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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
When Barry Meets Sallie: The President’s Choices to Lead the SEC
By Pam Martens: November 29, 2012 It took the New York Times 12 years to admit it was dead wrong to run editorials urging the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, the depression-era investor protection legislation that prevented Wall Street from collapsing the financial system for 75 years. (It took just 9 years from the date of repeal in 1999 for Wall Street to thoroughly corrupt the system, wreck the economy and collapse century old Wall Street firms.) One would have expected the New York Times to have acquired a little humility from its prior ill-informed meddling with Wall Street regulation. Nothing doing. The Times, together with Bloomberg News and the Wall Street Journal have all magically decided to push Sallie Krawcheck out in front as the leading contender to become the permanent new Chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, despite Krawcheck’s lack of a securities law degree (or any other … Continue reading
What’s Really Behind Warren Buffett’s Nod to Jamie Dimon For Treasury Secretary
By Pam Martens: November 28, 2012 Apparently news travels slowly from Gotham to Omaha. When Warren Buffett, the legendary investor and so-called Oracle of Omaha appeared on the Charlie Rose show on PBS Monday evening and praised the idea of Jamie Dimon as the next Treasury Secretary, he sounded less oracle and more out-of-touch cheerleader. Buffett was making the media rounds with Fortune’s Carol Loomis, who has written a glowing book on Buffett, Tap Dancing to Work: Warren Buffett on Practically Everything, 1966-2012. When asked by Rose what message it would send if President Obama appointed Jamie Dimon as the next Treasury Secretary, Buffett had this to say: “I think Jamie Dimon actually would be, I think he’d be terrific, because if we did run into problems in markets, I think he would actually be the best person you could have in the job and I think the world leaders … Continue reading
Glass-Steagall, the Four Horsemen, and the Crippled Job Market
By Pam Martens: November 27, 2012 Much of the current dysfunction and corruption on Wall Street has been laid at the feet of the repeal of the depression-era investor protection legislation known as the Glass-Steagall Act, which barred investment banks that underwrote securities from mergers with commercial banks taking insured deposits. The merger of Citicorp (parent of Citibank) with Travelers Group in 1998 forced the hand of Congress to pass the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act in 1999, which repealed the barriers imposed by the Glass-Steagall Act. Committees in both the Senate and House of Representatives have now begun to look beyond the Wall Street carnage of 2008 to the intractable problem of creating jobs in America. There is concern that the framework of Wall Street is creating structural impediments to job creation. Those concerns are very real. In November 2009, David Weild and Edward Kim authored a study for the accounting firm, Grant … Continue reading
Schapiro to Step Down from the SEC, December 14
By Pam Martens: November 26, 2012 The SEC has announced the departure of its Chair, Mary Schapiro, on December 14. The laudatory statement from the SEC depicted her chairmanship as follows: “During her tenure, Chairman Schapiro worked to bolster the SEC’s enforcement and examination programs, among others. As a result of a series of reforms, the agency is more adept at pursuing tips and complaints provided by outsiders, better able to identify wrongdoers through vastly upgraded market intelligence capabilities, and more strategic, innovative and risk-focused in the way it inspects financial firms.” To close observers of the SEC, the above statement is pure fiction. On November 1, Davis Polk, the large corporate law firm, issued a report on the implementation of the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation, which is under the auspices of the SEC. The report noted that “As of November 1, 2012, a total of 237 Dodd-Frank rulemaking requirement … Continue reading
How Are We Going to Create Jobs in America With Stock Offerings Like These
By Pam Martens: November 26, 2012 America doesn’t have a jobs problem; it has an IPO problem. The lack of jobs can be directly correlated to the misallocation of capital by Wall Street to financial wagers instead of directing the flow of capital into job producing growth industries. A review of the 201 initial public offerings (IPOs) at the New York Stock Exchange so far this year, shows that 99 were financial wagers on old debt and/or equity instead of new listings of real companies making real products to create real jobs. The 99 IPOs were closed end mutual funds or ETFs (Exchange Traded Funds). Another 11 listings were banks or financial firms. One of the financial firms is KKR Financial Holdings LLC. This is how it describes itself on its web site: “KFN, is a New York Stock Exchange-listed specialty finance company with expertise in a range of asset classes. … Continue reading
