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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
Who Owns the U.S. Stock Market?
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 8, 2014 Serious observers of Wall Street are increasingly asking this question: could a group of trading venues with giant pools of capital, operating in the dark, using high-speed algorithms and artificial intelligence that has a massive historical database and gets smarter with each micro-second trade — effectively own the stock market. Today, we take a look at the massive trading control exercised by just five Wall Street firms. JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup jointly control trillions of dollars in commercial bank deposits with thousands of branch bank buildings stretching across the United States scooping up the life savings of everyday Joes who have no clue these are also the Masters of the Universe on Wall Street. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley also own FDIC insured banks. Goldman Sachs Bank USA, as of March 31, 2014, has $104.7 billion in assets; … Continue reading
Shades of 1930 in Wall Street Banks’ Dark Pools?
By Pam Martens: July 7, 2014 On June 2 of this year, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), a self-regulator of Wall Street’s broker-dealers, dropped a bombshell. For the first time, FINRA released trading data for Wall Street’s dark pools – unregistered stock exchanges that the SEC recklessly allows to trade stocks without making the bids and offers public, along with many other details. The bombshell, that mainstream business media has yet to comprehend, was that the same mega Wall Street banks whose share prices crashed in the 2008 financial crisis are today not only running dark pools for stock trading but they’re trading the stock of their own corporate parents – to the tune of tens of millions of shares a week. Those Wall Street banks include JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America Merrill Lynch and Citigroup. What could possibly go wrong in this arrangement? Two days after Franklin D. … Continue reading
Facebook’s Experiment and its CIA Roots
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 3, 2014 Let us see if we have this straight: Facebook is a company that has been publicly traded for just slightly more than two years. It pays no dividend so its key attraction for its shareholders is that it knows how to run and grow its business. Its initial public offering launch was one of the biggest fiascos in modern finance. Its core asset from which its revenues flow is based on the loyalty and growth of its user base upon whom it decided to conduct secret psychological experiments – and then publish the findings. But wait. It gets worse. Facebook’s secret human lab rat study on a self-described “massive” 689,003 of its users was published just last month in the Proceedings of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences under the title: “Experimental Evidence of Massive-Scale Emotional Contagion Through Social Networks.” The … Continue reading
Hillary and Bill: Their Rugged Journey from Paupers to One-Percenters in 365 Days
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 2, 2014 In an interview with ABC’s Diane Sawyer on June 9, Hillary Clinton said that she and former President Bill Clinton were “dead broke” when they left the White House in January 2001. The remark was made in this context by the former first lady: “We came out of the White House not only dead broke, but in debt. We had no money when we got there, and we struggled to, you know, piece together the resources for mortgages, for houses, for Chelsea’s education. You know, it was not easy.” The remark is causing a storm of criticism, both for its lack of veracity and for its insensitivity to what actual financial struggle means in a nation with 46 million people living below the poverty level – including almost one in every five children. CounterPunch’s Jeffrey St. Clair has a particularly poignant … Continue reading
Crushing Occupy Wall Street: It Was All About the Pitchforks
By Pam Martens: July 1, 2014 You know there is something different in the air when Rand Paul is railing against “fat cats” and a fat cat is worrying aloud about pitchforks in Politico Magazine. It all harkens back to one of the greatest grassroots awareness campaigns in history, variously called Occupy Wall Street or “We Are the 99 Percent.” In a messy, tarp-filled outpost in Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan, the message of enforced inequality via the 99 percent brand was plastered across posters, hand-made t-shirts, street puppets, and even flashed onto skyscrapers in a creative blend of marketing savvy and social activism. From there, it tweeted around the world. This was creative destruction at its finest: calling out a failed system of crony capitalism that was only working for the 1 percent while creatively protesting for change in the streets – the only method left since the system … Continue reading
