Category Archives: Uncategorized

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 13, 2015 Two key legal events occurred last week and were reported as separate news items when, in fact, they are highly correlated. First, the U.S. Justice Department’s Deputy Attorney General, Sally Quillian Yates, released a memo on Wednesday effectively reversing former Attorney General Eric Holder’s standard operating procedure of big money settlements on Wall Street with no individuals being charged. Yates launched the new think in a speech the next day at NYU’s School of Law – not exactly the most auspicious of venues for setting a higher moral tone. Yates lost much of her credibility in the first five minutes of her talk. First she told the audience that was packed with Wall Street’s white collar defense attorneys that in “the few years since its launch, the Program on Corporate Compliance and Enforcement has made its mark here in New York.” … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 10, 2015 On Monday, August 24 the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged 1089 points within the first few minutes of trading. Close to half of that loss was recouped by the closing bell when the Dow clocked in with a loss of just 588 points. So if the small investor didn’t panic, he made out okay, right? Not necessarily. Small investors frequently have in place standing stop-loss orders that are sitting on the stock exchange order books to sell a stock at a pre-determined exit price that is lower than the current market to “stop” further losses. Once the target price of the stop-loss order is reached, the order automatically becomes a market order and is executed at where the market happens to be. In properly functioning, orderly markets, this would typically mean the stop-loss order would be executed at, or close to, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 9, 2015  Yesterday, in a stunning decision packed with Orwellian reverse speak, Judge Victor Marrero of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York (where cases against Wall Street firms are thrown out like penny candy by a carnival barker) dismissed claims against Goldman Sachs in a case so fraught with the appearance of corruption that it had commanded an investigation by the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Plaintiffs in the case were investors in Hudson Mezzanine Funding 2006-1 and 2006-2, synthetic bets on toxic mortgages which Goldman sold to investors while making multi-billion-dollar bets for its own firm that the deals would fail. In writing his decision to dismiss the claims by plaintiffs, the Judge actually acknowledged that employees of Goldman Sachs had called what they were selling to their customers “crap” and “junk” in internal emails that … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 8, 2015  When the revision to second quarter Gross Domestic Product was released by the Commerce Department on August 27, boosting GDP to 3.7 percent, it had a lot of people scratching their heads. Consumer Metrics Institute came right out with it, writing: “Once again we wonder how much we should trust numbers that bounce all over the place from revision to revision. One might expect better from a huge (and expensive) bureaucracy operating in the 21st century. Among major economies, only the Chinese numbers are more suspect.” Ouch. Jeffrey Sparshott and Jon Hilsenrath, economic writers at the Wall Street Journal, were more subtle in their assessment, suggesting that “How fast the economy grew depends on how you measure it. An alternative measure, gross domestic income, advanced at a much slower 0.6% pace last quarter. Both GDP and GDI measure overall economic activity … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 7, 2015  New York University has devolved into a dystopian model of higher education reimagined by Wall Street knaves who serve on its Boards and their kingpin attorney, Martin Lipton, who has been NYU’s Board Chairman for 17 years. As the university has thrown million dollar pay packages and perks like vacation homes with forgivable loans at its President, John Sexton, and an elite group of faculty, students have been buried under debt by the likes of the serially charged and now admitted felon, Citigroup, and are turning to prostitution in increasing numbers to meet the obscene hidden fees and staggering tuition piled on their shoulders by NYU’s masters of the universe. It now costs over $240,000 for a four-year degree at NYU – a nonprofit university subsidized by the taxpayer. At a protest rally in Washington Square last Tuesday against NYU’s tyrannical … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 3, 2015  The Shanghai stock exchange, which has been creating global stock market convulsions while trimming 39 percent off its value since June, will be closed for the next two days. The Chinese holiday started on Thursday in Beijing with a big parade and show of military might to commemorate the 70th anniversary of V-Day and the defeat of Japan in World War II. The massive military pageantry and display of weaponry was widely seen as a move by President Xi Jinping to reassert his authoritarian rule in the wake of a sputtering domestic economy, $5 trillion in value shaved off the stock market in a matter of months, and the need to devalue the country’s currency on August 11 in a bid to boost exports. Tragically, what has received far less attention than melting China stocks is the mass arrests of dissidents, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 2, 2015 The Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged 469.6 points yesterday for a loss of 2.84 percent but Wall Street banks and trading firms took a far heavier bruising. Business media have been placing the blame for global stock market convulsions on China’s slowing economy, devaluation of its currency and seemingly unstoppable selloffs in its wildly inflated stock market. There would seem to be much more to this story than we know so far to explain the outsized fall in Wall Street bank stocks. Yesterday, with the Dow losing 2.84 percent, the major names on Wall Street fared as follows: Citigroup, down 4.75 percent; Bank of America, down 4.65 percent; Wells Fargo, down 4.39 percent; JPMorgan Chase, down 4.13 percent; Morgan Stanley, down 3.86 percent; and Goldman Sachs, down 3.44 percent. The Blackstone Group, a private equity firm with significant involvement in China, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 1, 2015  JPMorgan Asset Management is running “sponsored content” at Barron’s, the financial publication, with today’s date and a remarkably rosy economic outlook given last week’s market rout and this morning’s Dow futures plunging to down 396 points at 9:02 a.m. – just 28 minutes before the market was set to open in New York. There used to be a time when advertising in newspapers was called advertising and you knew money was changing hands. All Barron’s is saying about JPMorgan’s “sponsored content” is this: “Barron’s news organization was not involved in the creation of this content.” Here’s the curious part of what JPMorgan Asset Management has to say about the U.S. economy: “…we find little to indicate that a slowdown is imminent. In any event, historically there’s been a long lag between signals of a downturn and the onset of recession. In … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: August 31, 2015  The riveting writer, Michael Hudson, has read our collective minds and the simmering anger in our hearts. Millions of American have long suspected that their inability to get financially ahead is an intentional construct of Wall Street’s central planners. Now Hudson, in an elegant but lethal indictment of the system, confirms that your ongoing struggle to make ends meet is not a reflection of your lack of talent or drive but the only possible outcome of having a blood-sucking financial leech affixed to your body, your retirement plan, and your economic future. In his new book, “Killing the Host,” Hudson hones an exquisitely gripping journey from Wall Street’s original role as capital allocator to its present-day parasitism that has replaced U.S. capitalism as an entrenched, politically-enforced economic model across America. This book is a must-read for anyone hoping to escape the most corrupt era … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 27, 2015  That big so-called rally at the market close yesterday was not a rally but a short squeeze. That’s when the hedge funds that have put on short positions size up the amount of stock for sale at the close of trading and, if the amount is light, they decide to close out their short positions by buying stock to cover. On Tuesday, there was approximately $3.5 billion in orders to sell at the close, resulting in the late day selloff. Yesterday, there was only about $500 million to sell, making it risky to hold short positions, thus the short squeeze driving the Dow up 619 points at the close. Expect to see a lot more of these spikes, up or down, in the last two hours of trading. Assessing just how large the bubble has grown in U.S. markets as a … Continue reading →