Category Archives: Uncategorized

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 18, 2016 A young black girl got a civics lesson in dystopian society sitting in the front row of the Senate Banking hearing this past Tuesday. Her expression was that of someone watching a Halloween horror film. The young girl was the daughter of Lisa Fairfax, a George Washington University law professor who brought her family members along to share her confirmation hearing to potentially become a Commissioner at the Securities and Exchange Commission. Hopefully, what the young girl observed will be enough to head her off in a career direction of white collar criminal law. Senator Joe Donnelly delivered a heartfelt review of what is going on in his home state of Indiana, asking the two SEC nominees, Hester Peirce and Fairfax, what role the SEC should play in the matter. Donnelly stated: “Ms. Peirce, I want to tell you a little … Continue reading →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →