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Recent Posts
- The Fed Just Kicked the Capital Increases for the Dangerous Megabanks and their Derivatives Down the Road for Years
- Intel, Boeing and U.S. Steel May Hold the Secrets to What’s Behind All the Talk of a U.S. Sovereign Wealth Fund
- Trump and Paulson’s Proposal: U.S. Sovereign Wealth Fund (or Another Grifter Bailout)
- A Wall Street Regulator Is Understating Margin Debt by More than $4 Trillion – Because It’s Not Counting Giant Banks Making Margin Loans to Hedge Funds
- After JPMorgan Threatens to Sue, the Fed Cuts Its Capital Requirement on the 5-Count Felon from a Planned 25 Percent Hike to Less than 8 Percent
- Three Megabanks Had Loans Outstanding of $1.832 Trillion to Giant Hedge Funds on March 31
- Jamie Dimon’s Washington Post OpEd Gets Pummeled at Yahoo Finance
- In the Span of 72 Hours, Four People Tied to a Hewlett-Packard Criminal Case Died in Two Separate Events
- Crypto Took Down Another Federally-Insured Bank and Just Handed Its CEO a 24-Year Prison Sentence
- All the Devils from 2008 Are Back at the Megabanks: Leverage, Off-Balance-Sheet Debt, Over $192 Trillion in Derivatives, Shaky Capital Levels
- New Study Says the Fed Is Captured by Congress and White House — Not the Megabanks that Own the Fed Banks and Get Trillions in Bailouts
- Data from the Fed’s Emergency Funding Program Shows Spring 2023 Banking Crisis Was Far Deeper than Americans Were Told
- These FDIC-Insured Banks Have Lost 69 to 40 Percent of their Market Value Year-to-Date
- Exposure at Hedge Funds Has Skyrocketed to Over $28 Trillion; Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Are at Risk
- We Charted the Plunge and Rebound in the Nikkei Versus Nomura and Citigroup; the Correlation Is Frightening
- Former U.S. Labor Secretary Says Billionaires Have No Right to Exist Because their Wealth Comes from Five Illegal or Bad Practices
- Citigroup Is Having a Helluva Summer: A Protest on Thursday Will Turn Up the Heat
- Nikkei Has Biggest Drop in History: Here’s What’s Causing the Global Market Selloff
- JPMorgan Is Tapping Illiquid Assets in its Global Collateral Program; the New York Fed Is Paying for Its Services
- Bank Regulators Issue Warnings on Fintech and Banking as Disasters Pile Up
- Donald Trump Gives a Speech on Not Letting China Win the Crypto Race – Not Realizing China Banned Crypto Mining and Transactions Four Years Ago
- The New York Fed Has Contracted Out Key Functions to JPMorgan Chase; We Filed a FOIA and Got These Strange Invoices
- On the Eve of Netanyahu’s Address to Congress, Senator Bernie Sanders Delivers a Breathtaking Assessment of His War Crimes
- Trump’s Sit-Down with Netanyahu at Mar-a-Lago Will Cost U.S. Taxpayers Millions While Profiting Trump’s Business
- Protecting Trump and His Jet-Setting Adult Children During His Presidency Cost Taxpayers Over $1 Billion
- A Congressman and a Doctor Reported a Woman Being Shot at Trump Rally: She’s Vanished from Official Reports
- Jamie Dimon Goes Missing from Earnings Call, After Dumping $183 Million of His JPMorgan Chase Stock Earlier this Year
- U.S. Senate Candidate Backed by Hedge Fund Billionaires Was Sitting in Front Row at Trump Rally as the Sniper Fired into the Bleachers
- Project 2025: The Fossil Fuel and Banking Money Behind the Madness
- The Fund Created to Unwind a Failing Megabank Has a Problem: There’s No Money in It
- Joe Biden Versus the New York Times
- Grand Jury Transcript in Jeffrey Epstein Case Is Released, Raising Questions about Epstein’s Darkest Secrets Being Protected in JPMorgan Cases
- The Supreme Court Crowns a King, Immunizing Future Criminal Acts Under Project 2025 – a Right Wing Manifesto
- The Debate Disaster and the Supreme Court’s “Chevron” Repeal Have a Money Trail Leading to Charles Koch
- Congressman Andy Barr Stacks a Hearing on the Fed’s Stress Tests with Lobbyists for Megabanks
- The Fed Posts Historic Operating Losses As It Pays Out 5.40 Percent Interest to Banks
- Goldman Sachs’ Bank Derivatives Have Grown from $40 Trillion to $54 Trillion in Five Years; So How Did Its Credit Exposure Improve by 200 Percent?
