By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 22, 2019 ~ From this past Friday evening through Sunday, if you clicked on any of the web pages at the New York Fed pertaining to the hundreds of billions of dollars it has been pumping out weekly to Wall Street’s securities firms since September 17, you saw the message below: We emailed the New York Fed’s media contact and asked why all of the other web pages at the New York Fed were working just fine but only its repo operation data and announcements had up and disappeared. We received no response. The web pages have since been restored with some tweaking that seems to have the intent of making this massive money spigot to Wall Street, for the first time since the financial crisis, appear to be just your ole run of the mill open market operation from your ole reliable … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 22, 2019 ~ WeWork is just one more in a long series of Wall Street scandals that prove that the universal banking model is little more than a thinly-disguised wealth transfer system from the pockets of average Americans to the 1 percent. Just two months ago WeWork’s two lead Wall Street underwriters, JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs, were planning to offer WeWork’s shares to the public investor at a valuation in excess of $47 billion. Now we are learning that the company may run out of money next month and has an actual valuation of $8 billion or less. WeWork’s founder, Adam Neumann, who was attempting to cash out of his company that had never made a dime of profits in its nine years of existence and had run up losses of $900 million in just the first six months of this year, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 21, 2019 ~ This morning the Federal Reserve pumped another $58.15 billion into Wall Street securities firms under the repo loan program it initiated on September 17. That program has been pumping out hundreds of billions of dollars each week to Wall Street with no authorization from Congress, as far as the public is aware. We decided to take a look at Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell’s daily appointment calendars over the past few months to see if there was any hint of what precipitated the reopening of the Fed’s money spigot to Wall Street for the first time since the financial crisis. We found a very interesting pattern of phone calls and meetings in the month of August. On Thursday, August 1, Powell had a phone call with JPMorgan Chase’s Chairman and CEO, Jamie Dimon. The call lasted 7 minutes, from 10:30 … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: October 20, 2019 ~ Unbeknown to most Wall Street reporters today, Jamie Dimon played a major role in the 1990s in allowing for the perpetuation of an institutionalized system of sexual harassment and verbal degradation of women on Wall Street. Dimon’s role, which we will detail later in this article, is a critical backdrop for the recent Ken Fisher humiliation of women at an investment conference. On the afternoon of Tuesday, October 8, the money manager Ken Fisher of Fisher Investments was on stage at the Tiburon CEO Summit with Chip Roame, the Managing Partner of Tiburon Strategic Advisors, the host of the investment conference. Attendees at the conference were made up of approximately 200 men and 20 women. Against that backdrop, Fisher apparently felt comfortable on stage to humiliate the women in the audience by comparing the acquisition of investment clients to “trying to get into … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 18, 2019 ~ Shhh! Don’t tell Congress that the Federal Reserve is back to electronically creating money out of thin air to throw at a liquidity problem (of an, as yet, undetermined origin) on Wall Street. And be sure not to mention that the Fed’s balance sheet has shot up in a period of just 42 days by $253 billion. And, of course, don’t remind Congress that before the last Wall Street crisis was over the Fed had secretly, with no oversight from Congress, piled up a $29 trillion tab to bail out Wall Street — a fact it fought years in court to keep under wraps. On September 4, 2019, the Fed’s assets on its balance sheet stood at $3.761 trillion. As of October 16, that figure is $4.014 trillion, edging closer to the $4.5 trillion peak it reached in 2015 following the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 17, 2019 ~ Academics and historians who attempt to compare the epic Wall Street crash of 2007- 2010 to the next one that’s inevitably coming won’t be able to count on publicly available articles from Bloomberg News. As we reported on Monday, critical articles by a top investigative reporter at Bloomberg News, Mark Pittman, that exposed the corrupt cronyism between Wall Street and the Federal Reserve have gone missing on the Internet. Just this morning we located yet another key article from Bloomberg News that has just up and disappeared on the Internet. Put this 2008 Bloomberg headline in the Google search box with the quotes included and see what happens: “Citigroup Unravels as Reed Regrets Universal Model.” Bloomberg News informed us that Pittman’s articles are still available on the Bloomberg terminal. That’s a market data and news terminal that hundreds of thousands … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 16, 2019 ~ Yesterday, the Public Investors Advocate Bar Association (PIABA) Foundation released a research study showing that Wall Street’s banks and brokerage firms are back to their old tricks again in gaming the private justice system that its crony self-regulator, FINRA, has carved out for the benefit of Wall Street to the detriment of Main Street. PIABA previously exposed how FINRA, when it was called NASD, rigged the selection process for picking arbitrators so that the croniest ones kept getting selected. PIABA released this statement on July 20, 2000: “In direct and flagrant violation of federal law, the NASD systematically evaded the Securities and Exchange Commission approved ‘Neutral List Selection System’ arbitration rule requiring arbitrators to be selected on a rotating basis. Instead, the NASD secretly programmed its computers to select some arbitrators on a seniority basis – just what the rule was … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 15, 2019 ~  The mega banks on Wall Street report earnings this week led off by JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and Wells Fargo this morning. Among the items of interest in JPMorgan Chase’s written presentation was that it spent $6.7 billion in this past third quarter buying up its own stock and thus boosting its stock price artificially beyond outside investor demand. The third quarter buybacks of its stock came on top of spending $5 billion in the second quarter and $4.7 billion in the first quarter, bringing its net repurchases of its own stock just so far this year to a whopping $16.4 billion — money that could have otherwise gone to loans to small businesses to kickstart innovation and job growth in America. This Thursday, the House Financial Services’ Subcommittee on Investor Protection, Entrepreneurship and Capital Markets will hold a … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 14, 2019 ~  Mark Pittman was the Bloomberg News reporter responsible for the Bloomberg lawsuit against the Federal Reserve seeking the names of the banks and their share of the trillions of dollars that the Fed was secretly funneling to them during the financial crisis. Pittman had already shared in a Gerald Loeb award for Bloomberg’s five-part series, “Wall Street’s Faustian Bargain,” and many felt he was a lock for a Pulitzer. But one week before Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke was to sit for his Senate Confirmation hearing on his reappointment to another term as Fed Chairman, Pittman died of a heart attack at age 52 on November 25, 2009. At the time of Pittman’s death, the Fed was still refusing to release the details of its secret loans, despite losing its court battle at the Federal District Court. The appellate court … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 11, 2019 ~ It’s long past the time for the U.S. Congress to ask the overarching question: is the New York Fed’s massive loan program to Wall Street firms even legal? And was it legal from 2007 to 2010 during the financial collapse on Wall Street? The Federal Reserve system was created in 1913 with a Discount Window that was to be the lender-of-last resort to deposit-taking banks to prevent panics and bank runs from bringing down the U.S. banking system. To this day, only deposit-taking institutions are allowed to borrow at the Fed’s Discount Window. The core function of deposit-taking banks throughout U.S. history has been to use those deposits to lend to worthy businesses that can help grow the U.S. economy, keep America competitive, and bring good paying jobs to the American people. Never in its history has the Federal Reserve, … Continue reading →