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Recent Posts
- 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
- Academic Study Provides Hard Numbers to the Sick, Revolving Door Culture at Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Citigroup
- $244 Billion of Treasury Debt to Hit the Market Today and Tomorrow as Interest Rates Spike on Ballooning Supply
- CFTC Fines J.P. Morgan Securities — a Fed Primary Dealer — $100 Million for Failing to Surveil Potential Spoofing and High Frequency Trading for Eight Years
- Another FDIC-Insured Bank Got in Bed with Fintech; It’s Now Got a Dumpster Fire and Desperate Pleas from Customers for their Money
- Citigroup Gets Fined $79 Million Two Years After It Caused a $300 Billion Flash Crash in European Stock Markets
- After Weeks of Howling by MAGA Republicans for the Chair of the FDIC “to Resign,” a Democrat Delivers the Decisive Stab in the Back
- The Curious Money Trail Behind the Supreme Court/Clarence Thomas Decision to Rescue a Federal Agency that Wall Street Hates
- Saudi Arabia’s Wealth Fund Dumps Its JPMorgan Chase Stock; Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Did the Same in 2020
- One of Jeffrey Epstein’s Protectors at JPMorgan Chase, Mary Erdoes, Has Sold $29 Million of Her Stock in the Bank Since Just Before Epstein’s Arrest in 2019
- Delinquencies on Office Property Loans at Banks Are at 8 Percent While Office Loans the Banks Sold to Investors Show 31 Percent in Trouble
- Goldman Sachs Shines Up Its Swamp Creature Reputation by Rehiring Robert Kaplan as Vice Chairman – the Guy Who Traded Like a Hedge Fund Kingpin While President of the Dallas Fed
- Cleary Gottlieb – Outside Counsel to Wall Street’s Serially Bailed Out Megabanks – Tarnishes the FDIC Chair in its So-Called “Independent” Report
- JPMorgan Chase and Its Regulators Are Hiding Dark Trading Secrets at the Largest and Riskiest U.S. Bank
- Campus Protests Over Gaza Open a Pandora’s Box for Wall Street Megabanks that Underwrote $8 Billion of Israel’s Bonds in March
- Wall Street’s Megabanks Have Trillions of Dollars Off-Balance Sheet, in a Replay of Accounting Hubris that Led to the 2008 Wall Street Collapse
- JPMorgan Remains the Second Largest Money Market Fund Manager, Despite Needing Billions in Money Market Bailouts from the Fed in 2020
- The First Bank Failure of 2024 Leaves a 1-Cent Stock for Investors and $667 Million in Losses for the FDIC
- Catch and Kill Protection Rackets: Trump, Weinstein, Epstein and Wall Street
- Wall Street’s Judge Shopping Continues: It’s Trying to Stop the FTC’s Ban on Worker Handcuffs Known as Non-Compete Agreements
- The Fed Tallies Up a Big Threat to Financial Stability in the U.S.: “Runnables” at $21.3 Trillion
- Billionaire-Owned Media Has Gone Full Throttle to Save Fellow Billionaire, Jamie Dimon
- The Professor Who Wrote the Seminal Book on Wall Street Megabanks Calls Today’s Financial System “Dangerously Unstable”
- Gold Has Set Historic Highs this Year as the Federal Reserve Has Reported Historic Losses
- Stanford Finance Professor Anat Admati Is Making Jamie Dimon Very Nervous – Again Calling His Bank “Dangerous”
Category Archives: Uncategorized
NYS Attorney General Documents a Decade of “Staggering” Fraud by Donald Trump, the Man Allowed to Run the U.S. Government from 2017 to 2020
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 22, 2022 ~ Yesterday, the New York State Attorney General, Letitia James, filed a 222-page lawsuit against former President Donald Trump, the Trump Organization, his three adult children (Donald Jr., Ivanka and Eric), and two company executives, Allen Weisselberg and Jeffrey McConney. The lawsuit is the culmination of a three-year investigation and documents in meticulous detail a “staggering” pattern of fraud from 2011 through 2021. A sampling of the more than 200 instances of fraud alleged by the New York State Attorney General is as follows: “Relying on objectively false numbers to calculate property values. For example, Mr. Trump’s own triplex apartment in Trump Tower was valued as being 30,000 square feet when it was 10,996 square feet. As a result, in 2015 the apartment was valued at $327 million in total, or $29,738 per square foot. That price was absurd given the fact … Continue reading
First Donald Trump Purloins Top Secret Documents; Now Morgan Stanley Allows Its Clients’ Social Security Numbers to Get Auctioned on Hard Drives
