Category Archives: Uncategorized

By Pam Martens: May 2, 2016 Speaking of the Wall Street and global banks that populate London’s financial district, John Mann, a Member of Parliament, asked the rhetorical question at a Treasury Select Committee hearing on February 4, 2014: “Have we or have we not just had the biggest series of quantifiable wrongdoing in the history of our financial services industry?…Is there any other industry in recorded history in this country who’s had a comparable level of quantifiable wrongdoing to your knowledge?” The answer, of course, is that there is no other industry on either side of the pond that has inflicted as much economic pain as Wall Street through “quantifiable wrongdoing.” And yet, the U.S. government continues to allow this serially crime-infested industry to run its own private justice system where both its customers and its employees are barred from taking their lawsuits into a court of law so … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 29, 2016 Bloomberg L.P., majority owned by billionaire Michael Bloomberg, with a net worth of $45.3 billion according to Forbes, has today outed the anonymous writers responsible for the popular financial blog, Zero Hedge, a competitor to Bloomberg L.P.’s financial web site. Raising eyebrows in journalism circles, Bloomberg’s reporters obtained the text of internal chat sessions at Zero Hedge which contained strategies for building traffic at the site. To some, that raises alarms of obtaining trade secrets – an issue over which Wall Street firms have sought, and received, criminal prosecutions. Also noteworthy, the article’s authors, Tracy Alloway and Luke Kawa, seem to take aim at the financial comfort of the people behind the blog, while failing to mention that their boss is the 8th richest person in the world, whose wealth intricately derives from the industry they cover. During Michael Bloomberg’s 12 … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 28, 2016  Remember the chat rooms dubbed “The Cartel” and “The Bandits Club” that contributed to felony counts against the mega Wall Street banks last May for rigging the foreign currency markets? How about that classic from the Barclays chat room trader: “if you aint cheating, you aint trying.” Well, apparently, one or more banks are causing concerns in this area again. Yesterday, the regulator of national banks, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, sent out a severe warning to its flock that there could be a five year jail sentence waiting in the wings for anyone attempting to use technology to block its mandated access to bank records. The letter was authored by Bethany Dugan, Deputy Comptroller for Operational Risk. The statement read in part: “The OCC has become aware of communications technology recently made available to banks that could prevent … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 27, 2016 Back in 2010, with the public still numb from the epic financial crash and still in the dark about the trillions of dollars of secret loans the Federal Reserve had pumped into the Wall Street mega banks to resuscitate their sinking carcasses, Matt Taibbi penned his classic profile of Goldman Sachs at Rolling Stone, with this, now legendary, summation: “The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” Historically, what smells like money to Goldman Sachs has been eight-figure money and higher. As recently as 2013, the New York Times reported that Goldman had a $10 million minimum to manage private wealth and was kicking out its own employees’ brokerage accounts if they were less than $1 million. Now, all of a … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 26, 2016 Yesterday, speaking before a rally audience in Rhode Island, Donald Trump called the coordination of election strategy between presidential candidates Senator Ted Cruz and Governor John Kasich “collusion.” (See video clip below.) He then made the following off the wall statement:  “If you collude in business, or if you collude in the stock market, they put you in jail.” That statement is profoundly important on multiple levels. For one, it raises the question of just how closely Donald Trump has followed the serial crimes of Wall Street and the Justice Department’s failure to deliver jail time. Despite holding a degree from the Wharton School, perhaps Trump thumbs through the real estate section of the New York Times and skips over the Wall Street news. Maybe Trump is entrenched in an illusion that it’s his charisma and star quality that is responsible … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 25, 2016 Brad Deutsch, the attorney who authored the letter last week charging the Hillary Clinton campaign’s joint fundraising committee with dubious dealings that appear to violate Federal election law, isn’t just any ole lawyer. Prior to joining the law firm Garvey Schubert Barer in July 2014, Deutsch worked for more than a decade at the government’s top watchdog over Federal campaign financing – the Federal Election Commission (FEC). Deutsch, now lead counsel to Senator Bernie Sanders’ campaign for President, would seem to be well qualified in defining what is and is not legal under Federal election law. From 2006 to 2014, Deutsch was Chief of Staff and Senior Legal Advisor to Commissioner Steven T. Walther at the FEC. Prior to that, he served as Assistant General Counsel at the FEC from 2004 to 2006 where he supervised a team of Federal election … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 22, 2016  Buried in a report released yesterday by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) was a stunning piece of news. Customers of JPMorgan Chase, the bank that Wall Street analyst Mike Mayo has preposterously called the “Lebron James of banking,” were major victims of Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme – to the tune of $5.4 billion – because of negligence on the part of the bank. The report states the following: “In 2014, DOJ [Department of Justice] assessed a $1.7 billion forfeiture – the largest penalty related to a BSA [Bank Secrecy Act] violation – against JPMorgan Chase Bank. DOJ cited the bank for its failure to detect and report the suspicious activities of Bernard Madoff. The bank failed to maintain an effective anti-money-laundering program and report suspicious transactions in 2008, which contributed to their customers losing about $5.4 billion in Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 21, 2016  According to a study released by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in March of last year, U.S. taxpayers have already injected $187.5 billion into Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two companies that prior to the 2008 financial crash traded on the New York Stock Exchange, had shareholders and their own Board of Directors while also receiving an implicit taxpayer guarantee on their debt. The U.S. government put the pair into conservatorship on September 6, 2008. The public has been led to believe that the $187.5 billion bailout of the pair was the full extent of the taxpayers’ tab. But in an astonishing acknowledgement on February 25 of this year, the Government Accountability Office, the nonpartisan investigative arm of Congress, issued an audit report of the U.S. government’s finances, revealing that the government’s “remaining contractual commitment to the GSEs, if … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 20, 2016 New York State has the toughest financial fraud law in the country. Under New York’s 1921 Martin Act, the State Attorney General’s office can bring both criminal or civil charges. Despite that important fact, no CEO or CFO or key executive of any major Wall Street bank has been prosecuted by the New York State Attorney General for their role in the 2008 crash — which crippled the U.S. economy and has left the nation with GDP growth of two percent or less ever since. Despite the Martin Act’s unique anti-fraud statutes, Wall Street banks have been churning out serial new crimes since the 2008 crash, proving that both Justice Department prosecutors in Washington and timid prosecutors in New York are failing miserably at their jobs in deterring Wall Street crime. What power brokers in New York do best is flood … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 19, 2016  Eight long years after the greatest Wall Street crash since 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression, U.S. mega banks on Wall Street still pose a systemic risk to the safety and soundness of banking and the overall financial stability of the United States. The public no longer has to guess as to whether the above statement is factual or simply the wild imagining of Wall Street activists. No less than the bank-cozy Federal Reserve confirmed on April 13 that three of the largest Wall Street banks (JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo) did not have credible plans to unwind themselves without taxpayer assistance if they were to fail, raising the specter of another epic taxpayer bailout adding to the already staggering $19 trillion national debt, much of which resulted from the last bailout. In the case of JPMorgan Chase, … Continue reading →