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Recent Posts
- Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” Is a Grotesque Giveaway to Fossil Fuel Billionaires While Adding $3.3 Trillion to Nation’s Debt
- Senator Chris Murphy Charges that Trump “Has Opened a Channel for Bribery”
- Congressman Casten: Trump’s Assault on the Rule of Law Is Causing Capital Flight Out of U.S. by Foreign Investors
- Trump’s Approval Rating Drops to 80-Year Low; IMF Says U.S. Tariffs Now Exceed the Highs During the Great Depression
- Nasdaq Has Lost More than 3,000 Points Since Trump’s First Full Day in Office in 2025; the Pain Has Barely Begun
- The Bond Crisis Last Week Was a Global No-Confidence Vote in U. S. President Donald Trump
- Trump’s Tariff Plan Guts $5 Trillion in Stock Value in Two Days; Senator Warren Calls for Emergency Action Before Markets Open on Monday
- Trump’s Attacks on Big Law, Universities, and the Media Have a Common Goal: Silence Dissent Against Authoritarian Rule
- Trump Administration Gives All Clear to Laundering Money through Shell Companies and Bribing Foreign Officials
- Four Megabanks on Wall Street Hold $3.2 Trillion in Uninsured Deposits – Which May Explain Senator Schumer’s Pivot to the GOP to Stop a Government Shutdown
- Here’s What Came Crashing Down Yesterday for Trump’s “Genius” Guy, Elon Musk: Tesla Stock, Access to Twitter (X), His Years of Secret Calls with Putin
- After Banning the Associated Press, Trump Is Now Targeting Specific Journalists That He Wants to See Fired
- Closely Watched Atlanta Fed Model Predicts Negative U.S. Growth in First Quarter
- Trump’s Gangster Diplomacy Makes Front Page Headlines Around the Globe
- Who Benefits Alongside Elon Musk If He Succeeds in Killing the CFPB: the Megabanks on Wall Street that Underwrite His Tesla Stock Offerings
- In Trump 1.0, the State Department Used Taxpayer Money to Publish a Book Elevating Elon Musk to a Superhero; It Was Funded by USAID, the Agency Musk Wants to Quickly Shut Down
- News Host Joy Reid Raises Threat of Trump Selling U.S. to Putin; Ten Days Later Her Show Is Cancelled
- Elon Musk’s DOGE Appears to Be Violating a Court Order; It Has Taken Down Hundreds of YouTube Videos that Educate Americans on How to Avoid Being Swindled
- Barron’s Releases Audio of Jamie Dimon Cursing Out His Workers at a Town Hall, as Dimon Plans to Dump Another One Million JPM Shares
- There’s One Federal Investigative Agency that Neither Trump nor Elon Musk Can Touch: It Just Opened an Investigation into DOGE
- Elon Musk’s Companies Were Under Investigation by Five Inspectors General When the Trump Administration Fired Them and Made Musk the Investigator
- Donald Trump Gives the Greenlight to Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase to Return to Bribing Foreign Officials
- After Tech Geeks Built a Back Door to Loot Billions from FTX, Republicans Refuse to Investigate What Elon Musk’s Tech-Squad Did Inside the U.S. Treasury’s Payment System
- Former Prosecutor, Now U.S. Senator, Informs Tesla That CEO Musk May Be Violating Federal Law and to “Preserve All Records”
- Trump’s Hedge Fund Guy Is Now Overseeing the U.S. Treasury, IRS, OCC, U.S. Mint, FinCEN, F-SOC, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
- As Elon Musk Begins Shutting Down Payments to Federal Contractors, a Strange Money Trail Emerges to His Operatives Inside the U.S. Treasury’s Payment System
- JPMorgan Chase Charged by Yet Another Internal Whistleblower with Cooking the Books
- We Asked Google’s AI Search Model, Gemini, Questions About the Fed and Wall Street Megabanks: It Got the Answers Dead Wrong
- With Trump and Melania’s Crypto Coins Likely to Raise Legal Challenges, Why Didn’t Trump Fire the SEC’s Inspector General in His Purge of IGs?
- Fossil Fuel Industry Could End Up Paying Tens of Billions for LA Wildfires and Deceiving the Public on Climate Change for Decades
- It’s Being Called the Biggest Grift by a President in U.S. History: Trump and First Lady Launch their Own Crypto Coins
- Trump Plans to Install a Fracking CEO to Head the Energy Department and Declare a National Emergency on Energy to Gain Vast Powers
- Fossil Fuel Money Played a Role in the Los Angeles Fires and the Push to Install Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense
- When It Comes to Wealth Retention in Retirement, Concrete May Be the New Gold
- Wall Street Watchdog Warns “Clock Is Ticking on a Coming Catastrophic Financial Crash”
- Wall Street Is Sending the Same Message to Americans on Fossil Fuel Financing that It Sent on Cigarettes: Drop Dead
- In a Six-Week Span, this Dark Pool with a Curious Past Traded 3.7 Billion Shares
- Wall Street’s Lobby Firm Hired Eugene Scalia of Gibson Dunn to Sue the Fed for Jamie Dimon
- Postmaster General Louis DeJoy Made $561,051 in Compensation in 2024, as Mail Costs Spiked and Delivery Deteriorated
- Fed Chair Jay Powell Sends a Bold Message to Trump and Tanks the Dow by 1123 Points
- The Head of Fixed Income at T. Rowe Price Makes the Scary Case for the 10-Year Treasury to Spike to 6 Percent
- $663 Billion in Cash Assets Have Gone Poof at the Largest U.S. Banks
- Donald Trump to Ring Bell at New York Stock Exchange Today as Hit List Posters Appear in Manhattan Targeting Wall Street CEOs
- Trump Has a Slush Fund to Prop Up the Dollar – Will He Use It to Prop Up Bitcoin Instead?
