Category Archives: Uncategorized

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 31, 2024 ~ Smart Americans have found two ways to outwit the wealth extraction machinery on Wall Street. They buy a home and build its value over time with sweat equity; and/or they start their own small business. A very large number of Americans who are living comfortably in retirement today built their wealth through one or both of these avenues. Wall Street banks, on the other hand, typically extract wealth from the little guy in a multitude of insidious ways – from high interest credit cards to excessive fees, tricked-up mortgages and outright frauds. Nothing better illustrated this wealth stripping than the 2013 PBS program from Frontline called The Retirement Gamble. The program documented the following: If you work for 50 years and receive the typical long-term return of 7 percent on the stock mutual funds in your 401(k) plan, and your fees are 2 … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 30, 2024 ~ While many other countries mandate that publicly-traded companies rotate their audit firms after a maximum number of years, there is no such requirement in the United States at the present time. The 10-K (annual report) that JPMorgan Chase filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on February 21, 2023 carried this statement under the auditor’s name of PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP (PwC): “We have served as the Firm’s auditor since 1965.” Let that settle in for a few moments as we take a quick tour through the last 10 years of JPMorgan Chase’s history under the same Chairman and CEO, Jamie Dimon, and the same audit firm. In 2013, after the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations found that JPMorgan Chase had lied to its regulators while gambling in derivatives in London using depositors’ money from its federally-insured bank and losing $6.2 billion, the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 29, 2024 ~ On July 27 of last year, the Vice Chair for Supervision at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, Michael Barr, made the following statement as part of the proposed new capital requirements for mega banks in the U.S. – revealing the stunning news that the serially-charged mega banks on Wall Street have been allowed to use their own internal risk models to tell the Fed how much risk-weighted assets they have and, thus, how much capital they need to hold. Barr stated: “For a firm’s lending activities, the proposed rules would end the practice of relying on a bank’s own individual estimates of their own risk and instead use a standardized, but risk-based measure of credit risk. Standardized credit risk approaches do a reasonably good job of approximating risks, while internal models are prone to underestimate such risks. “Second, for a firm’s … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 25, 2024 ~ Last Thursday, 12 Democrats in the U.S. Senate sent a deeply insightful letter on a subject most Americans have never discussed around their kitchen table: adequate capital levels at the Wall Street mega banks that came close to bringing down the U.S. financial system in 2008. Before that financial crisis was over – the worst since the Great Depression of the 1930s – millions of hardworking Americans had lost their jobs and millions more had their homes taken in foreclosure. If the U.S. is going to avoid a replay of that crisis, Americans are going to have to start having these critical conversations about the structure of Wall Street mega banks around the kitchen table. Americans are going to have to start engaging in the battle to shape the future of American democracy and more equitable wealth distribution, which requires dramatic reform … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 24, 2024 ~ To read main stream media headlines, one would think that the Federal Reserve Inspector General’s Office has exonerated former Dallas Fed President Robert Kaplan of any legal action for trading like a hedge fund kingpin while he was privy to insider information at the Fed. In fact, all that the Inspector General’s report has cleared Kaplan of is this: “we did not find that his trading activities violated laws, rules, regulations, or policies related to trading activities as investigated by our office.” What the Inspector General did not investigate is everything that a real insider trading investigation would have encompassed. It did not investigate if Kaplan was shorting the market with his $1 million plus trades in and out of S&P futures contracts during a declared National Emergency over the COVID pandemic while making market diving predictions on TV; it did not … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 23, 2024 ~ Gerald Epstein is Professor of Economics and a Founding Co-Director of the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. A book he has spent the past decade researching and writing comes out today from the University of California Press: Busting the Bankers’ Club: Finance for the Rest of Us. Anticipation of this book’s release has caused some sweaty brows in the halls of Congress, on Wall Street, at Big Law, and in the economics community. That’s because Epstein is naming names – the names of the people who have sold out American democracy and the public interest by becoming sycophants for, or actual members of, the Bankers’ Club. The Chairman of the Bankers’ Club is the Federal Reserve, writes Epstein. That’s because the Fed has strongarmed its way to becoming both the supervisor of the Wall Street mega … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 22, 2024 ~ The U.S. Department of Justice needs to immediately appoint an independent Special Counsel to investigate how long and in how many ways the U.S. Central Bank (the Federal Reserve or simply “the Fed”) has been functioning as a protection racket for Wall Street mega banks. We’ll get to the latest revelation about the Fed bullying and intimidating a Fed official in a moment, but first some necessary background. In 2013 the American people learned that Carmen Segarra had been a bank examiner with a law degree at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, one of Wall Street’s key regulators. Segarra charged in a Federal lawsuit that she was bullied by colleagues to change her negative examination of the powerful Wall Street mega bank, Goldman Sachs. Segarra detailed how her colleagues also obstructed and interfered with her investigation. When she refused to … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 18, 2024 ~ On February 10, 2014, the non-profit watchdog, Better Markets, took a bold and historic action. It filed a federal lawsuit against the highest law enforcement agency and officer in the United States – the U.S. Department of Justice and the man who sat at its helm, Attorney General Eric Holder. The lawsuit challenged a $13 billion out-of-court settlement that had been agreed to by the Justice Department and the Wall Street mega bank, JPMorgan Chase, over its sale of toxic mortgages. Better Markets wrote on its website that this was at the time “The largest settlement in U.S. history from a single entity by more than 300%” and that it “granted JP Morgan blanket civil immunity for years of alleged, but undisclosed, pervasive, egregious and knowing fraudulent and illegal conduct that contributed to the 2008 financial crash and the worst economy since the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: January 17, 2024 ~ Anat Admati, Professor of Finance and Economics at Stanford Graduate School of Business, and German economist Martin Hellwig, have performed a public service to all Americans with their newly released, updated and expanded book The Bankers’ New Clothes: What’s Wrong with Banking and What to Do about It. It puts the interlocking web of corruption that is mistakenly referred to as the U.S. banking system into a pristinely documented and highly readable book. Let us first explain those men without pants on the book jacket. That provocative graphic comes from the storyline in the Hans Christian Andersen tale “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” Tailors offer to make the emperor magical clothes that will be visible only to smart people and invisible to the stupid and unfit. When the emperor’s ministers go to inspect the clothes, they see nothing, but they are fearful of being called … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 16, 2024 ~ Jamie Dimon is the Chairman and CEO of the largest federally-insured, taxpayer-backstopped bank in the United States, JPMorgan Chase. Through much of Dimon’s tenure, JPMorgan Chase has also been designated as the riskiest bank in the United States by its regulators. And despite its unprecedented criminal history, the U.S. Department of Justice keeps handing the bank deferred-prosecution agreements or non-prosecution agreements with the casualness of a carnival barker tossing out penny candy. Dimon’s Board of Directors is too compromised itself to reform the bank and fire Dimon. (See here, here and here.) So all that remains as a potential restraint on this criminally-inclined banking behemoth is the bank’s federal regulators. On July 27 of last year, the Federal Reserve, FDIC and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) – JPMorgan Chase’s bank regulators — released a proposal to require higher capital levels … Continue reading →