In-depth research on public interest topics frequently ignored by corporate media. (For most recent reports, scroll to the end.)
Maria Bartiromo and the Co-Branding of CNBC and Citigroup: February 2, 2007
The cozy nexus between CNBC and Citigroup, the company on which it is supposed to be providing objective reporting.
Madoff and the SEC’s Revolving Door: August 31, 2009
…the background of the member of the team heading up the Inspector General’s Office of Investigations, J. David Fielder, should have sounded alarm bells to Congressional investigators.
Wall Street Titans Use Aliases to Foreclose on Families: October 5, 2009
A federal agency tasked with expanding the American dream of home ownership and affordable housing free from discrimination to people of modest means has been quietly moving a chunk of that role to Wall Street since 2002. In a stealth partial privatization, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) farmed out its mandate of working with single family homeowners in trouble on their mortgages to the industry most responsible for separating people from their savings and creating an unprecedented wealth gap that renders millions unable to pay those mortgages.
Judges Start Nixing Foreclosures By Wall Street Firms: October 21, 2009
The financial tsunami unleashed by Wall Street’s esurient alchemy of spinning toxic home mortgages into triple-A bonds, a process known as securitization, has set off its second round of financial tremors.
After leaving mortgage investors, bank shareholders, and pension fiduciaries awash in losses and a large chunk of Wall Street feeding at the public trough, the full threat of this vast securitization machine and its unseen masters who push the levers behind a tightly drawn curtain is playing out in courtrooms across America.
Why A Criminal Case Against Goldman Sachs Matters and Why Charges Could Stick: May 4, 2010
Change appears to be swallowing Goldman Sachs. It began quietly moving out of its storied and staid headquarters at 85 Broad last Fall to flashy new multi-billion dollar digs at 200 West Street, including a 54,000 square foot gym (roughly the size of 20 homes for average Americans; those who can still afford one after the Wall Street pillage). And after the release of internal emails by the SEC and Senate, Goldman looks more like a sleazy boiler room pump and dump operation in drag than an investment bank (in drag as a bank holding company). Comedy talk show hosts are having a field day (Jon Stewart calls them “those f*!*!ing guys”) and Goldmanfreude (pleasure in watching Goldman shamed for the pain it inflicted on others) is in full swing.
The May 6 Stock Crash Revisited: May 12, 2010
Cumulatively, mom and pop investors lost many millions of dollars on their stop loss orders from this free fall on May 6. Only those trades occurring between 2:40 and 3 pm that were 60 percent or more away from the market are being cancelled. That means the losses in Procter & Gamble and dozens of other stocks are real losses for those who got stopped out and real profits for those on the other side of the trade.
Over my 21 years on Wall Street, I never saw anything as suspicious as the trading activity on May 6 or as nonresponsive as the SEC’s investigation to date.
SEC Admits to Lacking Tools to Conduct Meaningful Investigations: May 17, 2010
SEC Chair Mary Schapiro made a stunning admission during House subcommittee hearings last week seeking answers to the May 6 hit and run in the stock market which briefly trimmed 998 points off the Dow and caused massive losses to small investors who had placed stop loss orders on individual stocks.
According to Ms. Schapiro, the SEC has no consolidated audit trail that captures time and sales in a chronological order among the 40 or more electronic trading platforms and exchanges that constitute today’s deeply fragmented U.S. stock market.
Flash Crash Report Raises Suspicions on Stock Exchanges Inside Wall Street Firms: October 4, 2010
“Detailed analysis of trade and order data revealed that one large internalizer (as a seller) and one large market maker (as a buyer) were party to over 50 per cent of the share volume of broken trades, and for more than half of this volume they were counterparties to each other (i.e., 25 per cent of the broken trade share volume was between this particular seller and buyer).”
Koch Footprints Lead to Secret Slush Fund to Keep Fear Alive: October 26, 2010
A secretive libertarian nonprofit with ties to Charles Koch bankrolled what was widely perceived to be a fear mongering effort to throw the Presidential election to Senator John McCain in 2008. Until now, where the money came from has been a hotly debated mystery.