- A CEO Assassination; a Billionaire Heiress/NYPD Commissioner; a Secret Wall Street Spy Center – Here’s How They’re Connected
- Despite More than 1600 Tech Scientists Signing a Letter Calling Crypto a Sham, Trump Names a Crypto Cheerleader for SEC Chair
- The Fed Rings a Warning Bell: Hedge Funds and Life Insurers Are Reporting Historic Leverage
- Trump’s Nominee for FBI Director, Kash Patel, Has Businesses Financially Intertwined with Trump
- Donald Trump Is at Risk of Getting Named in a Fossil Fuels Conspiracy Lawsuit
- Trump Is Having Difficulty Getting a Lawyer to Accept the Nomination for SEC Chair: Here’s Why
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Citigroup and JPMorgan Settle With EU Commission for Rigging Libor; U.S. Justice Department Stays Mum
By Pam Martens: December 4, 2013 Gary Gensler, the outgoing Chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, previously testified to Congress that he began investigating allegations that a global banking cartel was rigging the international interest rate benchmark known as Libor in the spring of 2008. One can prudently assume that around the same time, he made the issue known to the U.S. Department of Justice. It’s now almost six years later and yet two of the U.S. banks involved in the cartel, JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup, have yet to be charged by U.S. authorities. Today, JPMorgan and Citigroup have admitted participating in the Yen Libor financial derivatives cartel to the European Commission and accepted fines of €79.8m ($108.3 million) and €70m ($95 million), respectively. Citigroup avoided paying an additional €55m ($74.6 million) by being granted full immunity for one of its three charged infringements, ostensibly for its cooperation in … Continue reading
Can Citigroup Polish Its Tarnished Halo With Free Labor Cyclists?
By Pam Martens: December 3, 2013 Citigroup, parent of the once walking-dead of commercial banks, Citibank, is attempting to shed its image of Dr. Evil trades, bank bailouts, and student loan horrors through a high-risk outdoor advertising campaign in New York City. Called Citi Bike, the campaign is the brainchild of advertising giant Publicis Kaplan Thaler. Publicis explains the idea this way: “A bike sharing system consists of a fleet of specially designed, sturdy, very durable bikes that are locked into a network of docking stations sited at regular intervals around a city. The bikes can be rented from and then returned to any station in the system, creating an efficient network with many possible points and combinations of departure and arrival. With thousands of bikes at hundreds of stations, Citi Bike will be available for use 24 hours a day, all year ’round.” What does Citibank get out of … Continue reading
Intelligence Gathering Plays Key Role at New York Fed’s Trading Desk
By Pam Martens: December 2, 2013 On any given business day, you can take a taxi ride into lower Manhattan in the wee hours of the morning and see lights and the glow of Bloomberg trading terminals eerily illuminating the 9th floor of the historic Federal Reserve Bank of New York at 33 Liberty Street. A securities trader working at 4:30 a.m. in any other trading location in Manhattan might be concerned about personal safety. Not here. Quietly, without Congressional hearings, and lost in the tragedy and turmoil of September 11, the USA Patriot Act in 2001 bestowed private domestic policing powers on the 12 Federal Reserve Banks, including the New York Fed. On top of its own police force armed with Glock 22s and assault weapons, the building itself is a 22-story fortress with 18 floors above ground and four below. The building, completed in 1924, constitutes the block … Continue reading
Trading Floor of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York; In Photos, Over the Years
By Pam Martens: November 27, 2013 Fortunately for our readers, the rest of the Federal Reserve system is far more transparent than the Federal Reserve Bank of New York; in fact, they’re down right helpful to the press. Both the Federal Reserve Board of Governors and the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia (Philly Fed) have released educational videos to help the public understand the workings of our Nation’s central bank. And, of course, there is the unparalleled digital research available to the public through FRASER, the Federal Reserve Archival System for Economic Research, made available by the St. Louis Fed. FRASER has recently provided access to new documents detailing the banking emergency of 1933 when President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared a banking holiday to assess which banks could be reopened safely and which were insolvent and had to close their doors. The 1933 banking calamity stemmed from the same type … Continue reading
The Official Video from the Federal Reserve on How It Creates Electronic Money
By Pam Martens: November 26, 2013 Unless you’ve been lost at sea since 2008, you’ve likely heard time and again that the Federal Reserve is creating money out of thin air. Type the words “Federal Reserve creates money AND thin air” into the Google search engine and you’ll find about 2.4 million people weighing in on the subject, including folks at PBS. There’s no reason for the debate. The Federal Reserve has put out its very own video explaining how it creates money. It prefers the phrase “newly created electronic funds” to the colloquial “out of thin air.” The video is narrated by Steve Meyer, a Senior Advisor to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, who explains how the Fed has been paying for those trillions in bond purchases since the 2008 crash. Meyer says on the video: “You may wonder how the Federal Reserve pays for the securities it … Continue reading
