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Recent Posts
- Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” Is a Grotesque Giveaway to Fossil Fuel Billionaires While Adding $3.3 Trillion to Nation’s Debt
- Senator Chris Murphy Charges that Trump “Has Opened a Channel for Bribery”
- Congressman Casten: Trump’s Assault on the Rule of Law Is Causing Capital Flight Out of U.S. by Foreign Investors
- Trump’s Approval Rating Drops to 80-Year Low; IMF Says U.S. Tariffs Now Exceed the Highs During the Great Depression
- Nasdaq Has Lost More than 3,000 Points Since Trump’s First Full Day in Office in 2025; the Pain Has Barely Begun
- The Bond Crisis Last Week Was a Global No-Confidence Vote in U. S. President Donald Trump
- Trump’s Tariff Plan Guts $5 Trillion in Stock Value in Two Days; Senator Warren Calls for Emergency Action Before Markets Open on Monday
- Trump’s Attacks on Big Law, Universities, and the Media Have a Common Goal: Silence Dissent Against Authoritarian Rule
- Trump Administration Gives All Clear to Laundering Money through Shell Companies and Bribing Foreign Officials
- Four Megabanks on Wall Street Hold $3.2 Trillion in Uninsured Deposits – Which May Explain Senator Schumer’s Pivot to the GOP to Stop a Government Shutdown
- Here’s What Came Crashing Down Yesterday for Trump’s “Genius” Guy, Elon Musk: Tesla Stock, Access to Twitter (X), His Years of Secret Calls with Putin
- After Banning the Associated Press, Trump Is Now Targeting Specific Journalists That He Wants to See Fired
- Closely Watched Atlanta Fed Model Predicts Negative U.S. Growth in First Quarter
- Trump’s Gangster Diplomacy Makes Front Page Headlines Around the Globe
- Who Benefits Alongside Elon Musk If He Succeeds in Killing the CFPB: the Megabanks on Wall Street that Underwrite His Tesla Stock Offerings
- In Trump 1.0, the State Department Used Taxpayer Money to Publish a Book Elevating Elon Musk to a Superhero; It Was Funded by USAID, the Agency Musk Wants to Quickly Shut Down
- News Host Joy Reid Raises Threat of Trump Selling U.S. to Putin; Ten Days Later Her Show Is Cancelled
- Elon Musk’s DOGE Appears to Be Violating a Court Order; It Has Taken Down Hundreds of YouTube Videos that Educate Americans on How to Avoid Being Swindled
- Barron’s Releases Audio of Jamie Dimon Cursing Out His Workers at a Town Hall, as Dimon Plans to Dump Another One Million JPM Shares
- There’s One Federal Investigative Agency that Neither Trump nor Elon Musk Can Touch: It Just Opened an Investigation into DOGE
- Elon Musk’s Companies Were Under Investigation by Five Inspectors General When the Trump Administration Fired Them and Made Musk the Investigator
- Donald Trump Gives the Greenlight to Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase to Return to Bribing Foreign Officials
- After Tech Geeks Built a Back Door to Loot Billions from FTX, Republicans Refuse to Investigate What Elon Musk’s Tech-Squad Did Inside the U.S. Treasury’s Payment System
- Former Prosecutor, Now U.S. Senator, Informs Tesla That CEO Musk May Be Violating Federal Law and to “Preserve All Records”
- Trump’s Hedge Fund Guy Is Now Overseeing the U.S. Treasury, IRS, OCC, U.S. Mint, FinCEN, F-SOC, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
- As Elon Musk Begins Shutting Down Payments to Federal Contractors, a Strange Money Trail Emerges to His Operatives Inside the U.S. Treasury’s Payment System
- JPMorgan Chase Charged by Yet Another Internal Whistleblower with Cooking the Books
- We Asked Google’s AI Search Model, Gemini, Questions About the Fed and Wall Street Megabanks: It Got the Answers Dead Wrong
- With Trump and Melania’s Crypto Coins Likely to Raise Legal Challenges, Why Didn’t Trump Fire the SEC’s Inspector General in His Purge of IGs?
