Category Archives: Uncategorized

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 13, 2015  The quirky U.S. consumer has apparently decided to load up on building supplies, eat and drink at restaurants, forego filling the refrigerator, and snub Macy’s. The Commerce Department reported this morning that retail sales edged up 0.6 percent in July with food services and drinking places growing at 0.7 percent; building materials and garden supply dealers ratcheting 0.7 percent; while grocery store sales were flat and clothing and clothing accessories stores edged up just 0.4 percent. Department store sales were negative at -0.8. Yesterday, Macy’s reported that its second quarter earnings came in at 64 cents per share, a sharp drop from the 80 cents per share it earned in the second quarter of 2014. Revenue was also off, declining to $6.1 billion from $6.27 billion year over year. Macy’s stock dropped 5.06 percent by the close of trading yesterday, despite … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 12, 2015  The Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index was down a meager -0.96 percent at the close yesterday on the news of China’s devaluation of its currency, the Yuan, but some noteworthy individual stocks took a more dramatic pounding. Apple lost 5.20 percent; Micron Technology was in the red by 4.99 percent; Yum! Brands closed down 4.87 percent while General Motors lost 3.48 percent. All of these companies rely on China as a major export market.  According to a March report from FactSet, “companies in the S&P 500 in aggregate generate about 10 percent of sales from the Asia Pacific region, most of which comes from China and Japan.” Some U.S. companies, however, derive a far greater percentage of their sales from China. According to Sue Chang, a MarketWatch reporter using data from FactSet, 52 percent of Yum! Brands sales come from … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 11, 2015  Markets received a seismic jolt from China on Tuesday as it devalued its currency, the Yuan, by the most in two decades, cutting its daily reference rate by 1.9 percent. The move sparked instant selloffs in stocks, commodities, and emerging market currencies as well as a drop in the yield of the 10-year U.S. Treasury Note, which is trading early this morning at a yield of 2.16 percent. The devaluation was interpreted in the markets as a sign of capitulation by China to forego a stable currency policy in a last-ditch effort to revitalize sluggish export growth. On Friday, China reported that its exports had plunged by 8.3 percent overall in July with dramatic declines of 12.3 percent to the European Union and 13 percent to Japan. Exports to the United States fell by 1.3 percent. While China announced that the … Continue reading →

By Pam and Russ Martens: August 10, 2015  Last Friday’s nonfarm payrolls report of 215,000 new jobs in July with its attendant announcement of an unemployment rate of 5.3 percent drew mostly yawns from the media. That wasn’t the case on February 3 of this year when Jim Clifton, CEO of the polling company, Gallup, wrote a stunning opinion piece on the company’s web site calling the U.S. unemployment rate “The Big Lie.” Clifton raised more media frenzy the next day when he appeared on CNBC and suggested he might “disappear” for questioning the government’s unemployment rate. Back then, the official unemployment rate was 5.6 percent. Today it’s 5.3 percent – a very healthy looking rate for an economy that is supposedly on the rebound. One of the bogus aspects raised by Clifton in his opinion piece about how the U.S. government calculates the unemployment rate was this: “Say you’re … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 6, 2015 The Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation was signed into law five years ago to address the Wall Street abuses that led to the greatest financial crash since the Great Depression in 2008 and 2009. One of the requirements of that law was for the Securities and Exchange Commission to implement a rule making corporations publicly disclose the ratio of their CEO’s pay to the median worker’s pay. Yesterday, after being publicly humiliated over not putting the law into force, the SEC finally adopted the rule. But it won’t go into effect until corporations complete their 2017 fiscal year, meaning it will be stalled for almost another three years. Back on June 2, Senator Elizabeth Warren sent a scathing letter to SEC Chair Mary Jo White, berating her on a laundry list of broken promises. Warren told White: “You have now been SEC … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 5, 2015 Citigroup, the bank that played a central role in bringing America to its knees in 2008; received the largest taxpayer bailout in the history of finance to resuscitate its insolvent carcass; pleaded guilty to a felony count of rigging foreign currency trading in May and was put on a three year probation – is now under a string of criminal and civil investigations. On August 3, Citigroup filed its quarterly report (10Q) with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Instead of reporting a pristine slate free of transgressions as one would expect from a felon on probation, Citigroup reported that it had settled allegations of money laundering with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Commissioner of the California Department of Business Oversight involving its Banamex USA unit. The bank was, as typical, able to pay a penalty of $140 million … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 4, 2015 The Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation just celebrated its fifth anniversary on July 21 and the gaping holes it left in the promise to protect our Nation from another systemic financial crash are becoming clearer every day. No other agency has done more to highlight these growing risks than the Office of Financial Research (OFR), created under Dodd-Frank as a unit of the U.S. Treasury. In its most recent report, it provides the stunning news that private hedge funds in the U.S. now control one-third of all assets under management in the financial services industry – a stunning $4.1 trillion when leverage is included. In February of this year, OFR released a jaw-dropping report showing dangerous levels of systemic and interconnected risk among some of the same Wall Street players that held pivotal roles in the crash of 2008. The report found … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 3, 2015 William D. Cohan has joined Paul Krugman and Andrew Ross Sorkin at the New York Times in pushing the patently false narrative that the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999 had next to nothing to do with the epic Wall Street collapse of 2008 and the greatest economic calamity since the Great Depression. (See related articles on Krugman and Sorkin below.) The New York Times has already admitted on its editorial page that it was dead wrong to have pushed for the repeal of Glass-Steagall but now it’s dirtying its hands again by publishing all of these false narratives about what actually happened. In a July 30 column, Cohan ridicules Senators Elizabeth Warren and John McCain over their introduction of legislation to restore the Glass-Steagall Act to separate insured deposit banks from their gambling casino cousins, Wall Street investment banks. … Continue reading →

  By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 31, 2015  The commodities slump has accelerated this past month with gold now trading at five-year lows and the U.S. crude benchmark, West Texas Intermediate (WTI), down 19 percent in just the past month, 49 percent on the year, and 57 percent in the past two years. In early morning trade, WTI is at $47.82 versus $110 two years ago. Minutes of the Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee meeting on December 16 and 17 reveal that the Fed was expecting an upturn in oil prices this year, writing: “…inflation was projected to reach the Committee’s objective over time, with longer-run inflation expectations assumed to remain stable, prices of energy and non-oil imports forecast to begin rising next year, and slack in labor and product markets anticipated to diminish slowly.” CNN Money is reporting this morning that major iron ore or metals exporting … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 29, 2015 Your humble editor and publisher of Wall Street On Parade might have had a little something to do with a growing mutiny in Congress. Back on November 4, 2012 and again on July 25, 2013, we blew the whistle on an obscene, secret entitlement program between the Fed and the too-big-to-fail banks: a century old program where every year, boom or bust, despite the overall level of interest rates in the markets, the Fed pays out a risk-free, guaranteed 6 percent dividend to its member banks. (All Fed member banks get the dividend but the lion’s share goes to the biggest Wall Street banks because their capital dwarfs all other banks.) Now, after more than a hundred years, there’s a plan in Congress to shrink that payout to 1.5 percent and fix our crumbling roads with the savings. Only banks with … Continue reading →