- The Fed and FDIC Wake Up Suddenly to the Threat of Derivatives, Flunking the Four Largest Derivative Banks on their Wind-Down Plans
- Is the Stock Market Setting Investors Up for a Tech Bust Similar to the Dot.com Bust?
- Chase Bank Customers Are Reporting a Wave of Wire Fraud in their Accounts; the Bank Won’t Make Good on the Looted Funds
- The Senate Race in Ohio Is the Sickest in U.S. History in Terms of Billionaire Money from Outside the State
- Sullivan & Cromwell’s Legal Work for Sam Bankman-Fried’s Crypto House of Fraud Is Getting a Closer Look in Two Federal Court Cases
- Crypto Tries to Recreate the Koch Money Machine to Pack Congress with Shills
- French Fears Ignite Selloff in U.S. Megabanks and Foreign Peers
- Crypto Just Got Exponentially More Dangerous: Meet Fairshake
- Nvidia Hit a $3 Trillion Market Cap Last Week; Dark Pools Are Making Over 300,000 Trades in the Stock Weekly
- The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Is Making Enemies in All the Right Places
- A Former Exec at Citibank Raises Alarm Bells in Federal Court Over Failed Risk Controls Inside the Bank
- Charles Koch’s Money Is Being Used in Elections in Ways Only Orwell Could Have Imagined
- Freakonomics and Frankenbanks: JPMorgan Chase Sucked Up 18 Percent of All Profits of 4,568 FDIC-Insured Banks in the First Quarter
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Supreme Court’s Health Care Headlines With Flashbacks From the Past
By Pam Martens: June 28, 2012 As networks battled to break the news first, today’s U.S. Supreme Court decision which upheld President Obama’s health care reform, was initially misreported as being overturned on the individual mandate issue by both Fox News and CNN. CNBC did not misreport the outcome but spent what seemed like an eternity attempting to interpret snippets from Reuters. CNBC then switched to a constitutional law expert who had to admit he did not know yet how the decision had come down. ?
Mark Ames: How the ACLU and Human Rights Groups Quietly Exterminated Labor Rights
Mark Ames, at Exiled Online, has a must read piece, The Left’s Big Sellout: How The ACLU & Human Rights Groups Quietly Exterminated Labor Rights. Here’s a snippet: “Progressive intellectuals have been acting very bipolar towards labor lately, characterized by wild mood swings ranging from the ‘We’re sorry we abandoned labor, how could we!’ sentiment during last year’s Wisconsin uprising against Koch waterboy Scott Walker, to the recent ‘labor is dead/it’s all labor’s fault’ snarling after the recall vote against Gov. Walker failed.”
Long Island Country Club Members Always Knew Peter Madoff Was Guilty
By Pam Martens: June 27, 2012 Peter Madoff, brother of convicted Ponzi artist, Bernard (Bernie) Madoff, will plead guilty this week to conspiracy to commit securities fraud and other offenses according to court papers filed today in Federal court in Manhattan. Peter Madoff worked with his brother as chief compliance officer of the broker-dealer but has in the past denied involvement or knowledge of the Ponzi scheme which was carried out on another floor of the building from where the broker-dealer was housed. But in the tony towns of the North Shore of Long Island, few people have ever bought that story. Since at least 1978, Peter and Bernie Madoff solicited funds for management from wealthy country club members on the North Shore of Long Island. The brothers promised a fixed rate of return of as much as 13 percent on a stock portfolio. It is illegal to guarantee a fixed rate … Continue reading
Need a Little Help Rigging the Market? “Done…For You Big Boy”
By Pam Martens: June 27, 2012 The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has released the details of its $200 million settlement with Barclays for its attempts to rig interest rate markets. The U.S. Department of Justice, which in decades past took market manipulation seriously, has filed no criminal charges here. The DOJ let Barclays off the hook with a $160 million penalty and an agreement that it would continue to cooperate with the DOJ. The UK’s Financial Services Authority imposed a penalty of £59.5 million against the Bank. According to the CFTC, orders came down from senior management at Barclays with one hapless employee responding: “following on from my conversation with you I will reluctantly, gradually and artificially get my libors in line with the rest of the contributors as requested. I disagree with this approach as you are well aware. I will be contributing rates which are nowhere near the clearing rates for unsecured … Continue reading
Frank Partnoy On the Virtues of Patience
By Pam Martens: June 27, 2012 Frank Partnoy is just out with a new book: Wait: The Art and Science of Delay. Partnoy, now a professor of law and finance at the University of San Diego, is known for speaking the hard hitting truths about Wall Street – in testimony before Congress and in his books. Partnoy has an insider’s feel for his topics – he worked in the 90s as a derivatives structurer at Morgan Stanley and CS First Boston and wrote the Wall Street classic, F.I.A.S.C.O.: Blood in the Water on Wall Street. Another great read from Partnoy is Infectious Greed: How Deceit and Risk Corrupted the Financial Markets. His newest book, Wait, is not just about Wall Street, although from the review below it does appear he takes on Jim Cramer’s Mad Money television program. I’ll be doing an in-depth review in the near future (I’m taking … Continue reading
