Category Archives: Uncategorized

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 20, 2021 ~ JPMorgan Chase is the largest bank in the United States. It also has the scandalous distinction of having admitted to five criminal felony counts brought by the U.S. Department of Justice since 2014 and a breathtaking series of additional charges from other regulators. (See its Rap Sheet here.) On Friday, the Securities and Exchange Commission fined the securities unit of JPMorgan Chase $125 million for evading the ability of the SEC to adequately conduct its investigations of the bank because there was “firmwide” use by traders, supervisors and other personnel of non-official communications devices to conduct its business, while the firm failed to record and retain these messages as required by law. These new violations occurred despite similar conduct during the bank’s participation in the rigging of the foreign exchange market, which brought a criminal felony charge against the bank by … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 17, 2021 ~ The Nasdaq Composite Index dropped 385 points yesterday for a loss of 2.47 percent. At the lows of the day, it was down 446 points at 15,119.49. That compares with a loss of just 29.79 points on the Dow Jones Industrial Average or 0.08 percent. The Nasdaq is packed with Big Tech stocks trading at nose-bleed multiples and meager dividends, or no dividends at all. Tesla is trading at a trailing price-to-earnings ratio of 302 and pays no dividend. Amazon is trading at a trailing P/E of 67 and pays no dividends. Tesla tanked 5 percent yesterday while Amazon lost 2.56 percent. Other Big Tech losers were Apple, down 3.93 percent; Microsoft, down 2.91 percent; and a whopping smackdown of Adobe, which shed 10.19 percent. Notably, Adobe also doesn’t pay a dividend and trades at a trailing P/E of 54. The … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 16, 2021 ~ The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) is the agency that prevents financial panics from turning into catastrophic runs on banks by providing taxpayer-backstopped and government guaranteed insurance on deposits, up to $250,000 per depositor. Its leadership and honest governance is thus critically important to every American. So when a nasty public brawl breaks out between the Board of Directors of the FDIC and its Chairwoman, Jelena McWilliams, every American needs to sit up and pay attention. On Tuesday, Rohit Chopra, President Biden’s nominee who has been confirmed to lead the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), which automatically makes him a member of the Board of Directors of the FDIC, posted at the CFPB’s website serious charges against FDIC Chairwoman McWilliams – effectively stating that she was staging a one-woman coup against her Board and usurping their power to govern the FDIC. … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 15, 2021 ~ The Senate Banking Committee held a hearing yesterday titled “Stablecoins: How Do They Work, How Are They Used, and What Are Their Risks?” Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH), the Chair of the Committee, set the tone for the hearing by including the following poignant remarks in his opening statement: “Last month, I wrote to some of the biggest stablecoin issuers to get more information on how they manage their funds that back their coins, and to ask what rights their users have. Their responses were not particularly enlightening – and should lead us to assume most ordinary customers don’t have much in the way of rights at all. “So let’s be clear about one thing: if you put your money in stablecoins, there’s no guarantee you’re going to get it back. They call it a currency, implying it’s the same as having … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 14, 2021 ~ FINRA is Wall Street’s self-regulator. Last Tuesday afternoon, December 7, we attempted to access the part of its website that houses data on Wall Street’s Dark Pools. The web page was there but the data wouldn’t open. We contacted FINRA via email and asked what the problem was. We were told that it was “a result of today’s Amazon Web Services issue.” Our problem at FINRA’s website was just the tip of the iceberg last Tuesday. As a result of problems at Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon’s cloud-service network, customers couldn’t get through to Delta Air Lines on its AWS-supported phone lines; the Associated Press was limited in what it could publish for much of the day; Barron’s reported it was negatively impacted; apps for McDonald’s and Ticketmaster and streaming services from Disney and Netflix were also knocked offline. Amazon delivery … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 13, 2021 ~ For years now, Wall Street On Parade has been reporting on the probing letters that Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has sent to Wall Street firms and their regulators in an effort to ferret out the details of systemic corruption and the looting of the American people. (See “Related Articles” below.) Throughout this letter writing campaign, Senator Elizabeth Warren has been a member of the powerful Senate Banking Committee – which has subpoena power. The new Chair of that Committee, Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH), is also a progressive, like Warren. So why isn’t the Senate Banking Committee using its subpoena power instead of leaving Warren with nothing more than an inquiring mind and a pile of Word documents? According to the Congressional Research Service, the Senate Banking Committee has adopted a rule that requires a majority vote to issue a subpoena for … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 10, 2021 ~ On May 26 business media reported that the U.S. Department of Justice had opened a probe into the March collapse of the Archegos family office hedge fund. Archegos is believed to have leveraged $20 billion of its own capital into more than $100 billion in stocks and derivative exposure through margin loans tricked up as derivatives by some of the largest banks on Wall Street. One of the laws that the banks may have fallen afoul of is the Fed’s Regulation T. Under Reg T, broker dealers on Wall Street could not have loaned Archegos more than 50 percent to make its stock purchases. To get around this, the banks did not open a margin account for Archegos. Instead, the banks structured derivative contracts where they loaned as much as 85 percent of the money to Archegos to make the trades … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 9, 2021 ~ On October 12, Wall Street On Parade filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the Federal Reserve Board of Governors seeking the specific dates on which former Dallas Fed President, Robert Kaplan, had made purchases and sales in S&P 500 futures contracts in 2020. According to Kaplan’s financial disclosure forms, he had made “multiple” transactions of over $1 million in S&P 500 futures during 2020, the year that he sat as a voting member of the Federal Open Market Committee and was privy to the Fed’s unprecedented interventions in the market during the economic upheaval from the pandemic. (See Kaplan’s financial disclosure forms from 2015 through 2020 here.) Kaplan was under very precise instructions on his annual financial disclosure form to provide the “month, day, year” of each of his purchases of securities and each of his sales. But … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 8, 2021 ~ Yesterday, Cornell Law Professor, Saule Omarova, withdrew from her nomination to become the head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the regulator of national banks. Emily Flitter, reporting for the New York Times, said it was because Omarova had been “painted as a communist.” In terms of the full story on why Omarova had to withdraw, that is like pointing to a single droplet of rain as the cause of a hurricane. In October, the Vanderbilt Law Review published a 69-page paper by Omarova in which she made the following bizarre recommendations to reform the U.S. banking system: (1) Move all commercial bank deposits from commercial banks to so-called FedAccounts at the Federal Reserve; (2) Allow the Fed, in “extreme and rare circumstances, when the Fed is unable to control inflation by raising interest rates,” to confiscate deposits … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 7, 2021 ~ Last Friday, December 3, 2021, the Nasdaq stock market recorded 12 stocks setting new 52-week highs in contrast to 585 stocks setting new 52-week lows. Let that sink in for a moment. There were 48.75 times more stocks setting new 52-week lows than were reaching new 52-week highs. That extremely negative reading of market breadth came on a day when the Nasdaq closed down just 1.9 percent. Imagine what the breadth would have looked like if the percentage decline on the overall market had been worse. Yesterday, Monday, December 6, with the Nasdaq closing up 139.6 points, the new 52-week lows still swamped highs, with 137 new lows and only 53 new highs. Unfortunately, Americans never see headlines in their newspapers about the deterioration in the stock market’s underpinnings. What they do see on a regular basis are headlines about the … Continue reading →