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Recent Posts
- Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” Is a Grotesque Giveaway to Fossil Fuel Billionaires While Adding $3.3 Trillion to Nation’s Debt
- Senator Chris Murphy Charges that Trump “Has Opened a Channel for Bribery”
- Congressman Casten: Trump’s Assault on the Rule of Law Is Causing Capital Flight Out of U.S. by Foreign Investors
- Trump’s Approval Rating Drops to 80-Year Low; IMF Says U.S. Tariffs Now Exceed the Highs During the Great Depression
- Nasdaq Has Lost More than 3,000 Points Since Trump’s First Full Day in Office in 2025; the Pain Has Barely Begun
- The Bond Crisis Last Week Was a Global No-Confidence Vote in U. S. President Donald Trump
- Trump’s Tariff Plan Guts $5 Trillion in Stock Value in Two Days; Senator Warren Calls for Emergency Action Before Markets Open on Monday
- Trump’s Attacks on Big Law, Universities, and the Media Have a Common Goal: Silence Dissent Against Authoritarian Rule
- Trump Administration Gives All Clear to Laundering Money through Shell Companies and Bribing Foreign Officials
- Four Megabanks on Wall Street Hold $3.2 Trillion in Uninsured Deposits – Which May Explain Senator Schumer’s Pivot to the GOP to Stop a Government Shutdown
- Here’s What Came Crashing Down Yesterday for Trump’s “Genius” Guy, Elon Musk: Tesla Stock, Access to Twitter (X), His Years of Secret Calls with Putin
- After Banning the Associated Press, Trump Is Now Targeting Specific Journalists That He Wants to See Fired
- Closely Watched Atlanta Fed Model Predicts Negative U.S. Growth in First Quarter
- Trump’s Gangster Diplomacy Makes Front Page Headlines Around the Globe
- Who Benefits Alongside Elon Musk If He Succeeds in Killing the CFPB: the Megabanks on Wall Street that Underwrite His Tesla Stock Offerings
- In Trump 1.0, the State Department Used Taxpayer Money to Publish a Book Elevating Elon Musk to a Superhero; It Was Funded by USAID, the Agency Musk Wants to Quickly Shut Down
- News Host Joy Reid Raises Threat of Trump Selling U.S. to Putin; Ten Days Later Her Show Is Cancelled
- Elon Musk’s DOGE Appears to Be Violating a Court Order; It Has Taken Down Hundreds of YouTube Videos that Educate Americans on How to Avoid Being Swindled
- Barron’s Releases Audio of Jamie Dimon Cursing Out His Workers at a Town Hall, as Dimon Plans to Dump Another One Million JPM Shares
- There’s One Federal Investigative Agency that Neither Trump nor Elon Musk Can Touch: It Just Opened an Investigation into DOGE
- Elon Musk’s Companies Were Under Investigation by Five Inspectors General When the Trump Administration Fired Them and Made Musk the Investigator
- Donald Trump Gives the Greenlight to Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase to Return to Bribing Foreign Officials
- After Tech Geeks Built a Back Door to Loot Billions from FTX, Republicans Refuse to Investigate What Elon Musk’s Tech-Squad Did Inside the U.S. Treasury’s Payment System
- Former Prosecutor, Now U.S. Senator, Informs Tesla That CEO Musk May Be Violating Federal Law and to “Preserve All Records”
- Trump’s Hedge Fund Guy Is Now Overseeing the U.S. Treasury, IRS, OCC, U.S. Mint, FinCEN, F-SOC, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
- As Elon Musk Begins Shutting Down Payments to Federal Contractors, a Strange Money Trail Emerges to His Operatives Inside the U.S. Treasury’s Payment System
- JPMorgan Chase Charged by Yet Another Internal Whistleblower with Cooking the Books
- We Asked Google’s AI Search Model, Gemini, Questions About the Fed and Wall Street Megabanks: It Got the Answers Dead Wrong
- With Trump and Melania’s Crypto Coins Likely to Raise Legal Challenges, Why Didn’t Trump Fire the SEC’s Inspector General in His Purge of IGs?
- Fossil Fuel Industry Could End Up Paying Tens of Billions for LA Wildfires and Deceiving the Public on Climate Change for Decades
- It’s Being Called the Biggest Grift by a President in U.S. History: Trump and First Lady Launch their Own Crypto Coins
- Trump Plans to Install a Fracking CEO to Head the Energy Department and Declare a National Emergency on Energy to Gain Vast Powers
- Fossil Fuel Money Played a Role in the Los Angeles Fires and the Push to Install Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense
- When It Comes to Wealth Retention in Retirement, Concrete May Be the New Gold
- Wall Street Watchdog Warns “Clock Is Ticking on a Coming Catastrophic Financial Crash”
- Wall Street Is Sending the Same Message to Americans on Fossil Fuel Financing that It Sent on Cigarettes: Drop Dead
- In a Six-Week Span, this Dark Pool with a Curious Past Traded 3.7 Billion Shares
- Wall Street’s Lobby Firm Hired Eugene Scalia of Gibson Dunn to Sue the Fed for Jamie Dimon
- Postmaster General Louis DeJoy Made $561,051 in Compensation in 2024, as Mail Costs Spiked and Delivery Deteriorated
- Fed Chair Jay Powell Sends a Bold Message to Trump and Tanks the Dow by 1123 Points
- The Head of Fixed Income at T. Rowe Price Makes the Scary Case for the 10-Year Treasury to Spike to 6 Percent
- $663 Billion in Cash Assets Have Gone Poof at the Largest U.S. Banks
- Donald Trump to Ring Bell at New York Stock Exchange Today as Hit List Posters Appear in Manhattan Targeting Wall Street CEOs
- Trump Has a Slush Fund to Prop Up the Dollar – Will He Use It to Prop Up Bitcoin Instead?
- A CEO Assassination; a Billionaire Heiress/NYPD Commissioner; a Secret Wall Street Spy Center – Here’s How They’re Connected
- Despite More than 1600 Tech Scientists Signing a Letter Calling Crypto a Sham, Trump Names a Crypto Cheerleader for SEC Chair
- The Fed Rings a Warning Bell: Hedge Funds and Life Insurers Are Reporting Historic Leverage
- Trump’s Nominee for FBI Director, Kash Patel, Has Businesses Financially Intertwined with Trump
- Donald Trump Is at Risk of Getting Named in a Fossil Fuels Conspiracy Lawsuit
- Trump Is Having Difficulty Getting a Lawyer to Accept the Nomination for SEC Chair: Here’s Why
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Hurricane Helene Dumped 20 Trillion Gallons of Rain, Destroying Entire Towns in Western North Carolina, Hundreds of Miles from any Coastline