By Pam Martens: September 21, 2022 ~ Yesterday, Gurbir Grewal, the Director of Enforcement for the Securities and Exchange Commission, said that the manner in which Wall Street mega bank, Morgan Stanley, had allowed the personal information of its clients to be auctioned off online on hard drives was “astonishing.” Grewal is not someone who can be easily astonished. Grewal came to the SEC from his post as Attorney General of New Jersey. Before that he had been the Bergen County Prosecutor. Prior to that he held various positions in the Justice Department’s U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of New Jersey, including his last position there as Chief of the Economic Crimes Unit. Exactly what was it that astonished Grewal? According to the SEC’s Cease and Desist Order, here’s what happened: The retail brokerage unit of Morgan Stanley known as Morgan Stanley Smith Barney wanted to decommission two of its … Continue reading
Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley Have Mysteriously Disappeared from this Week’s Senate and House Banking Hearings
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 20, 2022 ~ There are eight Global Systemically Important Banks (G-SIBS) in the U.S. They are: JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Bank of New York Mellon, Morgan Stanley, State Street and Wells Fargo. These are the banks that pose the greatest risk to the stability of the U.S. financial system and are monitored under the Federal Reserve’s stress tests. Five of those eight banks pose the greatest risk to financial stability because together they hold $200.18 trillion (yes trillion) in notional derivatives (face amount) or 86 percent of all derivatives held by all of the nation’s banks, according to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency – the federal regulator of national banks. Those banks are: JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Bank of America. In any Senate Banking or House Financial Services Committee hearing that is going … Continue reading
A Fossil Fuels Giant Has Been Raising the Election Chances of Extreme-Right Candidates — Using a Dangerous High-Tech Weapon
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 19, 2022 ~ The Federal Election Commission (FEC), a federal agency, states that its mission is to “protect the integrity of the federal campaign finance process by providing transparency and fairly enforcing and administering federal campaign finance laws.” So last week Wall Street On Parade sent an email inquiry to the FEC, asking the following: “The fossil fuels conglomerate, Koch Industries, which is privately-owned by billionaire Charles Koch and the heirs of his late brother, David, owns a massive voter database, data mining, get-out-the-vote operation, etc. called i360. “As you will see from the FEC link below, i360 is selling its services to a multitude of Republican candidates for seats in the House and Senate, as well as to PACs that in turn support those candidates. “My question is, how is it legal for a privately-owned fossil fuels conglomerate to operate i360, effectively a more … Continue reading
AIG Was Brought Down by Derivatives in 2008. It Just Spun Off a Company Whose Prospectus Mentions Derivatives 371 Times
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 16, 2022 ~ Yesterday, mainstream media was touting that the largest Initial Public Offering (IPO) of the year, Corebridge Financial, had just finished its first day of trading. The IPO was priced at $21 and closed at $20.73 (ticker: CRBG), not an illustrious start. Corebridge Financial is the life insurance and annuity business of the giant insurer, AIG. In 2008, AIG required a $180 billion bailout from the U.S. government because of its derivatives and stock loan deals with the big trading houses on Wall Street – many of the same ones that are now underwriting this IPO. If that’s not enough to make you suspicious, consider the fact that the word “derivatives” is mentioned 371 times in the prospectus for Corebridge Financial. (More on that in a moment, but first some background.) When the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission wrote its final report for … Continue reading
JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo Flunk a Test Measuring their Support for American Democracy
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 15, 2022 ~ The nonpartisan watchdog group, Accountable.US, has released the results of an investigation into how committed to democracy the 100 largest corporations in America are. The corporations were graded on support for voting rights, the electoral process, and American democracy. The results were provided in an interactive resource called the American Democracy Scorecard. Researchers looked at 14 key criteria. Seven elements of the criteria involved making pro-democracy statements, being affiliated with pro-democracy organizations, and taking other pro-democracy actions. Seven other criteria involved corporate contributions to elected officials who are undermining democracy and voting rights. Three of the largest mega banks on Wall Street, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, and Wells Fargo, flunked the democracy test, each receiving a score of “F.” Goldman Sachs received a “D.” Bank of America and Citigroup received a “B” grade, but, clearly, that was based on very recent … Continue reading
