Category Archives: Uncategorized

By Pam Martens: February 3, 2014 In a span of four days last week, two current executives and one recently retired top ranking executive of major financial firms were found dead. Both media and police have been quick to label the deaths as likely suicides. Missing from the reports is the salient fact that all three of the financial firms the executives worked for are under investigation for potentially serious financial fraud. The deaths began on Sunday, January 26. London police reported that William Broeksmit, a top executive at Deutsche Bank who had retired in 2013, had been found hanged in his home in the South Kensington section of London. The day after Broeksmit was pronounced dead, Eric Ben-Artzi, a former risk analyst turned whistleblower at Deutsche Bank, was scheduled to speak at Auburn University in Alabama on his allegations that Deutsche had hid $12 billion in losses during the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: January 30, 2014 Yesterday, the White House transported a little cherry table with the Presidential seal for a signing event in West Mifflin, Pennsylvania. President Obama was visiting workers at a U.S. Steel Corporation manufacturing plant there and used the occasion to officially sign the order creating the new MyRA, a retirement account with low dollar minimums for participation. The Presidential Memorandum, surprisingly, was devoid of any salient details of how the MyRA would work and effectively gave the U.S. Treasury Secretary, Jack Lew, carte blanche to tailor the account as long as it complied with the following: “By December 31, 2014, you shall finalize the development of a new retirement savings security that can be made available through employers to their employees. This security shall be focused on reaching new and small-dollar savers and shall have low barriers to entry, including a low minimum opening amount.” … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: January 29, 2014 There’s only three ways to think about President Obama’s new plan for offering workers retirement accounts as he disclosed in his State of the Union speech last night. (1) President Obama and Treasury Secretary Jack Lew have decided to get into the financial services business as a front for Wall Street; (2) Wall Street has conned the President into bypassing Congress and launch its decades-long push to establish private accounts in the hope that these could eventually replace Social Security; (3) The reason we know so little about the details of this plan is that they’re not pretty. The new account is to be called MyRA and would be structured as a Roth IRA where contributions go in after-tax but earnings compound untaxed over time. But Roth IRAs already exist and can be opened at any number of banks and discount brokers (or Wall … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: January 28, 2014 Remember the line from the iconic movie, Dirty Dancing – “nobody puts baby in a corner”? That basically sums up the President’s game plan for 2014 that he will unveil tonight in his State of the Union address. The key elements of the plan have been leaking over the past two days. Yesterday at a White House press briefing, in answer to a question about the State of the Union speech, Press Secretary Jay Carney said: “I think restoring security and economic vitality to the middle class is a very ambitious goal.  Restoring opportunity for all and expanding opportunity for all, those are very ambitious goals.  And those are the goals the President has identified…mindful of Congress’s reluctance to be cooperative at times, the President is going to exercise his authority.  He’s going to use his pen and his phone…And it would be the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: January 27, 2014 Most Americans would be stunned to learn that companies based in China, a country associated with accounting secrecy, have gained a foothold to the tune of over a trillion dollars on U.S. stock exchanges. According to Thomson Reuters, the market value of Chinese companies currently listed on the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq Stock Market is more than $1.4 trillion. Last week, U.S. investors learned the hard way that when China sneezes, the U.S. may catch pneumonia. Growth in China is slowing and there are growing fears that its massive overinvestment in real estate and manufacturing plants in recent years has led to unsustainable levels of Chinese business and bank debt. Stock markets in countries which have been major beneficiaries of the China growth story plunged at the end of last week, including a two-day drop of almost 500 points in the U.S. … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: January 23, 2014 Politico’s Ben White appears to have joined the Maria Bartiromo be-kind-to-Wall-Street camp. Bartiromo lectured fellow participants on Meet the Press last September that “We need to get beyond the conversation of is Wall Street evil.” (Perhaps the statement should be phrased: “Wall Street needs to stop being evil so we can get beyond that conversation.”) White took it one step further last week, suggesting in a column that Wall Street is fully reformed and no longer dangerous, thanks to those omnipotent folks in the Nation’s capitol whose financial reforms have gotten Wall Street purring like a kitten. In a piece preposterously titled “How Washington beat Wall Street,” White writes that “In 2009, Washington went to war against big Wall Street banks hoping to blow up the kind of high-risk, high-reward strategies that helped spark the financial crisis. Five years later, that war is largely … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: January 22, 2014 Just when it seemed that the ethical reputation of the U.S. government, now universally known as Bugs R Us by its closest allies, enemies and citizens alike, was at its nadir, along comes a court affidavit by Harold W. McGraw III, chairman of McGraw Hill Financial, parent of Standard and Poor’s rating agency. The affidavit by McGraw, filed in a Federal District Court in California, seeks to bolster S&P’s position that the government is only suing it in retaliation for its downgrade of U.S. debt rather than meritorious claims that it fudged its credit ratings. The affidavit claims that former U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner called McGraw in August 2011 and threatened to retaliate against S&P for downgrading the debt of the United States. According to McGraw, Geithner was angry and accused S&P of making an error in calculating the basis for the downgrade, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: January 21, 2014 On February 5, 1997, the U.S. investment bank, Morgan Stanley, known for its stock underwriting and merger and acquisition business, made its first foray into creating a product distribution pipeline to mom and pop investors — it bought Dean Witter, Discover & Company and its army of stockbrokers. Last year, Morgan Stanley completed the purchase of Smith Barney’s retail brokerage business, giving it a selling force of over 16,000 stockbrokers – now called advisors. But a 16,000-strong sales force is not the only product distribution pipeline owned by Morgan Stanley. The company has a controlling stake in TransMontaigne, a sprawling oil and gas behemoth which owns real pipelines that carry real oil. According to the company’s web site, the ownership structure is as follows: “TransMontaigne Partners has no officers or employees and all of our management and operational activities are provided by officers and … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: January 20, 2014 David Bird, a reporter who covers energy markets for the Wall Street Journal, has been missing for nine days. Bird, who has worked for the parent of the Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones, for more than 20 years, left his Long Hill, New Jersey home on the afternoon of Saturday, January 11, telling his wife he was going for a walk. Despite a continuous search by hundreds of volunteers and law enforcement officials, Bird has not been located. Bird is 55 years old, approximately 6’1, and was last seen wearing a red jacket with yellow zippers according to officials. He and his wife, Nancy, have two children, ages 12 and 15. Anyone with information is asked to contact the Long Hill Police at (908) 647-1800. According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, Bird is a liver-transplant recipient and is required to take … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: January 16, 2014 There was a distinct chill in the air yesterday as questioning got underway in the U.S. Senate’s hearing on whether the Wall Street mega banks that caused the greatest economic collapse since the Great Depression from 2008 through 2010 should be allowed to effectively control the price of aluminum and other metals by owning metal warehouses and creating bottlenecks in delivery; or allowed to own oil pipelines, terminals and tankers while trading trillions of dollars a year in oil futures – potentially rigging that market against the consumer. It’s not that there’s limited evidence that these firms will rig markets. These are the same firms that are serially charged and pay enormous fines for fraud and cartel-like behavior. Traders even refer to themselves as “The Cartel” and “The Bandits’ Club” in chat rooms. The hearing was called by Senator Sherrod Brown, Chair of the … Continue reading →