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 1, 2024 ~ If you think you are safe from climate change, sea level rise, Category 4 and 5 hurricanes, storm surge and the like because you don’t live near an ocean or the Gulf of Mexico, the humanitarian crisis from Hurricane Helene that is playing out in Western North Carolina should quickly reorient your thinking on the matter. (You can be assured that it is doing just that in actuarial offices at insurance companies across the United States right now.) The worst hit areas of Western North Carolina – cities and towns like Asheville, Chimney Rock, Lake Lure, Fairview, Black Mountain, and Swannanoa – are 485 miles north of Perry, Florida, the town closest to where Hurricane Helene made landfall on Thursday night, September 26, as a Category 4 hurricane on the coastline of the Gulf of Mexico. These decimated towns in Western … Continue reading
Half of All Deaths from Hurricane Helene Occurred 485 Miles North of Where It Made Landfall

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 30, 2024 ~ As an unprecedented humanitarian crisis was happening in real time yesterday morning in Western North Carolina, we turned on the Sunday News programs: CNN’s State of the Union with Jake Tapper and, later in the morning, Face the Nation on CBS. We were stunned that the focus of both programs was the war in the Middle East and the presidential election. As both national news programs were airing, local news reports were coming out of Buncombe County, North Carolina that people there had no electric power, no running water, no cell phone service, impassible roads, and no distribution centers had been established for bottled water or food because the tractor trailers with the supplies had not arrived — two days after the hurricane hit. At the 10 a.m. press briefing by Buncombe County officials, 10 people were reported dead from Hurricane … Continue reading
What Did Madoff, Jeffrey Epstein and Sanctioned Russian Mercenary Group, Wagner, Have in Common? They All Banked at JPMorgan Chase

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 26, 2024 ~ On Tuesday, the Financial Times broke the story that JPMorgan Chase and HSBC had been named in a new report by the U.S.-based think tank, the Center for Advanced Defense Studies (C4ADS), for their role in laundering payments for the notorious mercenary group, Wagner, that has supported Russian military operations in Ukraine, the Middle East, Latin America and Africa. The think tank wrote that the involvement of the banks with Wagner had been done “unwittingly.” That’s also how JPMorgan Chase explained its money laundering for Ponzi kingpin Bernie Madoff for decades and for the international sex trafficker of children, Jeffrey Epstein, for at least 15 years. Curiously, neither the Wall Street Journal nor the New York Times found the information in the think tank’s report worthy of sharing with their readers. Wall Street On Parade, on the other hand, finds it highly … Continue reading
Deadly, Exploding Pagers Force the U.S. to Get Serious About Malware from China in U.S. Products that Are Potential National Security Threats

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 24, 2024 ~ Yesterday, the U.S. Department of Commerce announced it was proposing to ban certain technologies from China and Russia in U.S. automobiles. The U.S. Secretary of Commerce, Gina Raimondo, explained the thinking as follows: “Cars today have cameras, microphones, GPS tracking, and other technologies connected to the internet. It doesn’t take much imagination to understand how a foreign adversary with access to this information could pose a serious risk to both our national security and the privacy of U.S. citizens. To address these national security concerns, the Commerce Department is taking targeted, proactive steps to keep PRC and Russian-manufactured technologies off American roads.” According to the announcement, the proposed rule, which will be put out for public comment, would do the following: “…prohibit the import and sale of vehicles with certain VCS or ADS hardware or software with a nexus to the … Continue reading
Wall Street Has Moved Vast Sums of Its Trading to Its Federally-Insured Banks

