Category Archives: Uncategorized

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 29, 2016  There is quite a bit of inchoate dissonance as to whether JPMorgan Chase is a good investment. Recently, banking analyst Mike Mayo called JPMorgan Chase the “Lebron James of banking.” Lebron James is a famous basketball player who has won a lot of great awards for doing great things, including Olympic Gold. JPMorgan Chase is a bank that has, since Jamie Dimon took the helm as CEO on January 1, 2006, received a deferred prosecution agreement for two felony counts from the U.S. Justice Department for facilitating the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme and just last May agreed to a felony count for rigging foreign currency markets. In addition to the felony counts, there has been a serial stream of settlements for everything from rigging electricity markets to ripping off members of the U.S. military. We don’t know why Mike Mayo would … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 28, 2016  Yesterday, the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Financial Research (OFR) released its 2015 Annual Report to Congress. OFR was created under the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation of 2010 to keep the Financial Stability Oversight Council informed on emerging threats to financial stability in the U.S. Perhaps in an effort not to panic our sleeping Congress, or to further aggravate an already volatile stock market, the report said that “the United States financial system has continued to improve and threats to overall U.S. financial stability remain moderate.” From there, it went on to eviscerate that calm assessment with an endless stream of hair-raising concerns. One of those concerns is the interconnectedness of big Wall Street banks – a matter the OFR released a detailed paper on last February. One fact you won’t find in the OFR report is that five of the biggest … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 27, 2016 Expensive media real estate is reporting that presidential candidate, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, will meet with President Obama in the Oval Office today. Much is being made of the fact that the meeting comes less than a week before the politically important Iowa caucuses and just two days after Politico published an exclusive interview with the President in which he appeared to favor a Clinton presidency. (Memo to the President: this election is about finding an authentic non-establishment candidate, so your opinion as the quintessential establishment figure is not likely to sway folks – at least not in a good way.) The first thing that came to mind when we heard about the meeting was that one or more kingpins on Wall Street might have asked the President to whisper in Senator Sanders’ ear to stop repeating at every campaign … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 26, 2016  From June 2008 to the depth of the Wall Street financial crash in early 2009, U.S. domestic crude oil lost 70 percent of its value, falling from over $140 to the low $40s. But then a strange thing happened. Despite weak global economic growth, oil went back to over $100 by 2011 and traded between the $80s and a little over $100 until June 2014. Since then, it has plunged by 72 percent – a bigger crash than when Wall Street was collapsing. The chart of crude oil has the distinct feel of a pump and dump scheme, a technique that Wall Street has turned into an art form in the past. Think limited partnerships priced at par on client statements as they disintegrated in price in the real world; rigged research leading to the dot.com bust and a $4 trillion … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 25, 2016  Hillary Clinton was stumping in Iowa last week, promising supporters that if she is elected President she will fight to get rid of the U.S. Supreme Court decision, Citizens United, which allows unlimited corporate money to influence elections. At one campaign stop, Hillary said the decision is having “pernicious effects on our electoral system.” Hillary elaborated further on her views in an opinion piece for CNN last week, writing: “It’s time to reclaim our democracy, reform our distorted campaign finance system and restore access to the ballot box in all 50 states. “That starts with reversing Citizens United. And that’s where my comprehensive plan to restore common sense to campaign finance begins. As president, I’ll appoint Supreme Court justices who recognize that Citizens United is bad for America. And if necessary, I’ll fight for a constitutional amendment that overturns it.” That’s … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 22, 2016  We are in the midst of an unprecedented collapse in commodity and oil markets, fueling fears about every kind of debt from emerging markets to junk bonds held in U.S. listed Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs). In this midst of this raging fear, what has the U.S. Federal Reserve proposed? It’s proposed a plan to make banks “safer” by making them issue more debt and become more highly leveraged. We’re not kidding folks. Back in October, Fed Chair Janet Yellen had this to say about the plan: “The long-term debt requirement we are proposing today, combined with our other work to improve the resolvability of systemic banking firms, would substantially reduce the risk to taxpayers and the threat to financial stability stemming from the failure of these firms. This is an important step toward ending the market perception that any banking firm … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 21, 2016 According to a report from one of the regulators of national banks, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, as of September 30, 2015, insured U.S. commercial banks and savings associations had exposure to $192.2 trillion notional (face amount) of derivatives.  (Yes, that’s trillion with a “t”.) The report goes on to terrify with the revelation that only four banks hold 90.8 percent of all derivatives: Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America. But that’s far from an accurate picture. Buried deep in the report is Table 2, which broadens the landscape beyond just the commercial banking units of the mega Wall Street firms to what is lurking in the holding companies. In Table 2 we learn that Morgan Stanley ranks right up there with the other big boys on Wall Street, holding $31 trillion notional in derivatives. … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 20, 2016 Market action since the Federal Reserve’s first, in a promised series, of rate hikes on December 16 to put the U.S. back on a path of “normalization” and end its seven-year zero-interest-bound policy has reminded us of that line from the movie “Six Days Seven Nights.” Actress Anne Heche goes on what was supposed to be a pre-honeymoon vacation to instead experience a plane crash, be held hostage, and fight for her very survival. At one point she says words to the effect: I don’t know how much more of this vacation I can take. Investors might be forgiven for feeling the same way about the Fed’s idea of “normalization.” What U.S. investors woke up to this morning was another day of market hell. Futures on the Dow Jones Industrial Average were showing a loss of more than 300 points; Europe … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 19, 2016 The conventional wisdom was that the Fed’s rate hike on December 16 of last year was going to help big bank stocks by boosting their ability to charge heftier interest rates on loans. That theory has pretty much been relegated to the dust bin of financial fairy tales along with the Fed’s prediction that the slump in oil prices would be “transitory.” Bank stocks have been cratering like it’s early 2008 all over again and oil prices can’t find a floor, having broken through $60, $50, $40 and now $30 a barrel over the past 12 months. On top of the oil rout, which may spell corporate credit downgrades, bankruptcies, higher loan loss reserves – none of which are good for bank stocks – there are other bank risks not on the public’s radar screen. Among big U.S. bank stocks, Citigroup … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 18, 2016 Leave it to NBC to remind us that corporate media is tone deaf when it comes to facing up to outrageous conflicts of interest. The final presidential debate before the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary aired last night on NBC and was co-moderated by Lester Holt and Andrea Mitchell. Given the public focus on Hillary Clinton’s financial ties to Wall Street, it was clear that hard-hitting policy questions on reforming Wall Street would need to be asked during the debate. So why put Andrea Mitchell on that stage instead of an objective media moderator? Mitchell is married to Alan Greenspan, the man whose 18-year stint as Fed Chairman included a two-term appointment by Bill Clinton’s White House. Greenspan was correctly dubbed by Time Magazine as “25 People to Blame for the Financial Crisis”; was the man who played a key … Continue reading →