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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
Tim Geithner’s Treasury Department Gets Another Failing Grade
By Pam Martens: January 29, 2013 Somebody is right and somebody is wrong when it comes to whether Tim Geithner, the man who stepped down as U.S. Treasury Secretary on Friday, is a crony capitalist covering the backs of his corporate pals, their failed companies, and their obscene pay or is an American hero. President Obama is in the good guy camp, using the January 10 occasion of his nomination of Jack Lew to replace Geithner as Treasury Secretary to say: “When the history books are written, Tim Geithner is going to go down as one of our finest secretaries of the Treasury.” The President’s assessment stands in stark contrast to that of a growing list of informed insiders, some of whom are already writing those history books. Neil Barofsky, former Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), had a devastating take on Geithner in his 2012 book … Continue reading
Why Did Treasury Nominee Jack Lew Leave NYU for Scandal-Plagued Citigroup
By Pam Martens: January 28, 2013 There has been much ado by media and public interest groups about Jack Lew’s time spent at Citigroup and whether that renders him unfit to be President Obama’s nominee to head the U.S. Treasury Department. Lew sat on Citigroup’s management committee and in his last position at the firm in 2008, he was Chief Operating Officer at Citi Alternative Investments (CAI), the unit that housed a trifecta of toxic speculation, including proprietary trading, hedge funds that were imploding, and the Structured Investment Vehicles (SIVs) that housed $50 billion in subprime debt – an amount that Citigroup understated in financial reports to the SEC and public by $39 billion. It was the SIVs in Lew’s division that toppled Citigroup into the arms of the U.S. taxpayer. Lew only joined Citigroup in June of 2006. The company had set its course for disaster eight years earlier … Continue reading
Do You Really Need Stocks In Your Portfolio
By Pam Martens: January 25, 2013 Working on Wall Street for over two decades, I often heard financial advisors tell their clients that a good rule of thumb to determine how much of their investment money to put into stocks was to subtract their age from 100 and put the difference in stocks. For example, if your age is 54, subtract 54 from 100 and put the difference, 46 percent, of your investable money into stocks. If your age is 30, by this formula 70 percent of your funds would go into the stock market. The overall theory is sensible: the older you are, the less risk you should take because you will not have enough earning years left to replace lost funds. The high percentages recommended, however, felt like a formula cooked up by Wall Street to coax more money into the market. As with most things peddled on Wall Street, I never bought into this nonsense. … Continue reading
The SEC Holds a “Secret Conversation” With Wall Street Defense Counsel; But at the Justice Department the Pitches Are Made in the Conference Room
By Pam Martens: January 24, 2013 Two stunning assertions came out of the Martin Smith investigative report on Tuesday evening on the PBS program, Frontline. Titled The Untouchables, producer, writer and correspondent Martin Smith interviews Lanny Breuer, the head of the criminal division of the U.S. Department of Justice, who tells Smith he didn’t prosecute any senior executive of the major Wall Street firms because he couldn’t find a criminal case where he could “prove beyond a reasonable doubt every element of a crime.” As the public has watched big money settlements and deferred prosecutions at the largest banks, the public has assumed that every available device of the U.S. Department of Justice — the top law enforcement agency in America – was being deployed to root out and prosecute those who collapsed Wall Street in 2008, costing the U.S. taxpayer trillions in bailouts, the economy trillions in lost jobs and home … Continue reading
One Day After Frontline Airs Critical Report on Justice Department’s Lanny Breuer, WaPo Reports He’s Stepping Down
By Pam Martens: January 23, 2013 The Washington Post is reporting this afternoon that Lanny Breuer, head of the Criminal Division of the U.S. Department of Justice and the focus of a damaging report by producer Martin Smith for the PBS program, Frontline, that aired last evening, is stepping down from his post. The portion of the program that likely galvanized the White House was the startling report by prosecutors that had worked under Breuer in the criminal division of the DOJ that there wasn’t even a pretense of a real investigation against the major Wall Street firms: no subpoenas, no document reviews, no wiretaps. Following is the verbatim transcript of that portion of the program: NARRATOR: Frontline spoke to two former high-level Justice Department prosecutors who served in the Criminal Division under Lanny Breuer. In their opinion, Breuer was overly fearful of losing. MARTIN SMITH: We spoke to a couple of sources from within the … Continue reading