The Hidden Cost of Free Market Newsmen: September 12, 2011
When Larry Kudlow of CNBC, WABC Radio and National Review speaks, who’s really talking? Is it Kudlow or is it the $332,500 he has pocketed from the Koch-funded Mercatus Center. While Kudlow did previously acknowledge accepting $50,000 from Enron after he wrote an article about the company and failed to disclose it, he has not disclosed the Mercatus money to readers of his columns, blog or to viewers of his programs as he openly pitches the Mercatus/Koch agenda.
When John Stossel gives us his free market shtick on his weekly program on the Fox Business Network, who’s putting the words in his mouth? Is Stossel a muckracker or a buckracker in the debt of a web of shadowy right wing nonprofits that manage his name and message?
Supreme Seduction: Bringing Low the High Court: October 3, 2011
For the past three years the U.S. has been served up a heaping dose of free market creative destruction that is the sine qua non of legions of corporate funded front groups. First Wall Street, then housing, now the nation’s highest court has been brought low by its force. As it turns out, creative destruction is 90 percent corruption and 10 percent creative.
Wall Street Firms Spy on Protesters in Tax-Funded Center: October 18, 2011
Wall Street’s audacity to corrupt knows no bounds and the cooptation of government by the 1 per cent knows no limits. How else to explain $150 million of taxpayer money going to equip a government facility in lower Manhattan where Wall Street firms, serially charged with corruption, get to sit alongside the New York Police Department and spy on law abiding citizens.
Libor Scandal: The Unvarnished Story of Wall Street’s Heist of the Century: July 16, 2012
When much of Wall Street collapsed in 2008 as a direct result of their corrupt business model, their pals in Washington used the public purse to resuscitate the same corrupt financial model – allowing even greater depositor concentration at JPMorgan and Bank of America through acquisitions of crippled firms. And now, Wall Street may get away with the biggest heist of the public purse in the history of the world. You know it’s an unprecedented crime when the conservative Economist magazine sums up the situation with a one word headline: “Banksters.”
As if we needed more evidence – the Second Circuit Appellate Court handed down a decision yesterday strongly suggesting that if you stick with the Wall Street traders’ code and steal for the house, you’re good to go. But take money from the house and all manner of deceit will be leveraged against you to convict. The Wall Street Code is inviolate; the order of things must be maintained at all cost.
U.S. Ally Abu Dhabi Levels $4 Billion Fraud Charge Against Citigroup: September 5, 2012
It started with a handshake from former U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin; now it’s a Federal case with its own Wikileaks memo.
Meet the Lawyer Who Gets Citigroup Out of Fraud Charges: September 6, 2012
The litany of fraud charges against Citigroup, accompanied by the perpetual get-out-of-jail-free card reliably delivered by Brad Karp, has become so ubiquitous that it raises the obvious question: is Citigroup the hapless target of a world-wide network of frivolous lawsuit filers, or does Brad Karp have some secret sauce for getting a serial miscreant off the hook?
By mid morning today, as Occupy Wall Street protesters marched around the perimeter of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, all signs that an FRPD (Federal Reserve Police Department) existed had disappeared. The FRPD patrol cars and law enforcement officers had been replaced by NYPD patrol cars and officers. That decision may have been made to keep from drawing attention to a mushrooming new domestic police force that most Americans do not know exists. Quietly, without fanfare or Congressional hearings, the USA Patriot Act in 2001 bestowed on the 12 privately owned Federal Reserve Banks, domestic policing powers.
Since at least 1998 the U.S. Department of Labor, which oversees the nation’s 401(k) plans, has known that fee gouging was eroding the ability of workers to adequately build wealth for retirement in 401(k) plans. It took more than a decade for the Federal agency to pass a regulation mandating that 401(k) recipients receive fee disclosure in an annual mailing. Leading the charge against full disclosure was a coalition of trade associations dominated by Wall Street.