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 23, 2024 ~ Taxpayer-backstopped federal deposit insurance at commercial banks in the U.S. was never meant to be a get-rich scheme for the wild and voracious appetites of traders on Wall Street. But a quarterly report produced by the federal regulator of national banks – those operating across state lines – shows that vast amounts of trading on Wall Street is now taking place inside the federally-insured commercial banks that are owned by the trading powerhouses on Wall Street: JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and Bank of America. (Wall Street trading houses have been allowed to own federally-insured banks since the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999 under the Wall Street friendly Bill Clinton administration.) For decades, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) has published its “Quarterly Report on Bank Trading and Derivatives Activities.” The reports have shown that the … Continue reading
The Stock Market Had a Psychotic Episode After the Fed Rate Cut Yesterday, Plunging 479 Points from the Day’s High

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 19, 2024 ~ The Federal Reserve yesterday cut its benchmark interest rate, the Fed Funds rate, for the first time in four years. The cut was by half a point rather than the customary quarter point increments typical of Fed rate moves. Only one member of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), Michelle Bowman, voted against the action. Bowman wanted a quarter point cut according to the FOMC announcement. A Fed rate cut of a quarter point to a half point was widely anticipated by the market, so the stock market’s wild swings were puzzling to veteran Wall Street watchers. The FOMC released its written announcement at 2 p.m. As the chart above indicates, the written announcement produced a surge in the Dow Jones Industrial Average to an intraday high of 41,981.97, which was also an all-time high on an intraday basis. But within … Continue reading
As Trump Launches a Crypto Firm, FBI Reports Crypto Fraud Has Exploded to $5.6 Billion; Representing Almost 50 Percent of All Financial Fraud

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 17, 2024 ~ Last Thursday, the Senate Banking Committee held a hearing on combating financial frauds against consumers. During the hearing, Senator Jon Tester of Montana held up his mobile phone and said: “Every day, every day, I either get an email or a phone call from somebody who’s trying to screw me out of my money.” According to the FBI, it is highly likely that a large number of the people trying to screw both you and Senator Tester out of your money are crypto fraudsters. On September 9, the FBI released its 2023 report on crypto fraud, which made the following findings: “In 2023, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) received more than 69,000 complaints from the public regarding financial fraud involving the use of cryptocurrency, such as bitcoin, ether, or tether. Estimated losses with a nexus … Continue reading
Everything this Book Predicted on Wall Street Megabanks Ruling their Regulators Is Now Unfolding

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 16, 2024 ~ It is rare for a book to be so comprehensive and insightful that it provides a roadmap for the future – especially when its cast of characters are the lawyered-up megabanks on Wall Street and their legions of lobbyists and public relations flacks. We’re referring to Taming the Megabanks: Why We Need a New Glass-Steagall Act by Arthur E. Wilmarth, Professor Emeritus of Law at George Washington University. Last Tuesday, the Federal Reserve completely capitulated to the demands of the Wall Street megabanks on its plan to dramatically raise capital levels at the megabanks — the so-called Basel III Endgame. The Fed, via its Vice Chair for Supervision, Michael Barr, announced it was cutting the required capital it had formally proposed in July of 2023 by more than half and will continue to allow the megabanks to use their own dodgy … Continue reading
The Fed Just Kicked the Capital Increases for the Dangerous Megabanks and their Derivatives Down the Road for Years

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 12, 2024 ~ When the next megabank blows up from its derivative exposure, you can add the names Jamie Dimon and Patick McHenry to former Republican Congressmen Randy Hultgren and Kevin Yoder as four of the men who greased the skids for another derivatives banking crisis. (For our report on the role played by Hultgren and Yoder, see our 2021 report here.) Dimon and McHenry are the latest lead players in the disastrous history of derivative regulation in the U.S. Dimon is the Chair and CEO of the riskiest and largest bank in the United States, JPMorgan Chase. After his bank lost $6.2 billion gambling in derivatives in London in 2012 – using deposits from his federally-insured bank – Dimon would, to rational minds, seem like the least qualified candidate to be giving advice to his banking regulators on how much capital megabanks need … Continue reading
Intel, Boeing and U.S. Steel May Hold the Secrets to What’s Behind All the Talk of a U.S. Sovereign Wealth Fund

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 10, 2024 ~ Both Bloomberg News and the Wall Street Journal have now reported that it’s not just presidential candidate Donald Trump that is proposing a U.S. Sovereign Wealth Fund, but that President Joe Biden’s administration is also exploring the idea. The Wall Street Journal reported as follows on the Biden plan late Sunday night: “It isn’t clear how far the White House plan, overseen by national security adviser Jake Sullivan and his deputy Daleep Singh, is from completion, or whether Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential candidate, supports it. A Harris spokesman didn’t respond to a request for comment.” The advisor on Trump’s plan for a U.S. Sovereign Wealth Fund is John Paulson – a hedge fund billionaire not particularly known for putting the national security interests of America ahead of his own greed. (See our reporting yesterday for background on Paulson’s shorting of the U.S. … Continue reading