Category Archives: Uncategorized

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 14, 2016  As Presidential candidate and Senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders, stumps around the country telling tens of thousands of plundered Americans that Wall Street’s business model is fraud, Hollywood is amplifying that message to millions of moviegoers this year with a series of films that roll back the curtain on how Wall Street has morphed into a crime syndicate.  Wall Street is accustomed to having its legions of high-paid lobbyists and sycophants at the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal doing the heavy lifting in its serial campaign to recast the financial crash in 2008 and its attendant economic implosion as something other than outright fraud. Even when new, serial, diabolical frauds sprang up post-crisis, like JPMorgan’s London Whale, or the cartel rigging of the interest rate benchmark Libor, and the multi-bank foreign currency conspiracy, the lie repeated a thousand times … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 13, 2016 Yesterday, there were two assessments on the state of the union. Both came with fancy charts. One was delivered by the President of the United States, who sounded very much like the Pope in seeking peace among members of Congress and individual citizens. The other was delivered by a hard core realist – Jeffrey Gundlach, CEO of investment management firm, DoubleLine Capital. If you watched the President’s State of the Union speech at WhiteHouse.gov, you got to see the interesting charts – some are still available here along with a transcript of the speech. One chart, shown below, reads: “Today, the top 3 percent of the richest Americans hold half the nation’s wealth.” That correct assessment, unfortunately, makes another statement by the President impossible to justify. The President told the highly cynical American people the following: “Anyone claiming that America’s economy … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 12, 2016 Presidential candidate, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, is stumping across America urging citizens to help him create a meaningful political revolution to take back the country from the death grip of the one percent. His message is resonating. Sanders is attracting crowds of tens of thousands of disillusioned Americans. Political revolution is also in the air in the state of New York where a group called “Fed Up New Yorkers” has just launched a newspaper whose stated purpose “is to lessen Big Money’s grip on our political system and on our society.” The newspaper founders say their project is both “a publishing project and a political plan.” Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of the project is Neil Fabricant, retired president of George Washington University’s Graduate School of Political Management and a former legislative director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. Fabricant is … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 11, 2016 Why are the mega Wall Street banks throwing gasoline on the fire of this stock market rout? One of the damndest things in Wall Street history happened last week. No, we’re not talking about the Dow and S&P having the largest drop in the first week of the New Year in history, although that was certainly noteworthy. We’re talking about those mega Wall Street banks that can rarely bring themselves to put out a sell rating on a stock they follow, deciding to throw gasoline on a plunging stock market last week by issuing negative outlooks. A cynical person (like someone who has just seen The Big Short movie) might be inclined to suspect that the Wall Street banks have gotten their short positions in place and are now ready to make some serious fast money. Bloomberg News ran an article … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 8, 2016  Yesterday, Wharton Finance Professor Jeremy Siegel appeared on CNBC to make a prediction that the S&P 500 index would experience a 10 percent upside by the end of this year. You might want to evaluate that prediction against what Professor Siegel also believes to be the U.S. situation with China. In answer to a question as to why the economic situation in China won’t weigh on the U.S., Siegel said: “We export very little to China” (see second video at this link). That statement, in fact, is false. According to detailed data from the U.S. Census Bureau, China is our third largest source of exports, at $106.1 billion through November – behind only Canada and Mexico. Ruptures in the stock market in China have now cratered U.S. stocks twice in the past six months. Thanks to spillover from China, the first … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 7, 2016  While you were sleeping, things got decidedly uglier in global markets. The Chinese stock market was only able to stay open for 29 minutes before it hit its ridiculously low limit-down of 7 percent and shut down for the balance of the trading session. (U.S. stock markets require a loss of 20 percent before they cease trading for the day.) That sent global investors wanting to lighten up on equities into European markets which saw red across the board. With the overnight rout, global stock markets have now lost approximately $2.5 trillion this week – and it’s only Thursday. Further declines in the price of crude oil added to the angst with the cumulative losses marking the worst ever New Year’s start for oil. The U.S. domestic benchmark, West Texas Intermediate (WTI), at one point dropped below a $33 handle. China … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 6, 2016 Presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont gave a speech yesterday that is destined to go down in the history books of this era, further enshrining him as one of the most courageous voices of our time. Sanders promised to break up the serially criminally-inclined banks on Wall Street and reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act to drive a permanent stake through the heart of too-big-to-fail. But if you watched either his official campaign’s YouTube video of his speech or the one provided by volunteers for his campaign, three key passages of what he said have gone missing from the video. We were able to reconstruct the full speech as delivered by transcribing the three missing sections from a YouTube video posted by the PBS Newshour which, notably, had no gaps in its video. (Watch the PBS video of the speech at the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 5, 2016  From Riyadh to Tehran, Shanghai to Frankfurt, investors had plenty to sweat about yesterday. The culmination of this perfect storm landed in U.S. stock markets yesterday where the Dow Jones Industrial Average was shortly after 11 a.m. off by more than 450 points. The Dow closed the day down 276 points after some kindly buying support exceeding $1 billion from unknown sources came in to prop up the market at the close. The first weekend ahead of Monday’s stock market open got off to a bad start with trouble spots that are likely to challenge markets throughout this year. Saudi Arabia (a country that still refuses to grant women licenses to drive a car) engaged in mass executions of 47 people, one of whom was a Shia Muslim cleric, Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr. This set off wild protests in Iran, which has … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 4, 2016 Call them astroturf organizations or neoliberal think tanks or corporate front groups – it all adds up to the same thing: big corporate bucks are engaged in a vicious propaganda war to recast the 2008 financial crash and its depression-like aftermath as the product of big government meddling rather than corporate lobbyists strong-arming deregulation of banking and Wall Street. The corporate cartel simply cannot allow mandates for tough new regulations to gain footing in Washington, otherwise the multi-decade work of the Kochtopus goes poof. (Kochtopus is short-hand for the political and front group money machine run by billionaire brothers, Charles and David Koch.) The Koctopus now has its knickers in a twist over the release of the movie, The Big Short, directed by Adam McKay and based on the bestselling book by Michael Lewis, a former Wall Street insider. Prior to … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 31, 2015 Confidence in America can impact the strength of the U.S. dollar, the willingness of foreigners to invest their capital here in our markets and real estate, and our diplomatic relations with other nations. With each passing day of his candidacy, Donald Trump drags his country – the one he claims to want to make great again – deeper into the embarrassing caricature of a land where billionaires are unfettered to run wild with both their money and their mouths. For example, it’s not every day that a major U.S. ally is set to debate whether it will ban a U.S. Presidential candidate from entering their country. That ignominious milestone now goes to Donald Trump, courtesy of the United Kingdom. According to a report out this morning from the BBC, following more than 500,000 people signing a Parliamentary e-petition, a Parliamentary committee … Continue reading →