Profiteering on Banker Deaths: Regulator Says Public Has No Right to Details
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 30, 2014 A man with a long history of keeping big bank secrets safe from the public’s prying eyes has denied the appeal filed by Wall Street On Parade to obtain specifics about the worker deaths upon which JPMorgan Chase pockets the life insurance money each year. According to its financial filings, as of December 31, 2013, JPMorgan held $17.9 billion in Bank-Owned Life Insurance (BOLI) assets, a dark corner of the insurance market that allows banks to take out life insurance policies on their workers, secretly pocket the death benefits, and receive generous tax perks subsidized by the U.S. taxpayer. According to experts, JPMorgan could potentially hold upwards of $179 billion of life insurance in force on its current and former workers, based on the size of its BOLI assets. The man who denied Wall Street On Parade’s appeal is Daniel P. … Continue reading
Dark Pools, Barclays and the ‘Tone at the Top’
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 26, 2014 Yesterday, New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman filed a civil fraud complaint against the global bank, Barclays, for what can best be summed up as fostering an internal culture that rewards serial lying to customers and enforces the culture of lies by firing or intimidating employees who refuse to go along. The lawsuit was framed around well documented allegations that Barclays is running a dark pool that allows, encourages, and facilitates high frequency traders to front run the orders of slower market participants like pensions and mutual funds; but the critical takeaway from the complaint goes to the very heart of global banking. The complaint is the clearest proof yet that the insidiously corrupt culture of global banking has not been reformed but has instead metastasized throughout each operating unit of the unmanageable behemoths. To fully grasp this reality, it … Continue reading
BOE’s Carney: Inflated Central Bank Balance Sheet the New Normal; Expect to Hear the Same Conclusion from the U.S. Fed
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 25, 2014 The tabloids in London are having a field day today with headlines calling Bank of England Governor, Mark Carney, an “unreliable boyfriend” – a remark made yesterday by MP Pat McFadden during a hearing of the Treasury Select Committee of Parliament over the mixed signals Carney is sending the market about the timing of interest rate hikes by the BOE. (Carney, a Canadian and former head of the Bank of Canada, where he masterfully steered the Canadian economy through the financial crisis, might be forgiven for alternately thinking he’s on a bad blind date in his current assignment.) Carney suffered a withering grilling yesterday over a speech he delivered on June 12 in which he said “There’s already great speculation about the exact timing of the first rate hike and this decision is becoming more balanced. It could happen sooner than … Continue reading
What Your Stockbroker Is Doing With Your Stock Order and Why You Should Care
By Pam Martens: June 24, 2014 It’s gotten to the point that to maintain an account on Wall Street you have to surrender to a no-law zone. Wall Street is the only industry in America that can force its customers’ claims into its own private justice system, effectively closing the nation’s courts to its customers, while imposing a system where case law and legal precedent can be ignored and the public and press are barred from observing the proceedings. Under that shield from the courts and the full measure of the law, Wall Street rules itself much of the time. Just yesterday it was reported that after Wall Street firms pummeled their self-regulator with angry letters, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) withdrew a proposed rule that would force brokerage firms to tell customers what financial incentives they had paid a broker to switch firms. Often those incentives require reaching … Continue reading
Shhh. Don’t Wake Congress. Let Them Sleep Through the Next Wall Street Crash
By Pam Martens: June 23, 2014 Two Senate subcommittees held critically important hearings last week so Senators could gauge first hand the level of corruption and self-dealing on Wall Street and 72 percent of the members of those committees failed to show up. Missing in action were Senators Chuck Schumer, Bob Corker, Dick Shelby, David Vitter, Tom Coburn, Tammy Baldwin, and Rand Paul, among many others. Failure to show up for committee or subcommittee hearings has been tolerated far too long in the U.S. Senate as we reported two years ago when not one member of an 18-member subcommittee, other than the chairman, showed up for a hearing on the failing initial public offering process on Wall Street. It is understandable that Gallup’s new poll last week showed that confidence in Congress has just hit an all-time, historic low of 7 percent. So while the Senate debated why the American … Continue reading