New York Fed’s Strange New Role: Big Bank Equity Analyst
By Pam Martens: November 25, 2013 For more than two decades, financial columnist John Crudele has been hypothesizing on whether the Federal Reserve has its fingers in the stock market – directly or indirectly. Tampering with stocks is off limits to the Federal Reserve, as far as the public is aware. Its stated function is to serve as the central bank of the United States, focusing on achieving monetary policy through its open market activities in the bond markets and foreign exchange area. But the New York Fed itself is helping to fuel suspicions about what’s going on within its cloistered walls at 33 Liberty Street in lower Manhattan. Of the 12 regional Federal Reserve Banks, the New York Fed is the only institution with a trading floor and highly sophisticated trading platforms. But despite multiple requests, the New York Fed will not provide a photo of the full trading … Continue reading
Fed Minutes Reveal a Dangerous Power Grab by New York Fed
By Pam Martens: November 21, 2013 Just when it seemed one could no longer be shocked by the corruption, hubris and lack of accountability in the American financial system, along comes yesterday’s release of the Federal Reserve’s minutes for the October 29-30 meeting of its Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC). While mainstream media focuses on what the minutes revealed about when the Fed might begin to reduce its monthly $85 billion in bond purchases, receiving scant attention is a brazen power grab boldly stated on page two of the eleven pages of minutes. Back on October 31, wire services reported that the temporary dollar and foreign currency swap lines that had been put in place between central banks on a temporary basis during the financial crisis had been turned into standing arrangements. The Associated Press explained the action as follows: “Six of the world’s leading central banks, including the U.S. … Continue reading
Republican Senators Describe Fed Easing: A “Morphine Drip,” a “Sugar High,” “Asset Bubbles”; And They’re Right
By Pam Martens: November 20, 2013 This time around, Republican members of the U.S. Senate Banking Committee want to go on record that they not only see a train wreck coming from the Fed’s easy money policy, but have described it in unmistakable terms to Janet Yellen, the President’s nominee to lead the Federal Reserve. During the recent Senate Banking confirmation hearing of Yellen, three Republican Senators were particularly outspoken about the dangers lurking in the Fed’s policy of pumping $85 billion a month, a whopping $1.02 trillion a year, into Wall Street coffers via bond purchases from the Street. The policy is known in Wall Street jargon as QE3, shorthand for Quantitative Easing, round 3. By preventing a surplus of bonds on the Street, the Fed is keeping interest rates artificially low in hopes of stimulating economic recovery. The flip side of that effort, however, is to flood Wall … Continue reading
Wall Street Journal Goes From “Shakedown” to “Historic” to Describe $13 Billion JPMorgan Settlement
By Pam Martens: November 19, 2013 This morning’s Wall Street Journal headline reads: “J.P. Morgan, U.S. Reach Historic Settlement.” Call me old fashioned, but when I think of the word “historic,” it invariably conjures up good things: the August 18, 1920 ratification of the 19th Amendment giving American women the right to vote – a scant 144 years after the Nation’s founding. Historic is also appropriate to describe the November 4, 2008 Presidential election where Barack Obama became the first African American to secure the Presidential nomination of a major political party and the first to win the Presidential post – a mere 232 years after our great democracy was founded. A Wall Street firm throwing billions at its regulators to preempt its executives going to jail is anything but “historic.” It’s now the rubric on Wall Street and in Washington. The model is so revolting that a sitting Federal … Continue reading
JPMorgan and Bloomberg News: Leading Wall Street’s Blundering Herd
By Pam Martens: November 18, 2013 Last week was a lesson in obscene wealth breeding abject stupidity. The brands of JPMorgan Chase and Bloomberg News took a self-inflicted beating from preposterously dumb ideas from top management. In both instances, the companies reflected a haughty contempt and insular assessment of public sensibilities. Congress has spent the better part of the year worrying about too big to fail, too big to jail, and too big to prosecute mega banks on Wall Street. JPMorgan seemed to prove last week that these behemoths are even too big to think rationally. In the midst of eight high profile criminal or civil investigations by the U.S. Justice Department involving the fleecing of the little guy’s pocket, JPMorgan decided to effectively take the pulse beat of public sentiment toward its brand. It decided to do this not in a closed-door focus group but in the most public … Continue reading