By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 8, 2019 ~  For years now, Wall Street On Parade has been pointing out to our readers that the Wall Street mega banks remain dangerously interconnected, despite the fact that those interconnections stopped banks from lending to one another in 2008; resulted in the largest government bailout of Wall Street in U.S. history; and ended up taking down the U.S. housing market and global economy. Whenever there is a major selloff in the broader stock market, the Wall Street mega banks typically bleed far more than the major stock indices. Yesterday, however, something curious and potentially noteworthy happened. The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 473.3 points or 1.79 percent and the following Wall Street banks traded in line with that decline: JPMorgan Chase actually lost a little less than the Dow with a decline of 1.63 percent. Bank of America and Goldman Sachs … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 7, 2019 ~  If you needed more proof that the United States is heading in the direction of a dystopian authoritarian state, it arrived last Thursday, May 2, when the Chief Judge for the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York wrote a decision finding that the U.S. Justice Department had outsourced a criminal investigation to the target of the investigation – Deutsche Bank – and Deutsche Bank’s outside law firm, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison. Making the matter all the more interesting, the Chief Judge who wrote the decision, Colleen McMahon, formerly worked for Paul Weiss for 19 years, rising to the rank of partner. She remains, according to this profile, close friends with a number of former and current Paul Weiss lawyers. Judge McMahon’s takedown of the government’s cozy relationship with Deutsche Bank and Paul Weiss has … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 6, 2019 ~ In May 2012 when New York Times reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin wrote his severely factually-challenged analysis of whether the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act had led to the Wall Street collapse in 2008, he seemed to have an agenda of undermining Elizabeth Warren, then running for her first U.S. Senate seat from Massachusetts, in her push to restore the Glass-Steagall Act. That legislation, which was formally known as the Banking Act of 1933, created Federal insurance on deposits held in commercial banks while barring those banks from being under the same roof with the Wall Street casino – that is, high risk securities underwriting and trading firms known as investment banks and broker-dealers. The legislation grew out of two intense years of Senate investigations from 1932-1934 which concluded that the “unsavory and unethical” practices by Wall Street securities trading firms … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 3, 2019 ~ During the question and answer period of Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell’s press conference on Wednesday, Michael McKee of Bloomberg News asked the Chairman the following question: “I’m curious about the financial conditions that you see out there. The minutes of the March meeting tell us a few officials worried about financial stability risks. Was there a broader discussion at this meeting? Any consensus on whether such risks are growing as the markets hit new highs and we do see some instability in short-end trading. Is it possible that rates are too low at this point?” Powell answered the first part of the question as follows: “…I’d say that the headline really is that while there are some concerns around nonfinancial corporate debt, really the finding is that overall financial stability vulnerabilities are moderate on balance and, in addition, I … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 2, 2019 ~  There is a little noticed audio tape of an interview conducted on August 5, 2010 by investigators for the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC), a body convened under the Fraud Enforcement Recovery Act of 2009 to investigate the 2008 financial collapse on Wall Street. The interview is with Rodgin (Rodge) Cohen, Senior Chairman of Sullivan & Cromwell, the preeminent go-to lawyer on Wall Street. Cohen makes a number of eyebrow-raising admissions during his interview. First, in response to a question, Cohen concedes that he was personally involved in the amendment contained in the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Improvement Act (FDICIA) that changed the Fed’s emergency lending powers under Section 13(3) of the Federal Reserve Act. That one-sentence amendment to Section 13(3) was interpreted by the Federal Reserve from December 2007 to mid-2010 as giving it carte blanche to shovel $29 … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 1, 2019 ~ Could Bernanke, Paulson and Geithner have possibly picked a more self-serving title for their latest revisionist history of their secret $29 trillion bailout of the most insidiously corrupt industry in America? Their new book is titled Firefighting: The Financial Crisis and Its Lessons. Every municipal and volunteer firefighter in America should come together to file a class action lawsuit against the three for invoking an honorable profession in their dishonorable gambit to set Wall Street up for another obscene heads-we-win, tails-you-lose bailout. What the shameless trio – former Fed Chair Ben Bernanke; former Treasury Secretary under G.W. Bush and Ex-CEO of Goldman Sachs Hank Paulson; and former New York Fed President and Treasury Secretary under Obama, Tim Geithner – are up to is to provide cover for the Wall Street lobbyists who are trying to bully Congress into repealing the … Continue reading →

  By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 29, 2019 ~ In what can only be described as a new low in defining deviancy down on Wall Street, Thomson Reuters’ International Financing Review (IFR) reported this past weekend that some of the biggest names on Wall Street have returned to creating and/or trading synthetic collateralized debt obligations (Synthetic CDOs). The products were a major factor in bringing the U.S. financial system to the brink of failure in 2008. Synthetic CDOs also resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars in fines and reputational damage to these same Wall Street behemoths as investigators found that the firms were allowing hedge funds to pick “crap” subprime mortgage bonds to stuff in the CDOs in order to make windfall profits for the hedge fund, which shorted (bet against) the CDOs. The Wall Street firms had full knowledge of what the hedge funds were doing … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 26, 2019 ~ The Gallup polling organization was out with another new study yesterday that shows America is dangerously heading in the wrong direction. Gallup’s latest poll found that Americans were more likely to be stressed and worried than much of the world. The 55 percent of Americans who said they had experienced stress the prior day was one of the highest rates out of the 143 countries studied. The global average was 35 percent. With a 55 percent stress rate, the U.S. now ranks even with Albania, Iran and Sri Lanka. Only Greece, the Philippines and Tanzania rank higher at 59, 58 and 57 percent respectively. The highest stress levels were reported among Americans aged 30 to 49, where 65 percent reported experiencing stress the prior day. The figure was just one percent lower for Americans aged 15 to 29, where 64 … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 25, 2019 ~ Anyone who thought that Commerzbank was going to agree to a merger with Deutsche Bank while the latter was under multiple investigations in the U.S. for money laundering and questionable loans to the President of the United States, a man who was himself under a criminal probe until last month, was likely off their meds. Why Commerzbank allowed the speculation of a merger to proceed this long is the real question. At any event, both banks confirmed this morning that merger talks have ended with a spokesperson for Commerzbank saying this: “After careful analysis it became apparent that such a combination would not be in the interests of either bank’s shareholders or other stakeholders.” The breakdown of merger talks comes on the heels of a report on CNN last evening that Deutsche Bank has “begun the process of providing financial … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 24, 2019 ~ What the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC) wanted to see the U.S. Justice Department pursue was a potential criminal prosecution of Stan O’Neal, the CEO of Merrill Lynch in the leadup to the financial crisis, and its then CFO Jeffrey Edwards, for “making materially false and misleading representations and omissions about (a) Merrill’s exposure to retained CDO positions, (b) the value of those positions and (c) the firm’s risk management.” The FCIC also believed that Merrill had lied “in the offering documents for its $1.5 billion Norma CDO that was sold to investors in March of 2007.” A CDO is a Collateralized Debt Obligation which can be stuffed with about anything but during the 2006-2007 period was typically stuffed with subprime mortgages or synthetics linked to subprime mortgages. It was Wall Street’s cash cow and through what amounted to pay-to-play … Continue reading →