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Recent Posts
- Intel, Boeing and U.S. Steel May Hold the Secrets to What’s Behind All the Talk of a U.S. Sovereign Wealth Fund
- Trump and Paulson’s Proposal: U.S. Sovereign Wealth Fund (or Another Grifter Bailout)
- A Wall Street Regulator Is Understating Margin Debt by More than $4 Trillion – Because It’s Not Counting Giant Banks Making Margin Loans to Hedge Funds
- After JPMorgan Threatens to Sue, the Fed Cuts Its Capital Requirement on the 5-Count Felon from a Planned 25 Percent Hike to Less than 8 Percent
- Three Megabanks Had Loans Outstanding of $1.832 Trillion to Giant Hedge Funds on March 31
- Jamie Dimon’s Washington Post OpEd Gets Pummeled at Yahoo Finance
- In the Span of 72 Hours, Four People Tied to a Hewlett-Packard Criminal Case Died in Two Separate Events
- Crypto Took Down Another Federally-Insured Bank and Just Handed Its CEO a 24-Year Prison Sentence
- All the Devils from 2008 Are Back at the Megabanks: Leverage, Off-Balance-Sheet Debt, Over $192 Trillion in Derivatives, Shaky Capital Levels
- New Study Says the Fed Is Captured by Congress and White House — Not the Megabanks that Own the Fed Banks and Get Trillions in Bailouts
- Data from the Fed’s Emergency Funding Program Shows Spring 2023 Banking Crisis Was Far Deeper than Americans Were Told
- These FDIC-Insured Banks Have Lost 69 to 40 Percent of their Market Value Year-to-Date
- Exposure at Hedge Funds Has Skyrocketed to Over $28 Trillion; Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Are at Risk
- We Charted the Plunge and Rebound in the Nikkei Versus Nomura and Citigroup; the Correlation Is Frightening
- Former U.S. Labor Secretary Says Billionaires Have No Right to Exist Because their Wealth Comes from Five Illegal or Bad Practices
- Citigroup Is Having a Helluva Summer: A Protest on Thursday Will Turn Up the Heat
- Nikkei Has Biggest Drop in History: Here’s What’s Causing the Global Market Selloff
- JPMorgan Is Tapping Illiquid Assets in its Global Collateral Program; the New York Fed Is Paying for Its Services
- Bank Regulators Issue Warnings on Fintech and Banking as Disasters Pile Up
- Donald Trump Gives a Speech on Not Letting China Win the Crypto Race – Not Realizing China Banned Crypto Mining and Transactions Four Years Ago
- The New York Fed Has Contracted Out Key Functions to JPMorgan Chase; We Filed a FOIA and Got These Strange Invoices
- On the Eve of Netanyahu’s Address to Congress, Senator Bernie Sanders Delivers a Breathtaking Assessment of His War Crimes
- Trump’s Sit-Down with Netanyahu at Mar-a-Lago Will Cost U.S. Taxpayers Millions While Profiting Trump’s Business
- Protecting Trump and His Jet-Setting Adult Children During His Presidency Cost Taxpayers Over $1 Billion
- A Congressman and a Doctor Reported a Woman Being Shot at Trump Rally: She’s Vanished from Official Reports
- Jamie Dimon Goes Missing from Earnings Call, After Dumping $183 Million of His JPMorgan Chase Stock Earlier this Year
- U.S. Senate Candidate Backed by Hedge Fund Billionaires Was Sitting in Front Row at Trump Rally as the Sniper Fired into the Bleachers
- Project 2025: The Fossil Fuel and Banking Money Behind the Madness
- The Fund Created to Unwind a Failing Megabank Has a Problem: There’s No Money in It
- Joe Biden Versus the New York Times
- Grand Jury Transcript in Jeffrey Epstein Case Is Released, Raising Questions about Epstein’s Darkest Secrets Being Protected in JPMorgan Cases
- The Supreme Court Crowns a King, Immunizing Future Criminal Acts Under Project 2025 – a Right Wing Manifesto
- The Debate Disaster and the Supreme Court’s “Chevron” Repeal Have a Money Trail Leading to Charles Koch
- Congressman Andy Barr Stacks a Hearing on the Fed’s Stress Tests with Lobbyists for Megabanks
- The Fed Posts Historic Operating Losses As It Pays Out 5.40 Percent Interest to Banks
- Goldman Sachs’ Bank Derivatives Have Grown from $40 Trillion to $54 Trillion in Five Years; So How Did Its Credit Exposure Improve by 200 Percent?