JPMorgan Chase: Wake Up and Smell the Starbucks’ Coffee
By Pam Martens: June 26, 2012 JPMorgan Chase filed a prospectus today for a structured investment linked to Starbucks’ common stock. Based on the language of the prospectus, it sounds like JPMorgan has not completely unwound itself from its troublesome derivative trades: “…we may hold certain of our current synthetic credit positions for the longer term and, accordingly, the net income in our Corporate segment will likely be more volatile in future periods than it has been in the past. These and any future losses may lead to heightened regulatory scrutiny and additional regulatory or legal proceedings against us, and may continue to adversely affect our credit ratings and credit spreads and, as a result, the market value of the notes. See our quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended March 31, 2012; ‘Risk Factors — Risk Management — JPMorgan Chase’s framework for managing risks may not … Continue reading
Supreme Court Upholds Citizens United
By Pam Martens: June 25, 2012 The U.S. Supreme Court has today shot down a ruling in Montana that overturned the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United v. FEC, giving corporations unlimited spending in political campaigns. The high court ruled that Montana must follow the edict of the Citizens United decision. Twenty-two states had joined Montana in asking the U.S. Supreme Court to reconsider its ruling given all the newly acquired evidence of rampant corruption. The case was American Tradition Partnership, Inc., fka Western Tradition Partnership, Inc., et al v. Steve Bullock, Attorney General of Montana, et al. A dissent was written by Justice Breyer, with whom Justices Ginsburg, Sotomayor and Kagan joined. Excerpts from the dissent: “In Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Court concluded that ‘independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption’… I disagree with the Court’s holding … Continue reading
Madoff Wannabe: The Lunar Bandit
By Pam Martens: June 25, 2012 Here’s a respite from reading about the serial corruption of the big Wall Street firms. According to an SEC complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Orlando, Florida, Gurudeo (Buddy) Persaud is a small time player who ran a Ponzi scheme from 2007 to 2010, ripping off a widow working two jobs and other trusting souls. Unlike Madoff, Persaud actually did some trading with a portion of the investors’ money – the amount left over after paying himself lavishly and paying investors promised fixed returns of as much as 18 percent — until, of course, all the money was gone and new money stopped coming in. If you recall, Madoff said he was using a split-strike conversion strategy (which turned out to be that he split with the money and investors struck out). Persaud, according to the SEC complaint, was using strategies culled from … Continue reading
Why the SEC’s Schapiro Is So Worried About Another Run on Money Market Funds
By Pam Martens: June 24, 2012 On June 21, 2012, SEC Chair Mary Schapiro submitted 14 pages of testimony to the Senate Banking Committee, explaining why she is fingering her worry beads over a potential panic run on money market funds. It really didn’t require 14 pages of testimony. Schapiro had just two words in the back of her mind: European banks. Buried in the copious testimony is this daunting fact: as of May 31, 2012, approximately 30 percent of prime money market fund assets is invested in debt issued by banks based in Europe. What is a money market fund, really, and why is the SEC worrying about a slice of the market that is supposed to hold the shortest and safest investments? It’s because the public perception of what a money market fund is and the reality leaves an expanse as big as the Grand Canyon. In reality, … Continue reading
Republicans Place PAC-Like Ad on U.S. Government Web Site
By Pam Martens: June 24, 2012 Spencer Bachus is the Chair of the U.S. House of Representatives’ Financial Services Committee. That’s the body that oversees Wall Street. Given the corruption and hubris of Wall Street, one would think that this Committee would treat financial reform seriously. But the first thing one sees when visiting the web site of this Committee is a highly politicized slide show bashing the duly passed Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation and the Democrats. While it’s true that Dodd-Frank lacked adequate teeth to reform Wall Street, the Republicans don’t want to strengthen the legislation, they want to further deregulate Wall Street. This slide show is a brazen misuse of a taxpayer-funded web site and yet another striking example of why Congress ranks so low in public esteem.