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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
The Cleveland Fed’s Puzzle on Future Economic Activity
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 28, 2014 Edward S. Knotek II and Saeed Zaman work for the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. On August 19 they posted a paper at the Cleveland Fed’s web site that looked at causal relationships between wages, prices and future economic activity. Knotek and Zaman have two Ph.D.s between them. Their paper arrives at this conclusion: “…subdued wage growth is symptomatic of the existence of slack in the labor market. But given wages’ limited forecasting power, they are but one piece in a larger puzzle about where the economy and inflation are going.” What Knotek and Zaman are pumping out as forecasting research at the Cleveland Fed is important because the President of the Cleveland Fed, Loretta J. Mester, is a voting member of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) that sets monetary policy for the U.S. central bank. Mester will help decide … Continue reading
The Unprecedented Failure to Regulate Citigroup Continues
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 27, 2014 Yesterday, Wall Street’s self-regulator, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), charged Citigroup with cheating its customers out of fair prices on preferred stock trades — 22,000 times. Citigroup was fined a meager $1.85 million, ordered to pay $638,000 in restitution, allowed to neither deny or admit the charges, and sent on its merry way to loot the next unwary investor. Why do we believe there will be more charges of malfeasance in Citigroup’s future? Because it is an unrepentant recidivist. Yesterday’s FINRA fine was the 408th fine that FINRA has levied against Citigroup Global Markets or its predecessor, Smith Barney, for trading violations, market manipulations or failure to supervise its traders or brokers. And that’s just FINRA – the light-handed disciplinarian with industry ties. Citigroup has kept other Federal regulators, including the U.S. Justice Department, very busy as well. It is … Continue reading
Are U.S. Markets Liquid and Deep or Rigged and Broken?
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 26, 2014 Every time a Wall Street honcho is hauled before Congress to explain the latest fleecing of the unsophisticated investor, he can be counted on to punctuate his testimony with this: “the U.S. markets are the deepest, widest, most liquid markets in the world.” Or words to that effect. There are now two gripping questions before Congressional investigators, the FBI, the Justice Department and the New York State Attorney General’s office as they look at High Frequency Trading operations in U.S. markets: Can markets give the appearance of liquidity while simultaneously being rigged? How much “liquidity” is being created because the current market structure offers a slam-dunk opportunity for High Frequency Traders to loot the unsophisticated with impunity, thus drawing a steady flow of big money to the looting enterprise? This, naturally, leads to two final questions: will market liquidity be negatively … Continue reading
Memo to Fed: Interest Rates Are a Sideshow; the Problem is Income Inequality
By Pam Martens: August 25, 2014 The time and effort spent by members of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors debating the timing of rate hikes is an utterly wasted exercise in futility – and the historically astute members of the Fed know it. After eight solid months of blathering about when rate hikes might occur, the real muscle in the bond market – the bond vigilantes – are drawing their own conclusions about what is coming down the pike. The benchmark 10-year U.S. Treasury note has moved from a yield of 2.85 percent at the beginning of the year to close last week at 2.38 percent. That’s the reaction of a market more worried about constrained income dispersal in the U.S. causing deflation than a market bidding up yields in anticipation of a rate hike. In early August, the Fed’s own scholars released a report showing just how fragile … Continue reading
Two Charts That Should Frighten Fed Chair Yellen
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 21, 2014 Any ideas that household balance sheets in the U.S. have been repaired since Wall Street took a wrecking ball to the nation’s economy in 2008 were dashed with the release of a study earlier this month by the Federal Reserve. As Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen ponders what will happen in the markets when the Fed starts to eventually raise interest rates, she has to also worry about what will happen to the cash-strapped consumer who is barely hanging on and has no emergency funds to meet a job loss or hike in credit card interest payments. The Fed study was conducted in September 2013 by the Fed’s Division of Consumer and Community Affairs. Its stated aim was to “capture a snapshot of the financial and economic well-being of U.S. households, as well as to monitor their recovery from the recent … Continue reading
