know there is something bizarre going on in American politics when the New York Times endorses Hillary Clinton for President at the end of January and then begins to question her judgment before a month goes by. What message does it send to voters when a major newspaper sounds like it has endorser’s remorse and we’re still in the primary season? One month ago, the Old Gray Lady said that Democratic primary voters “have the chance to nominate one of the most broadly and deeply qualified presidential candidates in modern history.” Unfortunately, they weren’t talking about Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who has served with distinction in Congress for 25 years (16 years in the House and the last nine years in the Senate). The Times was speaking about Hillary Clinton, whose actual tenure in Washington feels like it is one … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 26, 2016  Maybe the presidential candidates should start wearing baseballs caps with the slogan: Make America Auditable Again. The country that has delivered epic accounting frauds like Enron, Worldcom, Tyco, and Bernie Madoff just flunked its own audit. Yesterday, the Government Accountability Office, the nonpartisan investigative arm of Congress, released a thumbs down report on how the U.S. government keeps its books. The GAO said it could “not render an opinion on the federal government’s consolidated financial statements for FY 2015 because of persistent problems with the Department of Defense’s (DOD) finances, the federal government’s inability to account for and reconcile certain transactions, an ineffective process for preparing the consolidated financial statements, and significant uncertainties.” How big of a deal is this? According to the GAO, what it was unable to effectively audit amounted to about “34 percent of the federal government’s reported … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 25, 2016 In a feeble public relations move, Bill Dudley, the President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and FINRA, the self-regulatory body on Wall Street, are making noises about cleaning up the culture on Wall Street. It’s always dangerous to make any predictions when it comes to Wall Street but in this case we can confidently predict that when it comes to the New York Fed and FINRA, the only possible impact they could have on the culture is to make it worse. The New York Fed didn’t see a problem for Bill Dudley’s spouse to collect $190,000 a year in deferred compensation from JPMorgan Chase while the New York Fed served as the bank’s main regulator. The New York Fed didn’t see a problem for Citigroup’s CEO, Sandy Weill, or JPMorgan CEO, Jamie Dimon, to sit on its Board … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 24, 2016 The same phenomenon that’s been playing out for months took center stage yesterday with one notable twist: oil prices dove, the broader stock market swooned, but the mega Wall Street banks took a worse beating than the broader stock market averages. The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 1.14 percent yesterday while Bank of America, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley were off by more than 3 percent. In an unusual twist, JPMorgan Chase, the bank that analyst Mike Mayo has preposterously called the Lebron James of banking, performed the worst among its peers yesterday, down 4.18 percent. What knocked the wind out of JPMorgan’s sails yesterday is at the heart of why the banks keep tanking when oil prices swoon. In a nutshell, the market doesn’t think these banks are coming clean about their exposure to oil – whether it’s in loans to … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 23, 2016  Thanks to the Presidential debates, most Americans have heard of the Glass-Steagall Act which kept the country’s banking system safe for 66 years until it was repealed by President Bill Clinton in 1999, allowing the risky activities of Wall Street trading firms to merge with insured-deposit banks, setting the stage for the Wall Street collapse in 2008. But few Americans have ever heard of the Riegle-Neal Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act of 1994, which Bill Clinton signed into law less than two years after taking office. The Riegle-Neal legislation allowed bank holding companies to acquire banks anywhere in the nation and invalidated the laws of 36 states which had allowed interstate banking only on a reciprocal or regional basis. Put these two pieces of legislation together with the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, also signed into law by Bill … Continue reading →

  By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 22, 2016  Fourteen years before Wall Street blew itself up in 2008, the General Accounting Office (now called the Government Accountability Office), warned Congress that Wall Street was on a dangerous path that could put the taxpayer at risk of bailouts as a result of trillions of dollars of derivatives being held by a handful of interconnected firms. These dangers were heightened according to the GAO by shoddy accounting practices for derivatives, inadequate regulatory reporting, and high leverage. Despite the fact that almost every single warning that the GAO called out in 1994 was ignored by the U.S. Congress, leading to the greatest financial collapse since the Great Depression in 2008, Congress has still not attended to the most dangerous elements highlighted in the report. Back in 1994, the GAO found that: “U.S. bank regulatory data indicate that the top seven domestic … Continue reading →