-
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
Seven Years after Michael Lewis Described on National TV How the U.S. Stock Market Is Rigged, SEC Chair Gensler Says He’s Going to Tackle Market Structure
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 10, 2021 ~ Yesterday, Gary Gensler, Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, delivered a speech at the virtual Piper Sandler Global Exchange and FinTech Conference. Gensler promised to tackle at least some of the tricked-up aspects of the U.S. stock market that have rendered it the envy of organized crime, rather than the envy of the world as Wall Street titans like to delude themselves. If Gensler actually follows through on his promise, he will be doing far more than was done by Obama’s SEC chiefs, Mary Schapiro and Mary Jo White. There is a precise date as to when President Obama and SEC Chair Mary Jo White became overtly aware that the stock market structure had been outrageously rigged. That date is March 30, 2014 when famed author and former Wall Street veteran, Michael Lewis, went on 60 Minutes to proclaim: “The … Continue reading
There Is Not One Elected Official at the Federal Reserve, But It Has Been Unilaterally Rewriting the Rules on Wall Street Since 2007
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 9, 2021 ~ The Federal Reserve will release the results of its stress tests of the mega banks on Wall Street on June 24. That exercise is nothing more than a shell game to mislead Congress and the public into believing that actual due diligence is being done by the Fed on these massive federally insured banks with their inhouse trading casinos. (See Three Federal Studies Show Fed’s Stress Tests of Big Banks Are Just a Placebo.) In reality, the Fed is a completely captured appendage of Wall Street. The Fed has outsourced the nitty-gritty supervision of Wall Street banks to the New York Fed, which is, literally, owned by the same banks. (See These Are the Banks that Own the New York Fed and Its Money Button.) That the Fed is still allowed by Congress to have anything to do with supervising these … Continue reading
From London to Los Angeles, News Outlets Go Dark Around the World this Morning; Fastly Takes Blame
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 8, 2021 ~ If you’re an early riser and like a cup of coffee with online news before officially starting your day, you got your coffee sans the news at numerous websites this morning. From approximately 5:30 a.m. to 6:30 a.m. ET this morning, major news sites like the New York Times, CNN, Financial Times and Guardian U.K. were dark or had error messages. The sites were not just dark in the U.S. but around the world. According to Fastly, which took the blame for the outages, the disruption impacted major cities across the U.S. and around the world, including Los Angeles, New York, Boston, Chicago, London, Paris, Dubai, Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo, Stockholm, Munich, Amsterdam, Santiago, Rio de Janeiro and dozens more. According to the Guardian news outlet in the U.K., Fastly is “a cloud computing services provider” that is supposed to “speed … Continue reading
The Wall Street Captured Fed Consolidates Its Power Under Biden
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 7, 2021 ~ Janet Yellen, the current U.S. Treasury Secretary, is also the Chair of the Financial Stability Oversight Council, which includes every Wall Street regulator. Before coming to the Treasury Department, Yellen was the Chair of the Federal Reserve and had spent the bulk of her working career at the Fed or the San Francisco Fed. When Yellen was not reappointed as Fed Chair by Donald Trump when her Chairmanship term expired in 2018, she immediately cashed in her chips on Wall Street, collecting millions of dollars in speaking fees in 2019, and undisclosed millions more in 2018. (See Janet Yellen’s Cash Haul of $7 Million Is Just the Tip of the Iceberg; She Failed to Report Her Wall Street Speaking Fees from JPMorgan and Others in 2018.) Yellen was a Federal Reserve Board Governor when she was appointed Fed Chair. Her term … Continue reading
Crypto Will Be Put Under the Microscope at June 30 House Hearing
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 4, 2021 ~ The House Financial Services Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, chaired by Congressman Al Green of Texas, will hold a hearing on June 30 titled: “America on ‘FIRE.’ Will the Crypto Frenzy Lead to Financial Independence and Early Retirement or Financial Ruin?” The announcement of the hearing came yesterday, the same day that Wall Street On Parade reported that the Federal Trade Commission was witnessing a skyrocketing increase in crypto scams. The FTC wrote on May 17: “Reports to the FTC’s Consumer Sentinel suggest scammers are cashing in on the buzz around cryptocurrency and luring people into bogus investment opportunities in record numbers. Since October 2020, reports have skyrocketed, with nearly 7,000 people reporting losses of more than $80 million on these scams.” The Subcommittee has not yet posted its lineup of witnesses for the hearing. Republicans, who are the minority party … Continue reading
Crypto: Congress Dawdles as $1.7 Trillion Con-Game Goes Unregulated, Threatening Reputation of U.S. Markets
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 3, 2021 ~ If you want to get your hair cut outside of your home in the United States, the job has to be done by a licensed worker at a regulated business. The same thing applies to plumbers, electricians, home inspectors, real estate and insurance agents. They all require a license and are subject to regulatory scrutiny. Likewise, commodities like corn, sugar, wheat, lumber and oil are all traded on regulated exchanges which are overseen by a federal regulator. But, for reasons that have yet to be explained to the American people, when it comes to the $1.7 trillion cryptocurrency market – which is effectively a con-game based on the greater fool theory, nothing is regulated. Not the crypto currency; not the promoters; not the crypto exchanges; and not the firms that are providing as much as 100 times leverage to fuel this … Continue reading
Fed’s Reverse Repos Surge to Historic $485 Billion: What’s Wall Street Afraid of This Time?