- The Fed and FDIC Wake Up Suddenly to the Threat of Derivatives, Flunking the Four Largest Derivative Banks on their Wind-Down Plans
- Is the Stock Market Setting Investors Up for a Tech Bust Similar to the Dot.com Bust?
- Chase Bank Customers Are Reporting a Wave of Wire Fraud in their Accounts; the Bank Won’t Make Good on the Looted Funds
- The Senate Race in Ohio Is the Sickest in U.S. History in Terms of Billionaire Money from Outside the State
- Sullivan & Cromwell’s Legal Work for Sam Bankman-Fried’s Crypto House of Fraud Is Getting a Closer Look in Two Federal Court Cases
- Crypto Tries to Recreate the Koch Money Machine to Pack Congress with Shills
- French Fears Ignite Selloff in U.S. Megabanks and Foreign Peers
- Crypto Just Got Exponentially More Dangerous: Meet Fairshake
- Nvidia Hit a $3 Trillion Market Cap Last Week; Dark Pools Are Making Over 300,000 Trades in the Stock Weekly
- The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Is Making Enemies in All the Right Places
- A Former Exec at Citibank Raises Alarm Bells in Federal Court Over Failed Risk Controls Inside the Bank
- Charles Koch’s Money Is Being Used in Elections in Ways Only Orwell Could Have Imagined
- Freakonomics and Frankenbanks: JPMorgan Chase Sucked Up 18 Percent of All Profits of 4,568 FDIC-Insured Banks in the First Quarter
- Academic Study Provides Hard Numbers to the Sick, Revolving Door Culture at Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Citigroup
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Janet Yellen: Average Net Worth of 62 Million U.S. Households is $11,000
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 20, 2014 It took 200 years of hard data in a bestselling book by Thomas Piketty, awesome graphs and charts in Robert Reich’s documentary, “Inequality for All,” and years of scolding from Wall Street on Parade, but Fed Chair Janet Yellen has finally, and correctly, arrived at the idea that the nation’s economic ills are deeply rooted in the fact that U.S. “income and wealth inequality are near their highest levels in the past hundred years.” That was the message Yellen delivered on Friday in a speech at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, replete with stomach-churning figures from the Fed. Make no mistake about it, coming at the end of a week that saw dramatic up and down spikes in the stock market – Yellen was sending a pivotal message to the Wall Street wealth hoarders – your billionaire standing could be … Continue reading
Hedge Funds Get Pummeled: Shades of Long-Term Capital Management L.P.
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 16, 2014 If you happened to be sitting behind a trading screen on Wall Street in late August and September 1998, you’ve likely been having some déjà vu over the past seven trading sessions. Intraday rallies continue to fail; there is a thundering stampede into Treasuries; rumors are buzzing about hedge funds in trouble; waves of selling pressure suggest wholesale dumping to meet margin calls. If you needed any more evidence that there is some serious stuff going on behind the scenes on Wall Street, you got it in yesterday’s stock market open. Within minutes the Dow Jones Industrial Average had plunged 370 points in a panic selling spree as buyers went on strike. The Dow was down as much as 458 points in early afternoon before trimming its loses before the final bell to close at a minus 173 points. It’s all … Continue reading
New Book: Senator Schumer Was Regular Visitor to Madoff Offices
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 15, 2014 New York City has 8.4 million people living in its boroughs. But when it comes to defending those charged with financial crimes, it’s a very small, clubby world of people who are either related to each other or have worked together in the past. And this clubby group has one more thing in common: most of its members seem to be lavishing huge campaign contributions on U.S. Senator Charles (Chuck) Schumer of New York – a man who is in a position to recommend Federal Judge appointments and the Justice Department’s U.S. Attorney who will prosecute the financial crimes – or not. These are the findings in a new on-line book, JPMadoff: The Unholy Alliance Between America’s Biggest Bank and America’s Biggest Crook, being offered free as a chapter a month by attorneys Helen Davis Chaitman and Lance Gotthoffer. (Chaitman is … Continue reading
The Stock Market Has Lost Confidence in Central Banks as Gods
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 14, 2014 Yes, there is a wall of worry that the stock market is no longer climbing but is now descending. The greatest worry, that makes all others pale in comparison, is that the U.S. central bank, the Federal Reserve, has nothing left in its monetary arsenal but one bullet – Fed-Speak, otherwise known as spin. After three bond buying programs known as Quantitative Easing (QE) flooded Wall Street with bountiful amounts of play money while failing to significantly lift wages or economic growth, the U.S. central bank now has a balance sheet that has quadrupled since the 2008 crisis to $4.4 trillion. That it would be allowed to engage in QE4 in the next crisis is highly doubtful since QEs have proven to be financial bubble makers, income inequality makers and of little help to the average citizen. Equally problematic, the Fed … Continue reading
Oil Price War Throws the Fed into Crisis Mode
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 13, 2014 It was only a matter of time until the evidence became irrefutable that the only way out of a global deflation on the order of the Great Depression was to address the fact that 571 U.S. billionaires simply don’t have enough hours in the day to spend adequate money to buy enough goods that would require the restocking of shelves, create new factory orders and thereby ramp up job hiring to keep a nation of 317 million people afloat. A nation where the top 10 percent reaps more than 50 percent of the income is doomed to end up in the quicksand of deflation, dragging down the rich along with everyone else. The Federal Reserve’s timidity to address this reality since the crisis of 2008, as the national debt ballooned and its own balance sheet quadrupled, has now put it in … Continue reading
Stock Market or Thrill Ride?
