Search Results for: JPMorgan

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: 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. In an effort to create the illusion that there is some element of transparency about what is going on in these … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 14, 2017  Today’s news headlines are not the stuff of confidence-building. It seems like a 241-year old democracy should have gotten its act together a lot better by now. Bloomberg News is reporting that 17 of the most prestigious colleges and universities in the country (including Harvard, Yale and Stanford) have filed court papers seeking to join a lawsuit in a Brooklyn Federal court against President Donald Trump’s hastily constructed Executive Order. The Order called for an immigration ban which has drawn a flurry of lawsuits, nationwide protests and a rebuke by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The schools told the court that during the last academic year, more than one million international students studied at U.S. universities and now, as a result of the immigrant ban, 42,000 scholars, including Nobel Laureates, are calling for a boycott of educational conferences in the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 9, 2017 Jeb Hensarling is the Republican Chair of the Financial Services Committee in the U.S. House of Representatives. Despite the seriousness of that job, Hensarling displays amazing ignorance of the inner workings of Wall Street at the hearings over which he presides. Unlike Senator Bernie Sanders who stumped around the country for more than a year during his primary campaign, reinforcing to Americans what they already suspected, that “the business model of Wall Street is fraud,” Hensarling wants to kill the few restraints on this criminal cartel that currently exist. He has been well financed by Wall Street to get the job done. Among Hensarling’s largest donors for his 2016 re-election campaign were every major Wall Street bank, including two admitted criminal felons (JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup’s Citicorp) as well as those charged with market rigging and serial frauds against the investing … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 31, 2017 In the midst of being skewered across media outlets yesterday for his chaotic rollout of an Executive Order that appeared to target Muslims, including those legally living in the U.S. as businessmen, doctors, university faculty and students — who were initially denied reentry after travel abroad — President Donald Trump tried desperately to change the subject. Following a plunge of over 200 points in the Dow Jones Industrial Average yesterday, Trump pivoted to something he thought would please his financial backers on Wall Street. He called the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation passed in 2010 by the Obama administration a “disaster” and promised to “do a big number” on it soon. The Dow closed down 122 points — now wary of Trump’s fire-ready-aim leadership on complex matters. The legitimate fear across Wall Street right now is that Trump’s zero-vetting approach to rule-by-Executive-Order … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 17, 2017 The currency of Washington’s power politics is campaign money. Much of that campaign money flows from Wall Street’s biggest banks: its lobbyists, its Political Action Committees, its employees and their spouses. After flooding the presidential campaign with money, Wall Street is then rewarded by being allowed to make cabinet hiring decisions as part of the new President’s transition team, ensuring continuity government and an incurable malignancy on American democracy. To begin the process of draining the corrupt swamp in Washington, it means cutting off the money flow from Wall Street – not looking for a new savior who is deeply indebted to the same Wall Street banks. Tens of millions of U.S. consumers have the power to pull the plug on the swamp by moving their deposits from big Wall Street banks to their local community banks or their credit union. … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 11, 2017  As Goldman Sachs guys prepare to take the reins of power in Washington under the Trump administration, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) provided a tragic reminder on Monday regarding the power of the U.S. citizen versus their Wall Street overlords. The GAO released a study showing that as of October 31, 2016, the government “had disbursed $22.6 billion (60 percent) of the $37.51 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) funds” that were directed at helping distressed homeowners as a result of the 2008 Wall Street financial crash and the resulting housing bust. Those paltry billions stand in stark contrast to the $7.8 trillion in near-zero interest loans that the Federal Reserve secretly funneled to just four Wall Street banks from 2007 to 2010. The Fed funneled $2.5 trillion to Citigroup; $2 trillion to Morgan Stanley; $1.9 trillion to Merrill Lynch; and … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 6, 2017 Northwest Ohio supporters of Senator Bernie Sanders in his run for President have launched a nationwide push to enlist other organizations to send it letters and take to social media to endorse a demand that President-elect Donald Trump fulfill a campaign pledge. Trump made the pledge on October 26 of last year in a speech he delivered in Charlotte, North Carolina, promising to enact a 21st Century Glass-Steagall Act to reform Wall Street. Such legislation has been sitting dormant in both the House and Senate for years. If enacted, it would separate the deposit-taking, taxpayer-insured commercial banks from the globe-trotting, high-risk trading casinos known as investment banks on Wall Street. The 1933 Glass-Steagall Act kept the financial system of the United States safe for 66 years until its repeal in 1999 during the Bill Clinton presidency. It took only nine years … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 3, 2017 Just 17 days from today, Donald Trump will be sworn in as the nation’s 45th President and deliver his inaugural address. Trump is expected to announce priorities in the areas of education, infrastructure, border security, the economy and curtailing the outsourcing of jobs. But Trump’s agenda will be derailed on all fronts if the big Wall Street banks blow up again as they did in 2008, dragging the U.S. economy into the ditch and requiring another massive taxpayer bailout from a nation already deeply in debt from the last banking crisis. According to a report quietly released by the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Financial Research less than two weeks before Christmas, another financial implosion on Wall Street can’t be ruled out. The Office of Financial Research (OFR), a unit of the U.S. Treasury, was created under the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 30, 2016 We have noticed throughout this past year that when the Standard and Poor’s 500 index of stocks sold off, big banks’ share prices sold off by dramatically more on a percentage basis. Yesterday, notwithstanding the big rally bank stocks have enjoyed since Donald Trump’s win on November 8, the big banks once again dramatically outpaced the S&P 500 on the downside. The S&P lost 0.03 percent while the major Wall Street banks like Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America lost over 1 percent. It was a worthwhile reminder that the hurdles the big banks have experienced this year have not diminished – by any means. As 2016 began, the big, globally-interconnected Wall Street banks were facing serious headwinds. The Fed had just hiked rates and oil prices could not find a floor and neither could the share prices … Continue reading →