Category Archives: Uncategorized

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 2, 2014 Martin Smith, producer extraordinaire of some of the most riveting documentaries for the PBS program, Frontline, has received the 2014 John Chancellor Award for Excellence in Journalism, presented by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Typically, our reaction to journalism awards is akin to that of the late Alex Cockburn, author, columnist and long-time co-editor of the sassy CounterPunch.com web site, who had this to say on the subject in 2009: “…as a rule CounterPunch disapproves of the endless prizes the journalism industry awards itself. Many years ago, the great editor of Le Monde, Hubert Beuve-Mery, let it be known that anyone at his newspaper accepting an award would be fired. These farcical rituals peak in the annual absurdities of the Pulitzers… “Now I see that another CounterPuncher has been given a major journalism prize. His newspaper reports that ‘Patrick … Continue reading →

 By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 1, 2014 Wall Street’s crime spree has been coming at the public for the past six years like a geyser spewing from a broken water main. It’s been tough for the public to keep track of the twists and turns, and equally so for Congress. What has been lost in all the media frenzy over the tapes released by Carmen Segarra, an attorney and bank examiner at the New York Fed who was fired for wanting to hold Goldman Sachs accountable, according to her lawsuit, is that four other regulatory lawyers have stepped forward from 2006 to earlier this year to report that their Wall Street regulator has been captured. In the case of those four, the captured regulator is the Securities and Exchange Commission. When you have five Wall Street insiders with law degrees telling you that Wall Street regulators are not … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 30, 2014 Four noted economists have issued a report under the umbrellas of the International Center for Monetary and Banking Studies and the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) that is raising alarm bells at global central banks. According to the report: “The world is still leveraging up; an overall, global deleveraging process to bring down the total debt-to-GDP ratio – or even to reduce its growth rate – has not yet started. On the contrary, the debt ratio is still rising to all-time highs.” This, say the authors, has produced an “ongoing vicious circle of leverage and policy attempts to deleverage, on the one hand, and slower nominal growth on the other,” setting the basis “for either a slow, painful process of deleveraging or for another crisis, possibly this time originating in emerging economies (with China posing the highest risk).” These are … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: September 28, 2014 If you missed our coverage in 2012 of the Lower Manhattan Security Coordination Center where Wall Street sleuths from those serially charged firms like Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan dunk donuts alongside New York’s finest in a $150 million spy center, keeping tabs on the comings and goings of their own Wall Street employees as well as innocent pedestrians, then you may not fully appreciate why Carmen Segarra has been celebrated all weekend for her temerity in taping her boss and colleagues at the New York Fed, as well as employees inside the cloistered bowels of Goldman Sachs. While Wall Street was spying on everyone else in lower Manhattan in a high tech center funded by the taxpayer, Segarra strolled over to a Spy Store, plunked down a modest sum and walked out with a tiny tape recorder. She then proceeded to capture the essence … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 26, 2014 Jake Bernstein has a financial blockbuster up today at ProPublica on the secret tape recordings made inside the New York Fed and Goldman Sachs by bank examiner turned whistleblower, Carmen Segarra, who was fired by the New York Fed after she refused to change her examination findings on Goldman Sachs. Segarra is one gutsy bank examiner and lawyer: according to the article, she went to the Spy Store, bought a tiny microphone, and proceeded to tape record two of the most powerful financial institutions in the world — 46 hours worth of tapes. Read our past coverage of the Carmen Segarra story and the deeply conflicted New York Fed at these links: Blowing the Whistle on the New York Fed and Goldman Sachs The Carmen Segarra Case: Welcome to New York, Wall Street and McJustice A Mangled Case of Justice on Wall Street … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 25, 2014 Imagine historians 25 years from now looking back on one of the worst economic periods since the Great Depression and finding that the Wall Street Journal was calling this a “Goldilocks Economy” – “not too hot, not too cold.” (They can’t actually bring themselves to say “just right” to stay on script with the fairy tale.) On September 7, 2014 the Wall Street Journal went with this headline: “The Upside of August’s Jobs Report: A Goldilocks Economy.” The next day, in a blog post, this appeared: “Stocks rallied Friday following the disappointing jobs report as those hoping for a Goldilocks economy (not too hot, not too cold) cheered.” During the Great Depression, headline writers were admonished not to use the phrase “Great Depression” but to go with the more benign “hard times.” The theory behind the use of the phrase “Goldilocks … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 24, 2014 If there’s a bull market on Wall Street, somebody forgot to tell the small caps. The Russell 2000 index that measures the performance of smaller capitalized companies is down 3 percent this year versus the big capitalized companies in Standard and Poor’s 500 – which is up 8.9 percent year-to-date through the close yesterday. This divergence is a worrisome sign for those who look at historical charts. It becomes even more problematic when combined with the recent news that a good chunk of the buoyancy in the S&P 500 is coming from these big corporations spending billions to buy back their own stock – sometimes in unregulated dark pools operated by global banks on Wall Street. Clearly, smaller companies can’t borrow tens of billions in the debt markets in order to plow it into their own share repurchase programs. As we … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 23, 2014 In addition to hundreds of Federal bank examiners permanently stationed at Wall Street’s biggest banks by the Federal Reserve and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency in an effort to eradicate a serial crime spree, an unknown number of Justice Department moles are now roaming about the mahogany corridors of power, chatting up potential criminals around the water cooler and hoping to make it out alive before being detected. Avoiding detection as a mole becomes so much more challenging when the highest law enforcement officer in the land, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, comes to New York to address Wall Street’s lawyers and tells them, flat out, that he’s got moles stationed inside his Wall Street targets. (There were likely 100,000 text messages flying about Wall Street before Holder got to the next paragraph of his speech.) The revelation by … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: September 22, 2014 In 30 years of watching Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) debut on Wall Street, I have to say that I’ve never seen anything remotely resembling the Alibaba episode on Friday. It’s one for the record books not just in size but in opacity. Alibaba is a Chinese e-commerce company whose large investment haul in the U.S. is not likely to brighten the tepid job prospects in this country one little bit. According to news out this morning, Wall Street underwriters exercised their option to boost stock in the deal by an additional 48 million American depository shares, bringing the IPO to the largest ever at $25 billion. The company began trading publicly for the first time on Friday on the premier stock exchanging in the U.S., the New York Stock Exchange, which is supposed to exercise some degree of regimen over what it allows to … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 18, 2014 Senator Orrin Hatch, Republican from Utah, is not the Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. That post is held by Democrat Ron Wyden – whose party currently holds the majority of seats in the Senate. But this Tuesday, in a hearing that he was not even chairing, Senator Hatch appeared to be attempting to censor the speech of the witnesses before they testified by admonishing them not to use a list of specific words and phrases. The hearing was convened to take testimony on the retirement crisis facing millions of Americans because of the disappearance of corporate funded pensions and the inability of most Americans to build up a sufficient nest egg on their own because of stagnant wages and 401(k) fees imposed by Wall Street eating up their savings. Hatch, with a stern face, told the panelists: “What I hope … Continue reading →