The Untouchables: PBS Asks Why U.S. Justice Department Isn’t Prosecuting Wall Street
By Pam Martens: January 23, 2013 The Untouchables, which aired last evening on the PBS program “Frontline,” builds on the outstanding 2012 series co-produced by Martin Smith and his wife, Marcela Gaviria, Money, Power, and Wall Street. (I highly recommend watching all four episodes of the earlier documentary, then rewatching The Untouchables if you want an epiphany into why Wall Street can’t be tamed.) Smith is producer, writer and correspondent in the latest effort. Unfortunately, last night’s program sought an answer to an abbreviated question: why has no Wall Street executive been criminally prosecuted for fraud tied to the sale of mortgages. The unabbreviated question and the one that infuriates Americans is: why has no executive of a major Wall Street firm been criminally prosecuted for anything. If the U.S. Justice Department was serious about doing its job, it has a cornucopia of crimes to pick from: Wall Street CEOs … Continue reading
Congressman Markey Asks SEC to Immediately Halt High Frequency Trading
By Pam Martens: January 22, 2013 Congressman Edward Markey (D-Massachusetts) sent a letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) last week, asking it to use its inherent authority to limit the use of High Frequency Trading. Markey called the practice a “clear and present danger to the stability and safety of our markets” and said “its use should be curtailed immediately.” He noted that Congress had already given the SEC the power to ban this practice. (See full text of letter at link below.) High Frequency Trading (HFT) is a technique used by sophisticated Wall Street firms and hedge funds using algorithms to buy and sell stocks on exchanges in a fraction of a second, or as Markey put it in his letter, “thousands of times faster than a human can breathe or even think.” Markey details for the SEC a system that has effectively consumed the marketplace, pushed out … Continue reading
President Obama Invokes Conservative and Liberal Themes in Inaugural Address
By Pam Martens: January 21, 2013 The President’s Inaugural address today sounded themes that both conservatives and liberals can applaud. The President said: “…we have never relinquished our skepticism of central authority, nor have we succumbed to the fiction that all society’s ills can be cured through government alone. Our celebration of initiative and enterprise; our insistence on hard work and personal responsibility, are constants in our character.” But the President also added later in the speech: “Our journey is not complete until we find a better way to welcome the striving, hopeful immigrants who still see America as a land of opportunity; until bright young students and engineers are enlisted in our workforce rather than expelled from our country. Our journey is not complete until all our children, from the streets of Detroit to the hills of Appalachia to the quiet lanes of Newtown, know that they are cared … Continue reading
What’s the Economic Cost of Wall Street’s Revolving Door
By Pam Martens: January 21, 2013 This month, U.S. Senators David Vitter (R-La.) and Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) sent a letter to the Government Accountability Office (GAO) asking the federal watchdog agency to research and report on the economic subsidy that too-big-to-fail banks receive as a result of actual or perceived taxpayer support. Last week, Richard Fisher, president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, delivered a speech on the same topic. While the points made by these gentlemen are both valid and critically important, they fail to take note of four other dangerous subsidies: (1) the market perception that the Washington and Wall Street revolving door has rendered these firms immune from prosecution – even for repeated, illegal cartel behavior; (2) the ability to spend billions buying back their own stock, effectively propping up their own share price and bad behavior; (3) self-regulation with compromised bodies creating the … Continue reading
Americans Are Making a Grave Mistake With 401(k) Plans
By Pam Martens: January 18, 2013 Only one in five employees in private industry today has a defined benefit pension plan that will pay a fixed amount in retirement. The rest of the private workforce is left to the volatile markets of the 401(k) plan and other savings to supplement their Social Security benefits. Adding to the dilemma, less than half of private industry workers are participating in any form of employer-sponsored plan at any moment in time. This is shaping up as a disaster for the next generation of retirees. A study conducted by the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College using data from the Federal Reserve’s 2010 Survey of Consumer Finances found that the typical household approaching retirement is ill prepared financially. (The Survey of Consumer Finances is conducted every three years and will be updated again this year.) The study found that 401(k)s have been battered … Continue reading