-
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
State of the Union: Obama Plays Pope; Gundlach Plays Realist
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 13, 2016 Yesterday, there were two assessments on the state of the union. Both came with fancy charts. One was delivered by the President of the United States, who sounded very much like the Pope in seeking peace among members of Congress and individual citizens. The other was delivered by a hard core realist – Jeffrey Gundlach, CEO of investment management firm, DoubleLine Capital. If you watched the President’s State of the Union speech at WhiteHouse.gov, you got to see the interesting charts – some are still available here along with a transcript of the speech. One chart, shown below, reads: “Today, the top 3 percent of the richest Americans hold half the nation’s wealth.” That correct assessment, unfortunately, makes another statement by the President impossible to justify. The President told the highly cynical American people the following: “Anyone claiming that America’s economy … Continue reading
Just in Time for the Political Revolution: A Revolution Newspaper
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 12, 2016 Presidential candidate, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, is stumping across America urging citizens to help him create a meaningful political revolution to take back the country from the death grip of the one percent. His message is resonating. Sanders is attracting crowds of tens of thousands of disillusioned Americans. Political revolution is also in the air in the state of New York where a group called “Fed Up New Yorkers” has just launched a newspaper whose stated purpose “is to lessen Big Money’s grip on our political system and on our society.” The newspaper founders say their project is both “a publishing project and a political plan.” Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of the project is Neil Fabricant, retired president of George Washington University’s Graduate School of Political Management and a former legislative director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. Fabricant is … Continue reading
Get Ready to Live the Sequel to “The Big Short”
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 11, 2016 Why are the mega Wall Street banks throwing gasoline on the fire of this stock market rout? One of the damndest things in Wall Street history happened last week. No, we’re not talking about the Dow and S&P having the largest drop in the first week of the New Year in history, although that was certainly noteworthy. We’re talking about those mega Wall Street banks that can rarely bring themselves to put out a sell rating on a stock they follow, deciding to throw gasoline on a plunging stock market last week by issuing negative outlooks. A cynical person (like someone who has just seen The Big Short movie) might be inclined to suspect that the Wall Street banks have gotten their short positions in place and are now ready to make some serious fast money. Bloomberg News ran an article … Continue reading
How Did the U.S. Stock Market Become So Intertwined With China?
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 8, 2016 Yesterday, Wharton Finance Professor Jeremy Siegel appeared on CNBC to make a prediction that the S&P 500 index would experience a 10 percent upside by the end of this year. You might want to evaluate that prediction against what Professor Siegel also believes to be the U.S. situation with China. In answer to a question as to why the economic situation in China won’t weigh on the U.S., Siegel said: “We export very little to China” (see second video at this link). That statement, in fact, is false. According to detailed data from the U.S. Census Bureau, China is our third largest source of exports, at $106.1 billion through November – behind only Canada and Mexico. Ruptures in the stock market in China have now cratered U.S. stocks twice in the past six months. Thanks to spillover from China, the first … Continue reading
Why the Stock Market Is Freakin’ Out
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 7, 2016 While you were sleeping, things got decidedly uglier in global markets. The Chinese stock market was only able to stay open for 29 minutes before it hit its ridiculously low limit-down of 7 percent and shut down for the balance of the trading session. (U.S. stock markets require a loss of 20 percent before they cease trading for the day.) That sent global investors wanting to lighten up on equities into European markets which saw red across the board. With the overnight rout, global stock markets have now lost approximately $2.5 trillion this week – and it’s only Thursday. Further declines in the price of crude oil added to the angst with the cumulative losses marking the worst ever New Year’s start for oil. The U.S. domestic benchmark, West Texas Intermediate (WTI), at one point dropped below a $33 handle. China … Continue reading
Key Segments of Bernie Sanders’ Speech on Wall Street Reform Disappear
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 6, 2016 Presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont gave a speech yesterday that is destined to go down in the history books of this era, further enshrining him as one of the most courageous voices of our time. Sanders promised to break up the serially criminally-inclined banks on Wall Street and reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act to drive a permanent stake through the heart of too-big-to-fail. But if you watched either his official campaign’s YouTube video of his speech or the one provided by volunteers for his campaign, three key passages of what he said have gone missing from the video. We were able to reconstruct the full speech as delivered by transcribing the three missing sections from a YouTube video posted by the PBS Newshour which, notably, had no gaps in its video. (Watch the PBS video of the speech at the … Continue reading
The Perfect Storm Lands on the First Trading Day of the Year
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 5, 2016 From Riyadh to Tehran, Shanghai to Frankfurt, investors had plenty to sweat about yesterday. The culmination of this perfect storm landed in U.S. stock markets yesterday where the Dow Jones Industrial Average was shortly after 11 a.m. off by more than 450 points. The Dow closed the day down 276 points after some kindly buying support exceeding $1 billion from unknown sources came in to prop up the market at the close. The first weekend ahead of Monday’s stock market open got off to a bad start with trouble spots that are likely to challenge markets throughout this year. Saudi Arabia (a country that still refuses to grant women licenses to drive a car) engaged in mass executions of 47 people, one of whom was a Shia Muslim cleric, Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr. This set off wild protests in Iran, which has … Continue reading
The Kochtopus Strikes Out at The Big Short Movie
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 4, 2016 Call them astroturf organizations or neoliberal think tanks or corporate front groups – it all adds up to the same thing: big corporate bucks are engaged in a vicious propaganda war to recast the 2008 financial crash and its depression-like aftermath as the product of big government meddling rather than corporate lobbyists strong-arming deregulation of banking and Wall Street. The corporate cartel simply cannot allow mandates for tough new regulations to gain footing in Washington, otherwise the multi-decade work of the Kochtopus goes poof. (Kochtopus is short-hand for the political and front group money machine run by billionaire brothers, Charles and David Koch.) The Koctopus now has its knickers in a twist over the release of the movie, The Big Short, directed by Adam McKay and based on the bestselling book by Michael Lewis, a former Wall Street insider. Prior to … Continue reading
Can America Survive Donald Trump’s Candidacy?
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 31, 2015 Confidence in America can impact the strength of the U.S. dollar, the willingness of foreigners to invest their capital here in our markets and real estate, and our diplomatic relations with other nations. With each passing day of his candidacy, Donald Trump drags his country – the one he claims to want to make great again – deeper into the embarrassing caricature of a land where billionaires are unfettered to run wild with both their money and their mouths. For example, it’s not every day that a major U.S. ally is set to debate whether it will ban a U.S. Presidential candidate from entering their country. That ignominious milestone now goes to Donald Trump, courtesy of the United Kingdom. According to a report out this morning from the BBC, following more than 500,000 people signing a Parliamentary e-petition, a Parliamentary committee … Continue reading
Larry Summers Lectures Bernie Sanders on Financial and Monetary Policy
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 30, 2015 Yesterday Larry Summers penned an opinion piece for the Washington Post, lecturing Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a Presidential candidate, on what Sanders should actually be saying in his own op-eds about reforming the Federal Reserve. No one will ever accuse Larry Summers of being short on arrogance. After promising the American people in 1999, as Treasury Secretary in the Bill Clinton administration, that pushing through the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act would be “the right framework for America’s future financial system,” then watching that system collapse as a result of that repeal just nine years later in the worst economic upheaval since the Great Depression, one would think Summers would find some obscure hole in academia and crawl into it. Instead, Summers went on to become President of Harvard where, in 2005, he suggested at an economics conference that women … Continue reading