Search Results for: JPMorgan

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 5, 2016  From Riyadh to Tehran, Shanghai to Frankfurt, investors had plenty to sweat about yesterday. The culmination of this perfect storm landed in U.S. stock markets yesterday where the Dow Jones Industrial Average was shortly after 11 a.m. off by more than 450 points. The Dow closed the day down 276 points after some kindly buying support exceeding $1 billion from unknown sources came in to prop up the market at the close. The first weekend ahead of Monday’s stock market open got off to a bad start with trouble spots that are likely to challenge markets throughout this year. Saudi Arabia (a country that still refuses to grant women licenses to drive a car) engaged in mass executions of 47 people, one of whom was a Shia Muslim cleric, Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr. This set off wild protests in Iran, which has … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 4, 2016 Call them astroturf organizations or neoliberal think tanks or corporate front groups – it all adds up to the same thing: big corporate bucks are engaged in a vicious propaganda war to recast the 2008 financial crash and its depression-like aftermath as the product of big government meddling rather than corporate lobbyists strong-arming deregulation of banking and Wall Street. The corporate cartel simply cannot allow mandates for tough new regulations to gain footing in Washington, otherwise the multi-decade work of the Kochtopus goes poof. (Kochtopus is short-hand for the political and front group money machine run by billionaire brothers, Charles and David Koch.) The Koctopus now has its knickers in a twist over the release of the movie, The Big Short, directed by Adam McKay and based on the bestselling book by Michael Lewis, a former Wall Street insider. Prior to … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 30, 2015  Yesterday Larry Summers penned an opinion piece for the Washington Post, lecturing Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a Presidential candidate, on what Sanders should actually be saying in his own op-eds about reforming the Federal Reserve.  No one will ever accuse Larry Summers of being short on arrogance. After promising the American people in 1999, as Treasury Secretary in the Bill Clinton administration, that pushing through the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act would be “the right framework for America’s future financial system,” then watching that system collapse as a result of that repeal just nine years later in the worst economic upheaval since the Great Depression, one would think Summers would find some obscure hole in academia and crawl into it. Instead, Summers went on to become President of Harvard where, in 2005, he suggested at an economics conference that women … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 29, 2015  Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, has breathed new life into bolstering Americans belief in our Democratic system of government and the notion that one good man or good woman can make a meaningful difference in Congress. Senator Warren was the driving force behind the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau which has opened a robust two-way dialogue and redress system with the American people regarding the financial crimes being inflicted on them – otherwise known as Wall Street’s institutionalized wealth transfer system – while it is simultaneously under relentless assault by corporate attack dogs masquerading as Republican members of Congress. It was Senator Warren in 2013 that informed us that the so-called Independent Foreclosure Reviews to settle the claims of 4 million homeowners who had been illegally foreclosed on by the bailed out Wall Street banks were a sham. The … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 15, 2015 The selloff in junk bonds has rattled the markets and is raising questions about just who it is that is providing liquidity to the junk bond Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) — which have magically redeemed billions of dollars in withdrawals from retail investors while the underlying bonds in their portfolio are under severe stress in the broader marketplace. (Both a junk bond mutual fund and a separate hedge fund were forced to freeze investor withdrawals of their cash last week due to illiquidity in the junk bond market.) Unknown to most retail investors is that there is an entity called an “Authorized Participant” hiding behind the curtain of ETFs that is making that liquidity possible. According to an August 8, 2014 written question and answer exchange between the National Association of Insurance Commissioners and BlackRock and State Street – two large … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 14, 2015  Last week we saw shades of 2007 with both a hedge fund and junk bond mutual fund halting the ability of investors to withdraw funds. An additional credit hedge fund announced it is shutting down. The problem this time around is a dearth of liquidity (read buyers’ strike) for junk bonds. In 2007 the problem was subprime mortgage backed securities and related derivatives. On June 7, 2007, long before anyone recognized that they were in the first inning of what would become the epic financial crash of 2008, Bear Stearns quietly sent a letter to investors in its High-Grade Structured Credit Strategies Enhanced Leverage Fund, telling them it was suspending the ability of investors to withdrawal their money from the hedge fund because the “investment manager believes the company will not have sufficient liquid assets to pay investors.” The following month, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 8, 2015  Yesterday, the New York Times gave Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton a free infomercial (a/k/a OpEd) to spin her toothless plan “to rein in Wall Street.” Hillary begins by telling us this: “Seven years ago, the financial crisis sent our economy into a tailspin. Over five million people lost their homes. Nearly nine million lost their jobs. Nearly $13 trillion in household wealth was wiped out.” But that’s not what her husband, former President Bill Clinton told us was going to happen when he repealed the 66-year old Glass-Steagall Act on November 12, 1999. Here’s what Bill Clinton promised us from this massive deregulation of Wall Street: (See video of his full remarks below.) President Bill Clinton: “You heard Senator Gramm characterize this bill as a victory for freedom and free markets. And Congressman LaFalce characterized this bill as a victory for … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 30, 2015 The problem with Wall Street is not just that individual participants serially disrespect the law. The bigger problem is that Wall Street as an industry has structured itself as an ingrained law-avoidance system. There’s simply no other industry in America where you could start the sentence – “Wall Street is the only industry in America where…” – and find endless ways to finish that thought. Jamil Nazarali, the head of Citadel Execution Services, the trading arm of a hedge fund and dark pool operator, gave the above sentence a trial run on October 27 at a Securities and Exchange Commission meeting on market structure. Nazarali said: “This industry is the only one that I am aware of where a for-profit public company regulates its customers and competitors. And I understand that you guys think that that’s important but what is it … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 25, 2015 America’s new gilded age has been lined with Golden Parachutes with pathological underpinnings. On September 11, 2002, the Securities and Exchange Commission brought charges against the three top executives of Tyco International. The complaint began with this: “This is a looting case.” The SEC charged that Tyco’s CEO, Dennis Kozlowski and Mark Schwartz, its CFO, “took hundreds of millions of dollars in secret, unauthorized and improper low interest or interest-free loans and compensation from Tyco.” The transactions were concealed from shareholders and, according to the SEC, “Kozlowski and Swartz later pocketed tens of millions of dollars by causing Tyco to forgive repayment of many of their improper loans” and “engaged in numerous highly profitable related party transactions with Tyco and awarded themselves lavish perquisites — without disclosing either the transactions or perquisites to Tyco shareholders.” USA Today reported that the Manhattan … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 24, 2015  After lamenting in a recent book how Presidents George W. Bush and Obama didn’t answer his letters (Return to Sender: Unanswered Letters to the President, 2001-2015), Ralph Nader has finally been requited by a powerful person in Washington. Nader had the temerity to write Fed Chair Janet Yellen a letter on October 30, pointing out how the Fed’s zero bound interest rate policy is crimping the spending ability of savers who rely on such things as savings accounts and money market interest for added income to survive. Yesterday, Yellen boldly answered Nader’s letter with a smackdown. The letter has caused an outbreak of sexism charges against Nader by various writers for his suggestion in the letter that Yellen would be wise to “sit down with your Nobel Prize winning husband, economist George Akerlof, who is known to be consumer-sensitive.” Annie Lowrey … Continue reading →