Category Archives: Uncategorized

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 30, 2020 ~ Imagine that your neighbor across the street had been criminally charged with five felony counts for financial crimes in the past six years and admitted to committing each and every crime to the U.S. Department of Justice. Would you put one-third of all of your money in a safe, give that neighbor the combination, and ask him to hold the safe in his house for you? You would probably be suited up for a straight jacket if you did something like that. That’s effectively what the Federal Reserve, the central bank of the United States, has done when it comes to JPMorgan Chase. As of this past Wednesday, the Fed has a $7 trillion balance sheet and $2 trillion of its agency Mortgage-Backed Securities are sitting at JPMorgan Chase, the bank that the Department of Justice has charged with five … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 29, 2020 ~ On Monday the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed down 650 points. On Tuesday, the Dow lost another 222 points. Yesterday, the Dow closed near the lows of the day, plunging 943 points by the closing bell. The pain was broad-based with only one of the Dow’s 30 component stocks closing in the green: that was The Travelers Companies, a property and casualty insurer. Market sentiment has turned bearish in no small part because of the unrelenting pandemic, the lack of a new stimulus bill from Congress, and the selloff in oil. All three are interrelated. As of 7:40 a.m. this morning, West Texas Intermediate (the U.S. domestic crude) was trading at $35.90, down 4 percent on the day and down 10 percent from its $40 handle last week. The price of oil is a heavy influencer of market sentiment for … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 28, 2020 ~ At 9:10 a.m. this morning, Dow futures were showing a loss of 623 points, signaling another nasty open for the stock market following Monday’s plunge of 650 points and a 222-point loss yesterday. The sell-off in futures this morning is being blamed on the rising number of COVID-19 cases in Europe and the U.S. and the failure of the U.S. Congress to pass a stimulus bill to cushion the coming economic fallout. But tomorrow morning will bring a report showing a huge pop in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for the third quarter, and the Trump campaign can be expected to spin it into a rallying cry at campaign events. At 8:30 a.m. tomorrow, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, a unit of the U.S. Department of Commerce, will report how the U.S. economy grew from July 1 through September 30. According … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 27, 2020 ~ Congresswoman Katie Porter has never met an overpaid Wall Street billionaire that she couldn’t reduce to a flummoxed whimperer within a few minutes. (See video clip below of Porter and Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, during an April 10, 2019 House hearing.) Porter has had the Chairman of the so-called “independent” Federal Reserve in her radar since he appeared at a House Financial Services Committee hearing on February 11 of this year. At the hearing, Porter held up a photo of Fed Chair Jerome Powell in black tie outside the mansion of billionaire Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon. Porter said this: “Can you imagine how attending a lavish party at Jeff Bezos’ $23 million home, along with Jared and Ivanka and the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon, might give off the sense to the public that … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 26, 2020 ~ On Friday, the print edition of the New York Times carried this headline over a column by Paul Krugman: “How Many Americans Will Ayn Rand Kill?” (The digital headline reads: “When Libertarianism Goes Bad.”) Krugman makes the following points: libertarian rhetoric is all about “freedom” and “personal responsibility.” Politicians in states filled with the Ayn Rand crowd refuse to issue mandates to wear masks, believing this comes under the Ayn Rand screed that individual choice must always triumph. Krugman correctly defines this failed logic as follows: “Many things should be matters of individual choice. The government has no business dictating your cultural tastes, your faith or what you decide to do with other consenting adults. “But refusing to wear a face covering during a pandemic, or insisting on mingling indoors with large groups, isn’t like following the church of your … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 23, 2020 ~ If you needed further proof that crime pays on Wall Street, look at the chart above. Goldman Sachs and its Malaysian subsidiary were criminally charged yesterday by the Justice Department, they admit to the charges, and its stock closed up on the day by $2.49. The U.S. Department of Justice is being played like a fiddle at a tractor meet. Those big white shoe law firms that handle increasingly dirty cases against the mega banks on Wall Street have twice, in a period of just three weeks, managed to get the Justice Department to announce settlements of landmark criminal cases against two of the largest banks on Wall Street on the day of presidential debates when the public and the media are not paying attention to Wall Street. On September 29, the day of the first presidential debate between President … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 22, 2020 ~ Anyone who has carefully studied the presidency of Donald Trump knows that his job is Distractor in Chief. Investigative reporters for the New York Times have spent endless hours compiling Trump’s tax evasions and unreported foreign bank account in China. The Washington Post has spent endless hours compiling more than 20,000 lies Trump has told since taking office. But the real man in charge of directing the agenda of the Trump administration, fossil fuels billionaire Charles Koch, has received far less scrutiny. Yesterday, former President Barack Obama delivered a speech at a campaign rally in Philadelphia for Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden. During the remarks, Obama got to the core of what Charles Koch’s political network and money machine has done to gut the safeguards for everyday Americans at the federal regulatory agencies that previously protected them. Obama didn’t mention … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 21, 2020 ~ Turns out the federal government’s plan for dealing with a mega bank failure on Wall Street is no better conceived than the federal government’s plan for dealing with the worst pandemic since 1918. The Federal Reserve issued two press releases yesterday about “large banks.” One read: “Agencies finalize rule to reduce the impact of large bank failures.” The other read: “Agencies issue final rule to strengthen resilience of large banks.” Wait. What? Fed Chairman Jerome Powell has been telling anyone who would listen this year – from Congress to viewers of the Today show – that the large banks have been a “source of strength” during the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. If that were true (which we’ve questioned from the first time Powell said it) why is the Fed now worrying about a “large bank failure” and … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 20, 2020 ~ It’s time to revisit that scene from the movie, The Big Short, where Steve Carell, playing Mark Baum, is sitting in the audience at the American Securitization Forum and interrupts the speaker on stage who has just stated that he expects subprime losses “will be contained at 5 percent.” Baum loudly asks: “Would you say that it is a possibility or a probability that subprime losses stop at 5 percent?” The speaker says: “I would say that it is a very strong probability, indeed.” Baum sits down but then begins to waive his arm in the air, forming a zero with his fingers. Baum then shouts out: “Zero! Zero! There is a zero percent chance that your subprime losses will stop at 5 percent.” You can view the scene from the movie below. That scene came to mind when we … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 19, 2020 ~ On May 2, 1985 the highest law enforcement officer in the United States, the head of the U.S. Department of Justice, Attorney General Edwin Meese, held a news conference to announce that the sixth largest brokerage firm on Wall Street, E.F. Hutton, was pleading guilty to 2,000 felony counts of wire and mail fraud. It had also agreed to pay criminal fines of $2 million and up to $8 million in restitution to the 400 banks it had defrauded. The fraud had lasted less than two years, from July 1, 1980 and February 28, 1982, and consisted of the following according to the Justice Department: “The essence of the charges was that Hutton obtained the interest-free use of millions of dollars by intentionally writing checks in excess of the funds it had on deposit in various banks.” On the following … Continue reading →