New York Fed’s Answer to Cartels Rigging Markets – Form Another Cartel
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 20, 2014 According to the Oxford Dictionary, the word cartel can mean either businesses that seek to restrict competition or a coalition “intended to promote a mutual interest.” Under at least the second definition, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, a key regulator of the biggest Wall Street banks’ holding companies, has been sponsoring (yes, sponsoring) a cartel for decades. To grasp the sheer insanity of what the New York Fed is doing, imagine going to the Securities and Exchange Commission’s web site (another Wall Street regulator) and finding that it has loaned out its web site and its imprimatur to multiple Wall Street cartels writing their own rules of conduct. It sounds Orwellian doesn’t it. And yet this is the web site address for the New York Fed-sponsored Foreign Exchange Committee: http://www.newyorkfed.org/fxc/ which has been operating for the past 36 years … Continue reading
Senator Elizabeth Warren Versus Paul Krugman on Too Big to Fail
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 19, 2014 Two weeks ago, Paul Krugman used some expensive media real estate to write a propaganda piece on the unsupportable proposition that the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation passed in 2010 is “a success story” and that its bank wind-down program known as Ordinary Liquidation Authority has put an end to “bailing out the bankers.” Wall Street On Parade took Krugman to task over this fanciful ode to accomplishments by the President the day after his piece ran in the New York Times’ opinion pages and suggested he do proper research on this subject before opining in the future. That was the morning of August 5. By late in the afternoon of August 5, Krugman had a reality smack-down on his Dodd-Frank success fairy tale by two Federal regulators. Every major media outlet was running with the news that eleven of the biggest … Continue reading
36,000 Madoff Victims Have Not Received a Dime in Restitution; 1,129 Fully Reimbursed
By Pam Martens: August 18, 2014 On May 5, 2014, Irving Picard, the court-appointed trustee in charge of finding and distributing Madoff’s swindled funds to investors released this statement in a press release announcing the fourth interim distribution of funds to victims: “…1,129 accounts will be fully satisfied following the fourth interim distribution. All allowed claims totaling $925,000 or less will be fully satisfied after the distribution.” Just eight days later, Richard Breeden, the Special Master that’s working on behalf of the U.S. Department of Justice to distribute a separate pool of funds to Madoff’s victims reported that more than 36,000 claimants have filed documents with his office indicating that they haven’t yet received a dime of restitution. Yes, 36,000 people from all over the globe. That’s bad enough but the story goes downhill from there. Almost six years from the date that Bernard Madoff turned himself in as the … Continue reading
Citadel’s Dark Pool: SEC Draws a Dark Curtain Around Its Operations
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 14, 2014 In response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from Wall Street On Parade seeking information on how Citadel’s dark pool, Apogee, operates, the Securities and Exchange Commission responded in a letter dated August 12, 2014 that “we have determined to withhold records responsive to your request….” Dark pools are the unregulated stock exchanges currently under scrutiny for potentially illegal market rigging activities. We were not asking for trade secrets or results of examinations. We simply wanted basic information on how the Apogee dark pool operates in the marketplace. Mary Jo White, Chair of the SEC, has promised greater transparency by her agency, and yet, this very basic level of information was denied. Other dark pools like Liquidnet, Credit Suisse Crossfinder, and even the mighty Goldman Sachs’ dark pool, Sigma-X, have released their Form ATS describing the operations of their … Continue reading
How High Up Did the Madoff Fraud Go at JPMorgan?
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 13, 2014 Helen Davis Chaitman is a nationally recognized litigator and author of The Law of Lender Liability. And she is two other things as well – a Bernie Madoff victim who lost a large part of her life savings to his Ponzi scheme and the tenacious lawyer who represented other victims of his fraud in district and appellate courts. Now, together with attorney Lance Gotthoffer, Chaitman has written a book titled JPMadoff: The Unholy Alliance Between America’s Biggest Bank and America’s Biggest Crook. The book is being made available to readers on a new web site which will provide a chapter each month. The first chapter is currently available and Chaitman says that the second chapter, to be posted on September 12, will detail what JPMorgan knew and when it knew it. The web site also provides a quick means of contacting your … Continue reading