Category Archives: Uncategorized

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 5, 2015 Years of unending news stories on U.S. government programs of surveillance, rendition and torture have apparently chilled the speech of even top business executives in the United States. Yesterday, Jim Clifton, the Chairman and CEO of Gallup, an iconic U.S. company dating back to 1935, told CNBC that he was worried he might “suddenly disappear” and not make it home that evening if he disputed the accuracy of what the U.S. government is reporting as unemployed Americans. The CNBC interview came one day after Clifton had penned a gutsy opinion piece on Gallup’s web site, defiantly calling the government’s 5.6 percent unemployment figure “The Big Lie” in the article’s headline. His appearance on CNBC was apparently to walk back the “lie” part of the title and reframe the jobs data as just hopelessly deceptive. Clifton stated the following on CNBC: “I … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 4, 2015 The monetary policy arm of the U.S. central bank, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), is getting hammered this week. On Monday, two researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco chastised the FOMC for effectively wearing rose-colored glasses since 2007 and getting the rate of economic growth mostly dead wrong. (More on that later in this article.) Yesterday, in a speech before the Minnesota Bankers Association, Narayana Kocherlakota, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis said that if one applied a corporate performance measurement to the FOMC’s dual job assignment from Congress of promoting price stability and maximum employment, then the FOMC has “underperformed in the past three years” on both measures. The reason the FOMC has underperformed according to Kocherlakota is that it did not provide adequate stimulus. The Fed President told the audience: “What concrete actions … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: February 3, 2015 Yesterday, Emily Glazer and Christina Rexrode penned an article for the Wall Street Journal on the regulatory focus that is coming to bear on the culture in the biggest Wall Street banks. (We’d link to the story did it not have a paywall blocking the contents.) Wall Street Journal Editor in Chief Gerard Baker gave the article a plug in his column yesterday with a jab – not at the banks but at the regulators: “The banking sector, already under fierce regulatory scrutiny since the financial crisis that has resulted in tens of billions of dollars in fines, faces a new and apparently even more arbitrary intervention from the regulators. Our story looks at how the issue of ‘culture’ is taking on added urgency as U.S. banks await feedback expected around March from the Fed’s annual ‘stress tests,’ which are supposed to ensure that … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 2, 2015 It was just last Wednesday that the U.S. central bank, the Federal Reserve, released its monetary policy statement and reassured the markets that “economic activity has been expanding at a solid pace” with “strong job gains.” This cheery U.S. news came on the heels of recent action by seven foreign central banks to slash interest rates and/or pump more stimulus funds to head off an economic train wreck around the rest of the globe. The Fed statement also came on the heels of thousands of job cut announcements by companies like American Express (4,000), Schlumberger (9,000), IBM (at least 2,000), Baker Hughes (7,000), and Coca Cola (1,600 to 1,800). What’s happening among U.S. retailers is also not suggesting strong job gains. Since December, there has been a steady pace of bankruptcy filings and announcements by retailers  to close all stores and … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 29, 2015 There is growing unease in stock and bond markets around the world that the current Chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve, Janet Yellen, has retrieved former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan’s blinders out of the mothballs in some musty old closet at the Fed, thus setting the U.S. economy up for more epic convulsions. Yesterday, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) released its policy statement and rattled markets here and abroad overnight. The statement contained a number of economic absurdities. The first sentence argued that “economic activity has been expanding at a solid pace” while a few sentences later we are told “inflation has declined further below the Committee’s longer-run objective.” A solid expansion simply does not correlate with declining inflation in the U.S. and mushrooming deflation among our trading partners. Later in the statement the Fed tells us that inflation will … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: January 28, 2015 The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) of the Federal Reserve will release its monetary policy statement at 2 p.m. today against a backdrop of extraordinary global events since its last statement on December 17. Since that time, deflationary forces have picked up steam in the 19-member Eurozone forcing the European Central Bank to announce a large scale quantitative easing program to buy up government bonds in the hope that the added liquidity will spike spending and inflation. A political earthquake has also been unleashed by the Coalition of the Radical Left, known colloquially as Syriza, seating their candidate, Alexis Tsipras, as Prime Minister in Greece. The win came on a platform to end austerity and renegotiate the terms of the Greek bailout. This is causing spasms in stock and bond markets in Europe over concerns it could lead to Greece’s exit from the Euro … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 27, 2015 Earlier this month, Jim Clifton, Chairman and CEO of Gallup, published a stunning indictment of Wall Street as a job creating engine. Clifton reported that the U.S. now ranks 12th among developed nations in business startups with countries such as Hungary and Italy having higher startup rates. Of equal concern writes Clifton, “American business deaths now outnumber business births.” Clifton has a theory on why America’s crisis in creating new businesses is a well-kept secret. He writes: “My hunch is that no one talks about the birth and death rates of American business because Wall Street and the White House, no matter which party occupies the latter, are two gigantic institutions of persuasion. The White House needs to keep you in the game because their political party needs your vote. Wall Street needs the stock market to boom, even if that … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 26, 2015 Just imagine what would happen in the United States, land of the billionaire Koch brothers’ well-heeled minions and their obsessive hysteria against the government helping those in need, if a political party called the Coalition of the Radical Left (Syriza is the Greek shorthand) took over the country in a landslide victory. Even though it happened in Greece yesterday, not the United States, it is sure to provide plenty of fodder for the Kochs to incite fear in their ranks and ramp up campaign spending by billionaires heading into the 2016 U.S. election. Just this past Saturday, Charles Koch was warning his Ayn Rand-worshiping followers at their annual confab in Palm Springs, California that “Americans have taken an important step in slowing down the march toward collectivism.” In excerpts of his speech leaked to the media, Koch said his vision is … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 22, 2015 The big story this week has not been news coming out of the widely covered World Economic Forum in Davos or the much anticipated bond-buying program in Europe known as QE. The big story is the sheer number of central banks moving into panic mode in the span of a week. We may be forced to change the name of our web site to “Central Banks On Parade.” Since last Thursday, seven separate central banks have taken action to guard against deflationary forces now moving like an out of control wildfire around the globe. Central bank moves in Switzerland, Canada, Denmark and Peru came as a surprise to markets and may have had a secondary agenda of drawing some blood from speculators. The most heavily anticipated announcement came today from Mario Draghi, President of the European Central Bank. At 2:30 p.m. … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 21, 2015 Television pundits and business writers who are relentlessly pounding the table on how cheaper home heating oil and gas at the pump is going to provide a consumer windfall and ramp up economic activity have a simplistic view of how things work. Oil-related companies in the U.S. now account for between 35 to 40 percent of all capital spending. Announcements of sharp cutbacks in capital spending and job reductions by these companies create big ripples, forcing related companies to trim their own budgets, revenue assumptions, and payrolls accordingly. The announcements coming out of the oil patch are picking up steam and it’s not a pretty picture. Last week Schlumberger said it would eliminate 9,000 jobs, approximately 7 percent of its workforce, and trim capital spending by about $1 billion. Yesterday, Baker Hughes, the oilfield services company, announced 7,000 in job cuts, … Continue reading →