By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 19, 2019 ~  In response to the stunning announcement from Facebook that it is planning to launch a cryptocurrency, Congresswoman Maxine Waters, the Chair of the House Financial Services Committee, issued the following statement yesterday: “Facebook has data on billions of people and has repeatedly shown a disregard for the protection and careful use of this data. It has also exposed Americans to malicious and fake accounts from bad actors, including Russian intelligence and transnational traffickers. Facebook has also been fined large sums and remains under a Federal Trade Commission consent order for deceiving consumers and failing to keep consumer data private, and has also been sued by the government for violating fair housing laws on its advertising platform. “With the announcement that it plans to create a cryptocurrency, Facebook is continuing its unchecked expansion and extending its reach into the lives of … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 18, 2019 ~ President Donald Trump has now tied his campaign, and himself, up in ticker tape. On June 15 the sitting President of the United States Tweeted the following message: “The Trump Economy is setting records, and has a long way up to go….However, if anyone but me takes over in 2020 (I know the competition very well), there will be a Market Crash the likes of which has not been seen before! KEEP AMERICA GREAT” First, since the stock market lost 90 percent of its value from 1929 to 1932 and the President is calling for “a Market Crash the likes of which has not been seen before,” he is effectively predicting that the stock market will lose 91 percent or more of its value. (Even for raging bears, that’s quite a stretch.) But since it’s the billionaires and multi-millionaires who … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 17, 2019 ~ U.S. stock markets have historically been challenged by corrupt actors. But there have been two extreme periods of corruption in the history of U.S. stock markets. One period occurred in the lead up to the 1929 stock market crash when Wall Street cartels were forming pools to wildly manipulate stock prices. That period led to an economic calamity known as the Great Depression. It also led to two years of intense hearings in the U.S. Senate to investigate the structure of the stock market, followed by intense legislative reforms including the Glass-Steagall Act, the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. The second period was the lead up to the 2008 stock market crash which led to the economic collapse known as the Great Recession. In that period, like 1929, Wall Street banks were allowed to … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 14, 2019 ~ According to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), as of September 30, 2018 there was a total of $13.6 trillion in deposits at all 5,397 Federally insured banking and savings institutions in the U.S. but just nine mega banks represented 40 percent of all domestic deposits. Those nine are the insured banking units of the holding company for JPMorgan Chase with $1.3 trillion in domestic deposits; Bank of America at $1.36 trillion; Wells Fargo with $1.27 trillion; Citigroup at $504 billion; U.S. Bancorp $314 billion; Morgan Stanley $181 billion; BB&T $161 billion; Goldman Sachs $130 billion; and State Street $108 billion. Unfortunately, the FDIC’s Deposit Insurance Fund had only $100.2 billion as of September 30, 2018 to cover losses should any of those trillion-dollar-banks fail – which means they can’t fail and have thus become known as too-big-to-fail, even as they continue to take … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 13, 2019 ~ Dark Pools are opaque stock trading platforms operated by the largest Wall Street banks and other firms. They are, effectively, stock exchanges but have been given exemptions by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) from having to register as a stock exchange or to submit to more rigorous oversight by the SEC. The rationale for the existence of Dark Pools owned by the mega banks has escaped the public since these are the same banks that are serially fined for abusing the public’s trust and rigging other markets like foreign exchange, Libor, and the Nasdaq stock market in the 1990s. Their conduct was so bad in the Nasdaq matter that they were forced to submit to having their trading phone calls taped and reviewed by regulators. Wall Street On Parade has written extensively about the highly suspect transactions that are … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 12, 2019 ~  The two greatest stock market crashes that triggered deep economic upheaval in the U.S. occurred from 1929 to 1932 and from 2008 to 2009. There has long been a debate as to why the 1929 crash was followed by a Great Depression while the 2008 epic crash, which took down century-old iconic names on Wall Street along with the U.S. housing market and labor market, was followed by a less severe Great Recession. Another debate about those two periods is why the stock market, as measured by the Dow Jones Industrial Average, took a quarter-century to regain the peak it had set in 1929 while the stock market returned to the peak it had set in 2007 just six years later. (See charts below.) We believe the answer is found in one word – debt. On January 1, 1939, after … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 11, 2019 ~ On September 25, 2013, after spending five years and 7,000 hours using taxpayers’ money investigating the potential rigging of the silver market, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) concluded that “there is not a viable basis to bring an enforcement action with respect to any firm or its employees related to our investigation of silver markets.” The investigation was provoked by multiple complaints asserting the market was rigged. The CFTC is a Federal regulator that oversees the U.S. commodities markets. The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) is also a Federal agency and the only one that can bring a criminal case against firms and individuals who commit conspiracy and fraud in commodity and securities markets. (The Securities and Exchange Commission can bring only civil, not criminal, cases.) On October 9 of last year, the DOJ used its criminal powers and … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 10, 2019 ~ On Friday markets digested the nonfarm payrolls report from the U.S. Labor Department showing a weak job growth in May of just 75,000. That news adds to a myriad of other economic data, including a slowdown in durable goods orders, that suggest a deceleration of the U.S. economy. The Atlanta Fed’s closely watched GDPNow indicator is showing a very weak 1.4 percent forecast for the second quarter of this year. The 10-year U.S. Treasury note has duly noted the deceleration in the economy and has fallen from a yield of 2.9 percent since the middle of December to 2.08 percent at Friday’s close. The yield of the U.S. Treasury has an inverse relationship to its price. That is, as the market value of the Treasury note rises, the yield declines. Thus, as the perception grows that the U.S. economy is … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 7, 2019 ~  Federal Reserve inspectors appear to be on some kind of mind-altering drug or their superiors are simply taking their marching orders from Wall Street cronies in the Trump Administration. Yesterday the Fed released a terse 104-word statement indicating that the largest and serially charged bank in the U.S., JPMorgan Chase, had shown “evidence of substantial improvements” in its “risk-management program and internal audit functions” and the Fed was therefore removing the dog collar it had put on the bank in January 2013. (JPMorgan Chase had been required to provide written progress reports to the New York Fed in 2013 until further notice – which became six years.) The Fed’s actions in 2013 stemmed from JPMorgan Chase secretly gambling with depositors’ money in exotic derivatives in London and losing at least $6.2 billion of those funds. The incident became infamously known … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 6, 2019 ~ The long-awaited final rule from the Securities and Exchange Commission called Regulation Best Interest, which grew out of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation and was intended to require that the nation’s stockbrokers put their clients’ interests ahead of their own, was voted on by the SEC yesterday. Three Republican Commissioners voted for it while the sole Democrat, Robert Jackson, voted against it and issued a detailed statement on why it sells out Main Street. SEC Chairman, Jay Clayton, was one of the three who voted in favor of passing the rule. Prior to joining the Trump administration as SEC Chair, Clayton was a law partner at one of Wall Street’s go-to law firms, Sullivan & Cromwell, where he had represented 8 of the 10 largest Wall Street banks within the prior three years. (See related articles below for how … Continue reading →