- Fossil Fuel Industry Could End Up Paying Tens of Billions for LA Wildfires and Deceiving the Public on Climate Change for Decades
- It’s Being Called the Biggest Grift by a President in U.S. History: Trump and First Lady Launch their Own Crypto Coins
- Trump Plans to Install a Fracking CEO to Head the Energy Department and Declare a National Emergency on Energy to Gain Vast Powers
- Fossil Fuel Money Played a Role in the Los Angeles Fires and the Push to Install Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense
- When It Comes to Wealth Retention in Retirement, Concrete May Be the New Gold
- Wall Street Watchdog Warns “Clock Is Ticking on a Coming Catastrophic Financial Crash”
- Wall Street Is Sending the Same Message to Americans on Fossil Fuel Financing that It Sent on Cigarettes: Drop Dead
- In a Six-Week Span, this Dark Pool with a Curious Past Traded 3.7 Billion Shares
- Wall Street’s Lobby Firm Hired Eugene Scalia of Gibson Dunn to Sue the Fed for Jamie Dimon
- Postmaster General Louis DeJoy Made $561,051 in Compensation in 2024, as Mail Costs Spiked and Delivery Deteriorated
- Fed Chair Jay Powell Sends a Bold Message to Trump and Tanks the Dow by 1123 Points
- The Head of Fixed Income at T. Rowe Price Makes the Scary Case for the 10-Year Treasury to Spike to 6 Percent
- $663 Billion in Cash Assets Have Gone Poof at the Largest U.S. Banks
- Donald Trump to Ring Bell at New York Stock Exchange Today as Hit List Posters Appear in Manhattan Targeting Wall Street CEOs
- Trump Has a Slush Fund to Prop Up the Dollar – Will He Use It to Prop Up Bitcoin Instead?
- A CEO Assassination; a Billionaire Heiress/NYPD Commissioner; a Secret Wall Street Spy Center – Here’s How They’re Connected
- Despite More than 1600 Tech Scientists Signing a Letter Calling Crypto a Sham, Trump Names a Crypto Cheerleader for SEC Chair
- The Fed Rings a Warning Bell: Hedge Funds and Life Insurers Are Reporting Historic Leverage
- Trump’s Nominee for FBI Director, Kash Patel, Has Businesses Financially Intertwined with Trump
- Donald Trump Is at Risk of Getting Named in a Fossil Fuels Conspiracy Lawsuit
- Trump Is Having Difficulty Getting a Lawyer to Accept the Nomination for SEC Chair: Here’s Why
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Exit Polls: 40 Percent of NH Dems Want a President More Liberal Than Obama
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 10, 2016 The world woke up this morning to find that the populist stirrings that were fanned by the leaderless Occupy Wall Street movement, which first galvanized the debate on the wealth and income inequality of the 99 percent, have been simmering in the hearts and minds of voters ever since. Apparently, voters were simply waiting for an authentic presidential candidate to frame their demands into a cohesive message. Yesterday, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont crushed Hillary Clinton in the first presidential primary in New Hampshire, taking 60 percent of the Democratic vote to Hillary’s 38.4 percent with over 90 percent of the vote counted. Donald Trump took 35.1 percent of the Republican vote, with the current Governor of Ohio, John Kasich, coming in at a distant second with 15.9 percent, based on a little over 90 percent of the vote counted. (See … Continue reading
No One Wants to Be Fed Chair Janet Yellen This Week
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 9, 2016 Tomorrow, Janet Yellen will scurry over to the Rayburn House Office Building to give her semi-annual testimony to the House Financial Services Committee, now under the control of a deeply paranoid Republican majority when it comes to the Federal Reserve. (Not that some of that paranoia isn’t justified.) There is no question that Yellen will face hostile questioning from Republicans on the Committee, as she has in the past, although the questions tend to venture far afield from the real financial threats to U.S. stability. Most Democrats, on the other hand, are so wedded to holding up the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation as their grand achievement after the 2008 crash that they refuse to look out the window and see the equity capital of the Wall Street mega banks currently in a death spiral as the same banks invent ever more … Continue reading
As Markets Gyrate Wildly, Senator Shelby’s Banking Committee Will Look at Market Structure
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 8, 2016 Senator Richard Shelby (R-Alabama), the Chair of the U.S. Senate Banking Committee, has announced a hearing on March 3 at 10:00 a.m. to examine “Regulatory Reforms to Improve Equity Market Structure.” To appropriately conduct that hearing, all the lights should be turned out in the hearing room and the senators and witnesses should have to fumble and stumble their way to their seats in the dark, since that’s what American investors have been forced to do since the 2008 crash – a tortuously long seven years of make-believe financial reform. Following the 1929 crash, whose economic impact was also swift and devastating, the Senate Banking Committee spent the years of 1932 through 1934 holding comprehensive hearings and investigations on the structure of the stock market. The hearings unraveled, day by day, the frauds that the Wall Street titans of that era … Continue reading
Four of the Largest Wall Street Banks Hit 12-Month Lows Last Week
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 7, 2016 Last Wednesday something noteworthy happened on Wall Street. Four of the largest Wall Street banks, each holding trillions of dollars in derivatives, hit new 12-month lows in intraday trading. The banks are Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. The banks recovered a little ground by the end of the week. These banks have two other things in common: they have been spending billions buying back their own stock and they all received bailouts during the 2008 crash. Over the past six years, publicly traded companies in the Standard and Poor’s 500 Index have bought back $2.7 trillion of their own shares according to Bloomberg data. There are four major problems with this strategy: much of the buybacks are financed with debt; some of the buybacks simply offset insider selling or stock awards to executives; none of the money … Continue reading