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 10, 2014 Here’s the action of the Dow Jones Industrial Average on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday of this week: down 273 points; up 274.8 points; down 334.97 points. In the span of a week the stock market has taken investors on a stomach-churning roller-coaster ride and futures are pointing to a weak open this morning. What’s rattling the market? Headlines have incorrectly simplified the worry to concerns on global growth. But that inadequately explains the underlying fears that are causing the gyrations and sending the timid to the exits. Wall Street On Parade will have an in-depth analysis of the core issues this coming Monday.
A Fed Rally or More Tinkering in Chicago Futures Markets?
By Pam Martens: October 9, 2014 There were some interesting moves in the Chicago futures markets yesterday that might have been an effort to instill fear in traders that were short the market ahead of the release of the Fed’s minutes slated for unveiling at 2 p.m. Getting the party started early could induce panic short covering if the Fed minutes suggested a dovish approach to raising interest rates – which indeed they did. The stock market had been down as much as 55 points around the 11 a.m. hour but began a gradual advance ahead of the release, with a surge to close up 274.8 points higher on the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Looking a bit psychotic, that move of more than 329 points peak to trough followed by just one day a loss of 273 points in the Dow. Eric Hunsader, chart watcher and computer whiz who heads … Continue reading
With Oil Prices in Freefall, Morgan Stanley Can’t Close on an Oil Deal
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 8, 2014 In July 2013 and again this past January, the U.S. Senate’s Subcommittee on Financial Institutions and Consumer Protection, part of Senate Banking, convened hearings to get a handle on the extensive physical commodity holdings of Wall Street banks. At the January hearing, Senator Sherrod Brown, chair of the Subcommittee, told hearing participants that “the six largest U.S. bank holding companies have 14,420 subsidiaries, only 19 of which are traditional banks.” At the time of the July 2013 hearing, Morgan Stanley, one of the nation’s largest retail brokerage firms, an investment bank, as well as an FDIC insured depository bank, owned sprawling crude oil operations. Congress had been aware of Morgan Stanley’s foray into the oil business since at least 2009 when 60 Minutes reported that Morgan Stanley had acquired the capacity to store 20 million barrels of oil. Ostensibly as a … Continue reading
Saudi Arabia Goes Rogue, Risking Oil Price War
Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 7, 2014 In the mid 1980s, there was a different King and a different oil minister in Saudi Arabia than present today, but, other than that, the threat of an oil price war within the ranks of OPEC has all the hallmarks of early 1986. Typically, cartels like OPEC are supposed to act in unison on prices. But last Wednesday, Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil company, Saudi Aramco, stunned world oil markets by acting alone in cutting its official crude price by $1 per barrel for November deliveries to its Asian customers. It also dropped its price by approximately 40 cents per barrel to U.S. and European customers. If this is the opening salvo of a replay of 1986, be forewarned that crude oil prices plunged by over 50 percent in less than eight months in that era. The Saudi oil minister in 1986 was … Continue reading
Fed Chair Janet Yellen Has a New York Problem
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 6, 2014 America’s central bank, the Federal Reserve, has a credibility problem and a management crisis unique to its unusual structure. If the Chair of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, Janet Yellen, had any real management powers, she would have immediately asked William Dudley, President of the New York Fed, to step down after internal tape recordings revealed that his staff rubber stamps “legal but shady” deals at the big Wall Street banks it supervises. “Legal but shady” and patently illegal dressed up as just shady deals collapsed this Nation’s financial system only six years ago and continues to depress the country’s economic growth. The tapes were released by former New York Fed bank examiner, Carmen Segarra, via the public interest web site ProPublica and public radio’s “This American Life.” Segarra is suing the New York Fed, charging that she was terminated … Continue reading