A review of deeds and mortgages in some of the toniest towns on the East Coast reveals that not only is New York University financing luxury Manhattan brownstones and high rise condos for its faculty and administrators out of its nonprofit coffers, it has also been secretly financing country homes for a select group. These extravagances have fallen directly on the shoulders of financially struggling students. NYU ranks fourth in Newsweek’s 2012 list of the least affordable colleges.
During 2007 and 2008, Citigroup entered an intractable death spiral owing to a decade of obscene executive pay, off balance sheet debt, toxic assets and mismanagement of its unwieldy disparate business lines. Instead of functioning as the tough cop on the beat in regulating Citigroup, Geithner hobnobbed, holding 29 breakfasts, lunches, dinners and other meetings with Citigroup executives.
JPMorgan and Madoff Were Facilitating Nesting Dolls-Style Frauds Within Frauds: January 13, 2014
Last week JPMorgan Chase paid $2.6 billion in fines and restitution, signed a deferred prosecution agreement and walked away from their 22-year involvement with Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. But according to court documents filed in 2011 by the Trustee of the Madoff victims’ fund, Irving Picard, this was not a simple case of poor risk management at JPMorgan. This was an operation structured like those Russian nesting dolls, with the Ponzi scheme as the outside doll with many more frauds layered inside the big one.
One reason that JPMorgan may have such a spooky feel is that it has aligned itself in no small way with real-life spooks, the CIA kind.
The probability of two vibrant young men in their 30s who are employed by the same global bank but separated by an ocean dying within six days of each other is remote. And few companies are in as good a position to understand just how remote as is JPMorgan: since 2010, it has received four patents on quantifying longevity risks and structuring wagers via death derivatives.
Fed Chair Bernanke Held 84 Secret Meetings in the Lead Up to the Wall Street Collapse: March 10, 2014
It’s been over five years since the collapse of iconic Wall Street firms such as Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers; the insolvency and bailout of AIG and Citigroup; the receivership of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; the shotgun marriage of Bank of America and Merrill Lynch. After a 5-year delay, the Federal Reserve has released the full transcripts of its meetings in 2007 and 2008 – the two key years of the crisis. But for unexplained reasons, the Fed Chairman, Ben Bernanke continues to redact 84 meetings from his appointment calendar that occurred between January 1, 2007 and the pivotal collapse of Bear Stearns on the weekend of March 15-16, 2008.
Swiss Insurers and JPMorgan Have More than ‘Suicides’ in Common: March 11, 2014
It now emerges that there are significant financial ties between JPMorgan Chase, which experienced three suspicious deaths of employees in their 30s in January and February of this year, and two Swiss insurers where a suspicious executive death occurred in August of 2013 and another this past January, the week before a JPMorgan executive was found dead on a 9th level rooftop of the bank’s European headquarters in London.
Slain MassMutual Executive Held Wall Street “Trade Secrets”: December 8, 2014
…Information has now emerged that Melissa Millan had access to highly sensitive data on bank profits resulting from the collection of life insurance proceeds on the death of their workers – data that a Federal regulator of banks has characterized as “trade secrets.”
What’s Really Behind the Flash-Crash Trader Prosecution? April 30, 2015
The Justice Department’s case against the 36 year old lone bedroom trader in the U.K., Navinder Singh Sarao, has now been thoroughly discredited by every Wall Street veteran who has studied it, most pointing out that what Sarao did is happening every second that Wall Street is open for business. Business writers at the New York Times, Financial Times, Newsweek, and Bloomberg View have given the charges an unequivocal thumbs down.
Just hours before Lucas was found dead, there had been a major housecleaning of DNC officials implicated in the DNC emails leaked by Wikileaks, showing that key executives had secretly strategized on how to sabotage the campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders while bolstering the campaign for Hillary Clinton.