The Market Is Freaking Out Over the Potential for a Perfect Storm: Fed Tightening, Shaky Mega Banks, and a Sharp Decline in Household Wealth
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 14, 2022 ~ The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 1,276 points yesterday for a decline of 3.94 percent. The Dow’s losses were outpaced by the tech-heavy Nasdaq, which gave up 632.8 points for a drop of 5.16 percent. The sharp selloff was triggered by the 8:30 a.m. report yesterday morning, an hour before the opening bell of the New York Stock Exchange, that inflation had come in hotter than expected in August. Wall Street had been looking for a 0.1 percent decline in the Consumer Price Index (CPI). Instead, the August reading showed an increase of 0.1 percent. The year-over-year rate slowed to 8.3 percent from 8.5 percent in July. The Fed is set to meet next Tuesday and Wednesday and with the CPI number coming in hotter than anticipated, there is now talk of the Fed slamming on the brakes more than anticipated, … Continue reading
Trump Administration Prosecutor Charges in New Book that Justice Department Was Corrupted by Trump and Attorney General William Barr
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 13, 2022 ~ Two new nonfiction books are being released today. Bestselling author and anthropologist Sarah Kendzior’s book, They Knew, describes Donald Trump as a “transnational career criminal.” The book from the former top federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York under the Trump Justice Department, Geoffrey Berman, a Republican, reinforces Kendzior’s thesis with the revelation that Trump’s Justice Department was weaponized “to aid the President’s friends and punish his enemies,” both foreign and domestic. One of the most outrageous demands from the Justice Department, writes Berman, was “pressure to pursue baseless criminal charges against John Kerry, who had served in the Obama administration as secretary of state.” Berman writes the following in Holding the Line: Inside the Nation’s Preeminent US Attorney’s Office and Its Battle with the Trump Justice Department: “Throughout my tenure as U.S. attorney, Trump’s Justice Department kept demanding that I use my office … Continue reading
Nonfiction Book Explains the Oligarchs’ Plot to Break Up the U.S. – To Make It Easier to Sell Off Its Parts
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 12, 2022 ~ Sarah Kendzior turned 44 on September 1. She has already had two bestselling books. She holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from Washington University with a focus on authoritarian regimes. We mention this as background because Kendzior’s latest book, They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent, to be released tomorrow by Flatiron Books, needs to be read as the work of a serious scholar. Six years ago Kendzior correctly predicted in numerous articles what the rise of Trumpism would bring to the United States. On August 3, 2016, three months before the presidential election, Kendzior wrote the following for Foreign Policy under the headline: “Welcome to Donald Trump’s America”: “For over a year, pundits — especially Republicans who have a stake in legitimizing their party’s abject surrender — have been claiming that Trump will eventually pivot from his extremist positions. They … Continue reading
After Funneling Trillions of Dollars in Repo Loans to Serial Bank Offenders, Lorie Logan Gets a $440,000 Job Running the Dallas Fed
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 8, 2022 ~ Bailing out the Wall Street megabanks that are serially fined and hit with felony counts appears to be catching on as a major career advancement strategy at the New York Fed. On August 22, Lorie Logan began her big promotion as President of the Dallas Fed, a position that paid $440,700 at the end of 2020. That’s $40,700 more than the salary of the President of the United States. Prior to joining the Dallas Fed, Logan was the Manager of the System Open Market Account (SOMA) at the New York Fed, effectively the Fed’s trading floor. As part of her job, Logan oversaw the trillions of dollars that were electronically created at the New York Fed to bail out Wall Street trading houses in the fall of 2019 and through the middle of 2020. (See our related report The Fed Appears … Continue reading