Hillary Clinton Will Not Commit to Releasing Transcripts of Her Speeches to Wall Street
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 5, 2016 The Hillary Clinton presidential campaign has a new strategy to get Senator Bernie Sanders to shut up about the unseemly mountains of money Wall Street has showered on her and Bill Clinton throughout their careers: in campaign funds, in speaking fees, in home mortgages, and in donations to their charity, the Clinton Global Initiative. (Details here.) The new strategy is to effectively socialize Sanders to silence by embarrassing him every time he brings up the subject. Before Clinton took the stage last night at the MSNBC Democratic Debate at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, her Press Secretary, Brian Fallon, and Campaign Manager, Robby Mook, met with reporters from Bloomberg News to complain about Sanders’ innuendos that Hillary Clinton can be bought by Wall Street. According to a report at Bloomberg, Fallon stated at a Bloomberg Politics breakfast earlier yesterday … Continue reading
As Madoff Airs on TV, Two Anonymous Whistleblowers Are Pounding on the SEC’s Door Again
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 4, 2016 Last night ABC began its two-part series on the Bernie Madoff fraud. Viewers will be reminded about how investment expert, Harry Markopolos, wrote detailed letters to the SEC for years, raising red flags that Bernie Madoff was running a Ponzi scheme – only to be ignored by the SEC as Madoff fleeced more and more victims out of their life savings. Today, there are two equally erudite scribes who have jointly been flooding the SEC with explosive evidence that some Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) that trade on U.S. stock exchanges and are sold to a gullible public, may be little more than toxic waste dumped there by Wall Street firms eager to rid themselves of illiquid securities. The two anonymous authors have one thing going for them that Markopolos did not. They are represented by a former SEC attorney, Peter Chepucavage, … Continue reading
Wall Street Bank Stocks: What the Market Is Screaming At You
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 3, 2016 Most folks don’t realize that on Monday, September 23, 2013, Goldman Sachs began trading as one of the 30 stocks in the Dow Jones Industrial Average Index (Dow). Because the Dow is stock-price weighted and Goldman sports a very high price, it has an outsized impact on point gains and losses in the index. As of yesterday’s close, Goldman Sachs is the priciest stock in the Dow, despite its plunging price of late. Yesterday, the Dow lost 295.64 points and Goldman Sachs was a major contributor to the decline, losing 4.98 percent of its share price to close at $151.70. If this keeps up, it might not be too long before you see Goldman yanked from the Dow. The percentage loss in Goldman yesterday was notable on multiple fronts. First, its percentage decline was 3.18 percent more than the loss in the … Continue reading
Billionaire Super Pacs Are Big Losers in Iowa
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 2, 2016 Billionaires went to bed very cranky last night and are likely awakening to irritable bowel syndrome this morning. What has been working swimmingly well for them since the 2010 Citizens United decision was handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court, allowing the super wealthy to dump unlimited sums of money into Super Pacs to sway the outcome of elections, just had a wrench thrown into the gears. Voters in Iowa gave a resounding thumbs down to Jeb Bush and his massive Super Pac spending, giving him an embarrassingly low 2.8 percent of the Republican vote. According to data made available by BloombergBusiness (see chart below), Bush’s campaign spent $9.8 million in the final three months of last year while his Super Pac spent an astounding $54.3 million in the final six months of 2015. Also embarrassing for the billionaires giving to … Continue reading
60 Minutes Raises the Question: Are Dirty Lawyers Running the U.S.
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 1, 2016 Wall Street, based in New York City, collapsed the U.S. financial system under the weight of its own corruption in 2008. We’ve just come off another year of unprecedented corruption on Wall Street, topped off with two major U.S. banks, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase, pleading guilty to felony counts for rigging foreign currency trading. Elsewhere in the state of New York, the heads of both legislative branches, Dean Skelos, the Senate Majority Leader, and Sheldon Silver, Speaker of the Assembly, were convicted on corruption charges in the waning days of 2015. Last evening, the CBS investigative news program, 60 Minutes, produced video evidence that 15 out of 16 lawyers in New York City were willing to discuss strategies with a potential client for laundering dirty money into the U.S. financial system through shell companies. In short, New York State is facing … Continue reading
The Times Endorses Hillary Clinton with a Banner Ad from Citigroup
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 31, 2016 Today’s digital edition of The New York Times captures the essence of the cancer eating away at our democracy: a leading newspaper is endorsing a deeply tarnished candidate for the highest office in America while a major Wall Street bank that has played a key role in her conflicted candidacy runs a banner ad as if to salute the endorsement. The slogan on Citigroup’s ad, “cash back once just isn’t enough,” perfectly epitomizes the frequency with which the Clintons have gone to the Citigroup well. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, among the top five largest lifetime donors to Hillary’s campaigns, Citigroup tops the list, with three other Wall Street banks also making the cut: Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley. (The monies come from employees and/or family members or PACs of the firms, not the corporation itself.) Hillary … Continue reading