Citigroup: Portrait of Why Too Big Has Failed
By Pam Martens: November 21, 2012 As we reported in August, the law firm Kirby McInerney agreed to settle a lawsuit against Citigroup on behalf of shareholders for $590 million over allegations that the firm issued materially false and misleading statements concerning Citigroup’s exposure to losses from collateralized debt obligations and other off-balance-sheet accounting tricks. A careful reading of the 547-page amended complaint reveals a major U.S. financial institution that used every contrivance imaginable to inflate its earnings by gaming the system with high risk leverage, off-balance-sheet gambles it inevitably lost and dysfunctional checks and balances — all while its regulators were asleep at the switch. The deeply researched document, unfortunately, leaves serious questions unanswered: where were the company’s auditors during all of these machinations? Who were the lawyers writing the prospectuses for these dodgy assets? How did Citigroup’s two chief regulators, the New York Fed and the Office of the Controller … Continue reading
JPMorgan Bought Itself a Boatload of Trouble With Bear Stearns
By Pam Martens: November 20, 2012 If only JPMorgan had been privy to those titillating emails from the Bear Stearns guys packaging the residential mortgage backed securities (RMBS) – the emails calling the bombs they were preparing to unload on investors a “sack of shit,” or “a shit breather,” and urging colleagues to “close this dog.” JPMorgan might not have been so willing to step up to the plate at the beckoning of the New York Fed and acquire Bear Stearns as it teetered toward bankruptcy in March of 2008. But packaging toxic mortgage backed securities and internally calling them disparaging names while failing to share that view with investors is becoming very old news on Wall Street. What is shocking news, even to veterans on Wall Street, is that Bear Stearns is alleged, by both the Securities and Exchange Commission and the New York State Attorney General, Eric Schneiderman, to have engaged in … Continue reading
JPMorgan Has 3-Year Litigation Expense of $16.1 Billion (Enough to Buy 80,500 Families a Home for $200,000)
By Pam Martens: November 19, 2012 Is JPMorgan actually a cartel of lawyers in drag as a bank? You’d think so reading the fine print buried in the firm’s 2011 annual report and the legal disclosures in its hair-raising third quarter report filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on November 5. According to its own figures, JPMorgan has paid the following sums for litigation expense: $3.8 billion for the nine months of 2012 ending September 30; $4.9 billion in 2011; and $7.4 billion in 2010 for the whopping total of $16.1 billion in 33 months. There are more than a dozen small countries that have less than that in annual GDP. How many times have we heard the now enshrined gospel that JPMorgan escaped the 2008 crisis unscathed. Reading the mountain of lawsuits now filed against the firm, it’s clear why: JPMorgan’s role in the housing collapse has … Continue reading
The New York Stock Exchange Wants to Teach You Investing Basics; Should You Listen
By Pam Martens: November 16, 2012 The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) wants to teach the public financial literacy. It says “Our Financial Literacy Center serves as a credible resource for basic financial education to help people better understand and manage their personal finances.” Is the NYSE a credible source? Right off the bat, I’m not feeling confident when I read: “Only the highest quality companies can choose to list their securities on our exchanges. And once they do, NYSE Euronext plays a unique role in providing deep and liquid markets for the trading of those securities, benefiting all investors, large and small.” Throughout the years, the NYSE has had to delist numerous companies that have turned out to be frauds or grossly mismanaged. They were not “the highest quality” companies by a long shot. Millions of Americans have lost their life savings believing that if a company trades on the NYSE, it was … Continue reading
Public Banks: Removing Job Growth From the Corrupt Jackboot of Wall Street
By Pam Martens: November 15, 2012 Throughout the United States there are critical functions that society deems too essential to leave to the vagaries of the profit driven marketplace. Fire and police departments, public schools, parks, libraries, roads, tunnels and bridges – all paid for with taxpayer dollars and overseen by government. So why shouldn’t the U.S. have a parallel system of public banks with a public mandate and accountable to the people – especially at a time of unprecedented corruption in commercial banking under the jackboot of Wall Street. Until the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999, it was illegal for Wall Street firms to own commercial banks. Commercial banks made loans to consumers and businesses and Wall Street investment banks were assigned the job of allocating capital to worthy business enterprises by underwriting their stock and bond offerings. Today, just five Wall Street firms, JPMorgan Chase & Co., … Continue reading