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 2, 2021 ~ The chart above has been compiled by the St. Louis Fed using the New York Fed’s data for its issuance of Reverse Repurchase Agreements, otherwise known as Reverse Repos. What’s a Fed Reverse Repo? According to the New York Fed, it is when counterparties loan the Fed money in exchange for collateral, which is typically Treasury bills. In the most recent action, we’re talking about the New York Fed, acting on behalf of the Federal Reserve, selling U.S. Treasuries to Wall Street banks, trading houses, mutual funds and government-sponsored enterprises in overnight and weekend deals and paying zero or next to zero as an interest rate when it buys back the securities. Why would the smartest guys on Wall Street, who never let a loose dime slip through their fingers in order to get a larger cut of the annual bonus pool, be … Continue reading
The Best Hedge Fund Performance in History; Now Clients Can’t Get Access to their Money
By Pam Martens: June 1, 2021 ~ “…no adequate rational market explanation for this performance.” If something sounds too good to be true, you can bet your discolored Bernie Madoff account statements that it will inevitably end badly. Quietly, at the start of a three-day weekend, Bloomberg News published this titillating news item about the hedge fund Renaissance Technologies, known as RenTech or RenTec on Wall Street: “Credit Suisse Group is temporarily barring clients from withdrawing all their cash from a fund that invests with Renaissance Technologies…The fund lost about 32% last year, in line with the decline in the Renaissance Institutional Diversified Alpha Fund International fund that it invests into, the people said. Renaissance, regarded as one of the most successful quant investing firms in the world, was rocked by billions of dollars in redemptions earlier this year after unprecedented losses in 2020.” Put the above paragraph together with the … Continue reading
House Hearing: Only Jamie Dimon’s Microphone Mysteriously Malfunctions During Pivotal Questioning
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 28, 2021 ~ CEOs from the six largest banks on Wall Street testified under oath yesterday before the House Financial Services Committee. But only one CEO, Jamie Dimon, had an ear-piercing electronic sound emanate from his microphone, which blocked out the sound of his voice, when he was asked key questions by two separate members of Congress. The situation was so bizarre that Congressman Juan Vargas, a Democrat from California, said this about the episodes: “It reminded me of the movie ‘Young Frankenstein.’ Every time they said ‘Luther’ the horses would get scared. Every time they said ‘Jamie Dimon,’ the computers would get scared.” The first episode occurred after Congressman Al Green, a Democrat from Texas, told Dimon that two of the banks previously purchased by JPMorgan Chase had used slaves as loan collateral and at one point, after calling in a loan, the … Continue reading
Justice Department Opens Probe into Potential Bank Cartel that Financed Archegos
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 27, 2021 ~ Last evening, Bloomberg News, followed by the Wall Street Journal, reported that the U.S. Department of Justice has opened a probe into the late March collapse of the Archegos family office hedge fund. The Wall Street Journal reported that “Banks that lent to Archegos, including Credit Suisse Group AG, UBS Group AG, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley,” had been contacted for information by the Justice Department. According to media reports, Archegos is believed to have leveraged $20 billion of its own capital into more than $100 billion in stock and derivative exposure through margin loans from the banks named above, as well as others. Among the laundry list of items the Justice Department may be investigating, is whether the banks violated the Federal Reserve’s Regulation T, which would have limited the banks to an initial margin loan of no … Continue reading