If you are one of the lucky Americans who has not already been mugged in the shopping aisles of the financial supermarkets, you should carefully browse through the database to see what awaits the unwary.
The Untold Story of 9/11: Bailing Out Alan Greenspan’s Legacy: September 11, 2016
Here’s where Wall Street and the U.S. economy stood on September 10, 2001, the day before an attack in lower Manhattan provided the excuse for the Federal Reserve to flood Wall Street with unquestioned amounts of cash: The Nasdaq stock market, filled with the stocks of rigged analyst research from the iconic firms on Wall Street (the target of Spitzer’s investigation), had imploded, losing 66 percent of its pumped up value and wiping out $4 trillion in wealth. While it wasn’t yet known at the time, being only officially acknowledged long after 9/11, the U.S. economy had contracted for two consecutive quarters and was looking at another negative quarter of growth.
Wall Street Banks Are Trading in Their Own Company’s Stock: How Is This Legal? : February 15, 2017
Increasingly, under the mantra of liquidity, trading activity on Wall Street that would have resulted in criminal charges in another era is yawned at by regulators. The week that Donald Trump shocked markets around the globe by getting himself elected President of the United States, Wall Street banks like Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and others traded millions of shares of each other’s stocks – as well as trading millions of shares of their own publicly traded stock. The trades were not directed to a regulated stock exchange like the New York Stock Exchange. Instead, the trades were conducted internally by the Wall Street bank’s own Dark Pool – an entity appropriately named for its darkness and hands-off regulation.
President Trump’s nominee to head the Securities and Exchange Commission, Walter J. (Jay) Clayton, a law partner at Sullivan & Cromwell, has represented 8 of the 10 largest Wall Street banks as recently as within the last three years.
The 2017 Memorial Day weekend will inevitably go down in history as the three-day span when remembrances of our military veterans took a media backseat to President Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and everything Russian. One of the key areas under multiple probes is a meeting Kushner held in December with Sergey Gorkov, the Chairman of Vnesheconombank (VEB), a Russian state-owned bank which has been under U.S. sanctions since July 2014 for Russia’s annexation of Crimea and aggression in Ukraine.
Donald Trump’s New Lawyer Tied to a Shadowy Web of Nonprofits: June 22, 2017
Four years ago Wall Street On Parade published an investigative report with the headline: “Jay Sekulow: The Man Pumping the IRS Scandal on Network TV Sits at the Center of a Web of Nonprofits That Have Paid Him, His Family and Related Businesses $40 Million Since 1998.” Add millions of dollars more to the above figure and you have an updated account of the man the President of the United States just added to his white collar criminal defense legal team. Oh yes, there’s one more update, Jay Sekulow has no white collar criminal defense legal experience.
Trump Transition Team Emails: Here’s Why Washington Insiders Are Freaking Out: December 18, 2017
On Saturday, the news broke that Kory Langhofer, counsel to Donald Trump’s transition team known as Trump for America, Inc. (TFA), had sent a 7-page letter to House and Senate Committees stating that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office had improperly received “tens of thousands of emails” from the General Services Administration (GSA), a Federal agency, that had been sent or received by members of Trump’s transition team.
Yes, James Freeman, We Do Know How Bad the Federal Reserve Is: August 10, 2018
At Wall Street On Parade, we know exactly how bad the Federal Reserve is. Before 1999, the Federal Reserve typified the assessment of American democracy – the worst form of government, except for all the others. In 1999, Alan Greenspan, then Chair of the Federal Reserve, got what he and Wall Street had been pushing for years to achieve: the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act which had protected the U.S. financial system for 66 years by barring banks holding Federally-insured deposits from combining with investment banks engaged in underwriting and trading in securities. In 2010, Wall Street got the balance of its wish list: the Dodd Frank financial reform legislation made the Federal Reserve the primary regulator of the now behemoth Wall Street bank holding companies, despite the fact that it had been asleep at the switch as the worst financial crash since the Great Depression was incubating on Wall Street.
