Search Results for: is the new york fed too conflicted

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 2, 2016 In the Afterword that appears in the paperback edition of “Flash Boys,” author Michael Lewis writes that following the publication of the hardcover edition of the book in 2014 and his appearance on 60 Minutes (in which he called the U.S. stock market rigged and mapped out the case against high frequency trading) “it has sounded like a desperate bid by a slumlord to gussy the place up to distract inspectors. In any case, the slumlords seem to realize that doing nothing is no longer an option: Too many people were too upset.” Doing nothing while going through the motions of doing something perfectly defines the Securities and Exchange Commission. Today the Securities and Exchange Commission is continuing its illusion of dealing with the rigged structure of the U.S. stock market by holding a meeting of its Equity Market Structure Advisory … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 20, 2016  An article in the Washington Post yesterday continued the paper’s unrelenting efforts to marginalize Senator Bernie Sanders and his effort to press forward on his call for a political revolution in America.  The Post article brandished its most preposterous cudgel yet: the cost of Senator Sanders’ continuing protection by the Secret Service, which it suggested was a drain on taxpayers. Calling Sanders the “now-vanquished Democratic presidential candidate,” the Post’s John Wagoner laments that even though “Hillary Clinton has clinched the party’s nomination,” Sanders is still receiving Secret Service protection which could be costing taxpayers more than $38,000 a day. In fact, Clinton hasn’t clinched anything until there is an official vote taken at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, July 25-28, no matter how much corporate media might wish otherwise. And since there has never been a Presidential candidate like Clinton, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 10, 2016  A little noticed 2008 email from former Federal Reserve Chairman, Ben Bernanke, raises serious questions about his official narrative on the collapse of Lehman Brothers. We’ll get to the email in detail, but first some necessary background.  A lot of eyes rolled on Wall Street last October when Ben Bernanke, who chaired the Federal Reserve in the lead up to and during the financial collapse in 2008, released his memoir of the financial crisis with the title: “The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and its Aftermath.” Many Wall Street observers felt the title would have more correctly captured the facts on the ground had it read: “The Lack of Fed Courage to Supervise Mega Banks Led to an Epic Collapse.” (In the leadup to the crisis, the Fed allowed Citigroup CEO Sandy Weill and JPMorgan Chase CEO, Jamie … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 23, 2016 Remember Harry Markopolos? That’s the tenacious financial expert that pounded on the door of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for years, providing it with detailed, written evidentiary support for the premise that Bernie Madoff, the respected former Chairman of the NASDAQ stock market, was running a massive Ponzi scheme. The SEC never confirmed the fraud before Madoff confessed as he ran out of money in December 2008 because it skipped the most basic of investigation techniques: it failed to verify if real stocks and bonds actually existed in Madoff’s client portfolios. They didn’t. There’s a new Markopolos in town with that same brand of leave-no-stone-unturned tenacity and he has his sights set on the charity operations of Hillary and Bill Clinton, known as the Clinton Foundation and its myriad tentacles. Ortel’s actions come just as Hillary Clinton makes her final … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 16, 2016  Since Wall Street’s felony counts last May (see “Related Articles” below) and the unleashing of ever more creative ways to fleece the populace, it’s getting tougher and tougher to find people willing to shill for the Wall Street claptrap that it’s been punished enough and it’s time to put the bashing to rest. It’s getting tougher — but not impossible. Matt Winkler, the Bloomberg News Editor-in-Chief Emeritus, wrote an opinion piece and appeared on Bloomberg TV last week to regurgitate the threadbare “Stop Bashing Wall Street. Times Have Changed” refrain. Winkler starts off with this premise: “One of the reasons the American economy is performing better than any of the largest in Asia and Europe is that its regulators have repaired the damage of the financial crisis and the worst recession since the Great Depression. Led by the Federal Reserve, they … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 7, 2016 It was considered big news last week that House members Maxine Waters of the Financial Services Committee and Al Green of the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations have requested that the Government Accountability Office (GAO) launch an investigation of “regulatory capture” on Wall Street. That news broke on Friday, one day after Senator Elizabeth Warren grilled the head of a Wall Street self-regulatory agency in a Senate hearing on a new study showing that stockbrokers with serial records of misconduct are allowed to remain in the industry. Warren also cited another recent study showing that even when investors prevail in arbitrations against bad brokers, they may never get paid. According to the study, over $60 million in fines owed to investors have not been paid since 2013. The individual that Senator Warren was grilling is Richard Ketchum, head of the Financial … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 4, 2016  There are 15 U.S. Senators who are members of the U.S. Senate Banking Committee’s Subcommittee on Securities, Insurance, and Investment that has been investigating the charges that the stock market is rigged by the stock exchanges along with dark pools run by large broker-dealers that are operated as opaque, unregulated quasi stock exchanges, high frequency traders at hedge funds, conflicted payment for order flow, and tricked-up order types – to mention just a few of the ways the public investor is getting fleeced. The Subcommittee held a critically important hearing yesterday to review what progress the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), the self-regulatory Wall Street watchdog, were making to rein in the abuses on Wall Street. Despite the lack of trust the public feels toward Wall Street and the abysmal 14 percent approval rating … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 8, 2016  Senator Richard Shelby (R-Alabama), the Chair of the U.S. Senate Banking Committee, has announced a hearing on March 3 at 10:00 a.m. to examine “Regulatory Reforms to Improve Equity Market Structure.” To appropriately conduct that hearing, all the lights should be turned out in the hearing room and the senators and witnesses should have to fumble and stumble their way to their seats in the dark, since that’s what American investors have been forced to do since the 2008 crash – a tortuously long seven years of make-believe financial reform. Following the 1929 crash, whose economic impact was also swift and devastating, the Senate Banking Committee spent the years of 1932 through 1934 holding comprehensive hearings and investigations on the structure of the stock market. The hearings unraveled, day by day, the frauds that the Wall Street titans of that era … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 31, 2016 Today’s digital edition of The New York Times captures the essence of the cancer eating away at our democracy: a leading newspaper is endorsing a deeply tarnished candidate for the highest office in America while a major Wall Street bank that has played a key role in her conflicted candidacy runs a banner ad as if to salute the endorsement. The slogan on Citigroup’s ad, “cash back once just isn’t enough,” perfectly epitomizes the frequency with which the Clintons have gone to the Citigroup well. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, among the top five largest lifetime donors to Hillary’s campaigns, Citigroup tops the list, with three other Wall Street banks also making the cut: Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley. (The monies come from employees and/or family members or PACs of the firms, not the corporation itself.) Hillary … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 6, 2016 Presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont gave a speech yesterday that is destined to go down in the history books of this era, further enshrining him as one of the most courageous voices of our time. Sanders promised to break up the serially criminally-inclined banks on Wall Street and reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act to drive a permanent stake through the heart of too-big-to-fail. But if you watched either his official campaign’s YouTube video of his speech or the one provided by volunteers for his campaign, three key passages of what he said have gone missing from the video. We were able to reconstruct the full speech as delivered by transcribing the three missing sections from a YouTube video posted by the PBS Newshour which, notably, had no gaps in its video. (Watch the PBS video of the speech at the … Continue reading →