Category Archives: Uncategorized

By Pam Martens: July 24, 2014 Since March 30 of this year when bestselling author, Michael Lewis, appeared on 60 Minutes to explain the findings of his latest book, Flash Boys, as “stock market’s rigged,” America has been learning some very uncomfortable truths about the tilted playing field against the public stock investor. Throughout this time, no one has been more adamant than Terrence (Terry) Duffy, the Executive Chairman and President of the CME Group, which operates the largest futures exchange in the world in Chicago, that the charges made by Lewis about the stock market have nothing to do with his market. The futures markets are pristine, according to testimony Duffy gave before the U.S. Senate Agriculture Committee on May 13. On Tuesday of this week, Duffy’s credibility and the honesty of the futures exchanges he runs came into serious question when lawyers for three traders filed a Second Amended … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 23, 2014 Anshu Jain, Co-CEO of Deutsche Bank, was not having a good day yesterday. First the oath-taking, subpoena-issuing Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released a detailed email to him from William Broeksmit, the 58-year old former Deutsche risk executive alleged to have hanged himself in his London home on January 26. By the end of the day, someone had leaked to the Wall Street Journal a deeply critical letter of Deutsche Bank from the New York Fed which said that “The size and breadth of errors strongly suggest that the firm’s entire U.S. regulatory reporting structure requires wide-ranging remedial action.” What the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations was taking testimony on yesterday, however, was far from an “error” committed by Deutsche Bank. Both Deutsche Bank and Barclays were shown, through emails, marketing materials and witness testimony, to have set up elaborate … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: July 22, 2014 Only one word comes to mind to describe the testimony taking place before the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations this morning: Machiavellian. The criminal minds on Wall Street have twisted banking and securities laws into such a pretzel of hubris that neither Congress, Federal Regulators or even the General Accountability Office can say with any confidence if the U.S. financial system is an over-leveraged house of cards. They just don’t know. According to a copious report released last evening, here’s what hedge funds have been doing for more than a decade with the intimate involvement of global banks: the hedge fund makes a deposit of cash into an account at the bank which has been established so that the hedge fund can engage in high frequency trading of stocks. The account is not in the hedge fund’s name but in the bank’s name. … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: July 21, 2014  The U.S. stock market looks more and more like that box of pasta on the grocer’s shelf. There’s less of it but it costs more. According to data from Birinyi Associates, for calendar years 2006 through 2013, corporations authorized $4.14 trillion in buybacks of their own publicly traded stock in the U.S. That should be good, right? Earnings are boosted on a per share basis because of fewer shares, making corporate prospects look brighter. Unfortunately, according to Standard and Poor’s, net equity issuance (the difference between buybacks, leveraged buyouts, etc. and Initial Public Offerings or secondary offerings) has been shrinking as corporate debt has been rising to fund those stock buybacks. In 2013 alone, corporations authorized $754.8 billion in stock buybacks while simultaneously borrowing $782.5 billion from credit markets. Jeffrey Kleintop, Chief Market Strategist for LPL Financial reports that corporations are now the single … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: July 17, 2014 Wall Street On Parade has been reporting for the past six months on a series of tragic, sudden deaths of Information Technology workers at JPMorgan. Now coming to the fore are stories of relentless prosecutions of Wall Street’s IT workers by Manhattan District Attorney, Cyrus Vance. Bloomberg News reports today that Vance is engaged in at least four prosecutions of Wall Street workers over theft of computer code or other intellectual property. Bestselling author, Michael Lewis, devoted a significant part of his latest book, Flash Boys, to the prosecution of Sergey Aleynikov over alleged stolen computer code. Aleynikov had been working for Goldman Sachs when he received an offer to move to a hedge fund and build a system from scratch. Aleynikov accepted the offer but agreed to stay at Goldman for six weeks to train his colleagues. (That does not seem like the action … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: July 16, 2014 Yesterday, Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen delivered her Semiannual Monetary Policy Report to the Senate Banking Committee. Yellen deftly maneuvered questions on slack in the job market, asset bubbles on Wall Street, and assorted digs at the explosion of the Fed’s balance sheet to over $4 trillion as a result of quantitative easing. When it finally came to the turn of the last Senator on the docket to quiz Yellen, Senator Elizabeth Warren, the Fed Chair gave her a big, warm smile at the beginning of the questioning, likely figuring she was about to steal home and get big kudos for her performance back at the Fed. Things didn’t go as planned. Senator Warren has apparently been looking at the bare bones 35-pages released to the public for the various “living wills” or wind-down plans if a systemically important (too-big-to-fail) bank gets into trouble … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: July 15, 2014  Yesterday, the U.S. Department of Justice announced its long anticipated $7 billion settlement with Wall Street mega bank, Citigroup, over its sale of toxic mortgage-backed bonds to investors, which included pensions, charities, cities, states, hospitals and FDIC-insured banks and others. The Justice Department informed us that it had collected “nearly 25 million documents” for this one investigation. The material facts the Department of Justice released to the public in its skimpy 9-page Statement of Facts (SOF) set a new low for bare bones disclosures. Instead of Appendix 1 being filled with incriminating emails or whistleblower letters proving Citigroup’s intent to defraud, it was instead a meaningless listing of deal names which tell the public absolutely nothing. Why would a serious law enforcement agency release such a worthless document to the public? To grasp exactly what is going on here, one need look no further … Continue reading →

By Russ Martens and Pam Martens: July 14, 2014 Since December of last year, JPMorgan Chase has been experiencing tragic, sudden deaths of workers on a scale which sets it alarmingly apart from other Wall Street mega banks. Adding to the concern generated by the deaths is the recent revelation that JPMorgan has an estimated $180 billion of life insurance in force on its current and former workers. Making worldwide news last week was the violent deaths of JPMorgan technology executive Julian Knott and his wife, Alita, ages 45 and 47, respectively, in Jefferson Township, New Jersey. However, two other recent, sudden deaths of technology workers at JPMorgan have gone unreported by the media. The bodies of the Knott couple, who have a teenage daughter and two teenage sons, were discovered by police on July 6, 2014 at approximately 1:12 a.m. According to a press release issued by the Morris … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: July 10, 2014 There’s no question that there’s a lot of sharks swimming about those dark pools being run by the mega Wall Street investment banks which are operating as privatized, unregulated stock exchanges operating in the dark. Any hopes that Wall Street’s captured regulators are going to harpoon those sharks anytime soon were dashed on July 1 when the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) announced a bizarre settlement with Goldman Sachs over misconduct by its dark pool, Sigma-X. The settlement popped up out of the blue three years after the alleged trading violations were documented by FINRA and the settlement was so devoid of facts as to create its own dark curtain around an already opaque arena. As is typical, FINRA made the sweeping claim in its press release that “In today’s highly automated trading environment, FINRA has no tolerance for firms that fail to have … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 9, 2014 Wall Street awoke to a big problem this morning. Their army of physicists designing artificial intelligence algorithms to skim money from millions of trades undertaken by the pensions and mutual funds owned by the average American may not be smart enough for a brand new form of competition. That brand new competition is a group of Senators whose brains are rapidly gathering asymmetric information on the dirty dealings of Wall Street by clustering key Wall Street executives and experts into hearing panels and then drilling down for how things are really operating today at the stock exchanges, in the dark pools, and in the “casinos” run by the high frequency traders. Equally important, by taking first-hand testimony at this series of hearings, the U.S. Senate is acknowledging two things: the Securities and Exchange Commission has dropped the ball and the Senate … Continue reading →