Category Archives: Uncategorized

By Pam Martens: July 30, 2012  The word paywall is typically used to describe web sites which make you pay to gain access.  But viewed with the added perspective of the image below, that’s what representative government in the U.S. has become – a paywall to access.  The following chart is provided through the courtesy of the Center for Responsive Politics. The Center calls it the list of Goldman Sachs heavy hitters from 1989 to 2012 — those employees of Goldman Sachs making the largest political contributions.  (It should be noted that not all individuals listed on the chart continue to work for Goldman Sachs.)  The first entry on the list is Todd J. Christie – brother to the current Governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie, who said last week he plans to run for President in 2016.  Todd J. Christie is the former CEO of Spear, Leeds &  Kellogg, the New … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: July 28, 2012 It has only taken twelve years of unending Wall Street scandals and scoundrels, the greatest financial collapse since the Great Depression, a wrecked national economy, 46 million fellow Americans living below the poverty level — including one in every five children — but, finally, the pigs are flying over Wall Street.  Yes, the unthinkable has happened.  The New York Times has admitted it was wrong about repealing the Glass-Steagall Act while Sandy Weill calls for taking a wrecking ball to the big banks. In an editorial published in the print edition of the New York Times yesterday, “The Big Banker’s Change of Heart,” the paper of record at last fessed up to its role in America’s nightmare decade. The editorial page editors wrote: “While we are on this subject, add The New York Times editorial page to the list of the converted. We forcefully advocated the repeal of … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: July 27, 2012  The Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (SIG-TARP) which provides oversight of the TARP bailout program put in place during the financial crisis of 2008, released a report this week on AIG.  The report indicated that AIG still has no Federal regulator and that “PricewaterhouseCoopers has been AIG’s auditor for decades and continues to serve in that role.” To appreciate the significance of the above sentence, a little background is in order.  In May 2005, AIG restated five years of financial statements, shaving $3.9 billion off its previously reported profit for those years and reducing its book value by $2.7 billion. AIG had a derivatives unit called AIG Financial Products which, by 2008, had issued $400 billion in credit default swaps, mostly to Wall Street banks, which it did not have the financial wherewithal to cover.  In 2008, first through the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: July 26, 2012  The House Financial Services Committee’s web site needs to add a Surgeon General warning: Watching Our Hearings May Be Hazardous To Your Health and Are Not Recommended for Those Suffering From High Blood Pressure or Anger Management Issues.  The financial absurdities that continue to spill out of these hearings, four long years after the collapse of Wall Street, are the stuff of Greek tragedies.  One can witness the attendant public outrage on message boards around the web with calls for doing all manner of decidedly unpleasant violence to the one percent crowd.  At yesterday’s hearing, ostensibly scheduled to hear from U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner on the “Annual Report of the Financial Stability Oversight Council,” we learned stunning new details about the Libor rate rigging, the oversight of AIG, and where the regulator of the largest banks in America turns when he becomes aware of a criminal matter.  … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: July 25, 2012  It was revolting enough that Sandy Weill was appointed to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences after blazing a trail of poverty across America with his warped and idiotic vision of financial supermarkets.  (As if serious investors stroll into a brokerage firm, load up their shopping cart and breeze through the express check out.)  As Robert Scheer said in April at The Nation: “How evil is this? At a time when two-thirds of US homeowners are drowning in mortgage debt and the American dream has crashed for tens of millions more, Sanford Weill, the banker most responsible for the nation’s economic collapse, has been elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.”  But to hear Weill this morning on CNBC channeling Gandhi was too much for anyone who had a front row seat at his house of horrors and watched him suck $785 … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: July 25, 2012 Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s statement to Congress last week that the process for setting Libor is “structurally flawed” may live in infamy as the understatement of this financial era.  According to documents available on the British Bankers Association’s web site, just 90 days before Barclays was charged with rigging Libor and fined $453 million by U.S. and U.K. regulators, it had been appointed to a steering committee to oversee the integrity of Libor. LIBOR, the London Interbank Offered Rate, is the benchmark interest rate set each business day, in 10 currencies and 15 maturities. It is supposed to represent the actual rate at which banks are borrowing from each other.  The rate is used as an index to set approximately $10 trillion in consumer loans, including adjustable rate mortgages, credit card debt and student loans in the U.S.  It also impacts the rate … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: July 24, 2012 Neil Fabricant, president emeritus of the George Washington University Graduate School of Political Management and lifetime New Yorker, has penned a take-your-breath-away expose on the heretofore inscrutable Mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg. Mike! Wall Street’s Mayor is sharp, witty, and pulls no punches when it comes to the billionaire 1 percenter out to portray himself as the man of the people, while growing his estimated $3 billion personal wealth to $22 billion while in office.  (Exactly how does one do that?  It sure didn’t work out that way for Jon Corzine, former Senator and Governor from New Jersey.  If global businesses could run themselves, wouldn’t we all have one?)    Fabricant puts the pieces of the gambit together for you – from the Mayor’s early days at Wall Street investment bank, Salomon Brothers – made variously famous for its Big Swinging Dicks in Michael Lewis’ Liar’s … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: July 23, 2012 Alexander Cockburn, the outspoken columnist who died on Saturday, penned his last column for The Nation on July 11, just ten days before his death.  His final column out of a lifetime of covering politics and world news predicted the collapse of Wall Street. Alexander Cockburn had kept it a secret from all but his closest friends and family, but he knew he was dying.  He likely suspected this column would be his last. And what he chose to write about was the systemic corruption of the global banking cartel.  Perhaps we should listen carefully: “People calling for banking reform on either side of the Atlantic are underestimating the problems of enforcement.  A writer on the financial news blog Zero Hedge recently remarked that ‘the Libor scandal seems to be waking people up to manipulation and fraud by the big banks.’  Of course, there are … Continue reading →

 By Pam Martens: July 21, 2012 Alexander Cockburn succumbed to a battle with cancer on the early morning of July 21, 2012.  The news came to me in an anonymous tweet posted to a listserv.   I imagined Alex stomping about the fluffy clouds inside the pearly gates and cursing that a life dedicated to the written word was, at death, announced by a 160 character electronic blip.  Alex was The Nation’s “Beat the Devil” columnist for 28 years and co-edited the internationally popular political journal CounterPunch with his cherished friend, Jeffrey St. Clair.  I never met or even spoke with Alex Cockburn but for five years we exchanged emails about the articles I was writing for CounterPunch.  Alex may have been radical in his writing, but as an editor of the work of others, he was thoughtful, respectful, and appeared to view each written word as a jewel to be polished … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: July 20, 2012 Tomorrow will mark the second anniversary of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.  It is appropriate that the public has learned recently through the Libor scandal that Wall Street is far from reformed and that no consumer in America is protected from the continued pillaging of Wall Street. One man who has done his very best to escape his rightful place among the cast of Wall Street enablers who provided the deregulatory foundation for a serial crime spree by Wall Street is Arthur Levitt, the longest serving Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission from 1993 to 2001. Levitt and his mighty crew of public relations handlers have pulled out all stops to rewrite history.  Levitt’s current page at the SEC’s web site contains this rollicking piece of fantasy: “Investor protection was Chairman Levitt’s top priority. Throughout his tenure at the … Continue reading →