By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 6, 2018 ~  Several early warning signs emerged in the stock market yesterday. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index closed at a record high but every major Wall Street bank with large exposures to derivatives closed in the red yesterday. Leading the decliners were Deutsche Bank with a loss of 1.61 percent; Morgan Stanley closed down 1.49 percent; Bank of America lost 0.95 percent while Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase were in the red by less than one percent. But the red ink didn’t stop there. Five of the seven U.S. insurance companies that were singled out in the 2017 Financial Stability Report from the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Financial Research also closed in the red yesterday. The five insurers showing losses of less than one percent were Ameriprise Financial, Hartford Financial Services Group, Lincoln National Corp., Prudential Financial and Voya Financial. Two … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 5, 2018 ~ The Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation that was passed in 2010 required that publicly traded companies report publicly how much the CEO makes compared to the median salary of workers. The Securities and Exchange Commission, with its close ties to Wall Street, stonewalled for years in passing the final rule and had to be pressured and publicly embarrassed in open letters from members of Congress before it finally implemented the rule. As a result, eight years later, we are finally seeing the hard numbers that define CEO greed in America. In May, Democratic Congressman Keith Ellison from Minnesota’s 5th District released a study on the new data that was being released. The study was titled “Rewarding or Hoarding: An Examination of Pay Ratios Revealed by Dodd-Frank.” Among the key findings in the study were the following: Two-thirds of the richest 1 … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 4, 2018 ~ The largest bank in the United States, JPMorgan Chase, is already a 3-time felon. It received two felony counts in 2014 for its role in the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme and pleaded guilty to an additional felony count in 2015 for its role in a bank cartel that was rigging foreign currency trading. One more felony count and its Chairman and CEO, Jamie Dimon, might have finally been sacked by the bank’s timid Board for placing the bank’s global reputation under yet another scandal. So, it appears this morning, based on an avalanche of reporting from Australia, that JPMorgan Chase has ratted out U.S. behemoth, Citigroup; the troubled German bank, Deutsche Bank; and Australian bank ANZ, in order to save its own skin. The Australian Financial Review politely writes that “JPMorgan blew the whistle” on the other banks over a … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 1, 2018 ~ Yesterday the Wall Street Journal dropped a bombshell into financial markets with a report that “about a year ago” the U.S. Federal Reserve had “designated Deutsche Bank AG’s sprawling U.S. business as being in a ‘troubled condition.’ ” The Financial Times added to market angst by also reporting yesterday that the FDIC, which provides Federal deposit insurance to U.S. banks, has designated Deutsche Bank as a “problem bank” sometime within the past year. Until yesterday, both of these actions by Federal regulators were secret and unknown to Deutsche Bank’s shareholders, to the markets and to the New York Stock Exchange where Deutsche Bank’s stock trades in the U.S. Over the past year, Deutsche Bank’s stock has lost more than 40 percent of its value as a result of a lack of positive earnings for three years and serial regulatory lapses … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 31, 2018 ~ JPMorgan Chase likes to hold its annual shareholders’ meetings far away from the media glare of New York City’s pesky press corps. Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, has good reason to want to dodge Manhattan’s investigative reporters – who might start to see a pattern of fraudulent behavior. At the 2011 shareholders’ meeting in Columbus, Ohio more than 1,000 protesters descended on the event to protest the bank’s unsavory foreclosure practices. JPMorgan Chase’s 2013 shareholders’ meeting in Tampa – 1100 miles from New York City — came less than two months after the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations issued a 300-page report on how JPMorgan Chase had used its bank depositors’ money to gamble in risky derivatives in London, eventually losing $6.2 billion of that money. The 2014 shareholders’ meeting, also in Tampa, came four months … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 30, 2018 ~  Big Wall Street bank stocks outpaced the decline in the markets yesterday by a big margin. That’s a serious problem but here’s a bigger problem: if you get your information from mainstream media, you have no idea this happened or what it portends for the U.S. economy. Corporate media (a/k/a “mainstream” media) is obsessed with ratings, clickbait and celebrities behaving badly – which goes a long way in explaining why the U.S. has a billionaire celebrity in the oval office who publicly talks about television ratings when he greets hostages released by North Korea. It’s also now clear why so many members of Congress claimed that nobody could have seen the 2008 financial crisis coming: mainstream media simply refused to heed and report on the many warnings. The same thing happened yesterday. The Standard and Poor’s 500 Index fell by … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 29, 2018 ~ U.S. investors have returned this morning from a 3-day Memorial Day break for parades and barbecues to find that turmoil in European stock markets may serve up losses to U.S. portfolios. At 7:18 a.m. this morning, futures on the Dow Jones Industrial Average were projecting a loss of 191 points at the open of trading in the U.S. The turmoil is rooted in a failed coalition government in Italy over the weekend with the prospect for Euro-sceptics gaining more power in a new Italian election in the fall. Italy’s finances are in no condition for a flailing government. It has over 2.3 trillion Euros in outstanding debt. Last Friday the credit ratings agency, Moody’s, placed Italy’s sovereign debt rating under review for a possible downgrade. The rating is already weak at Baa2, just two rungs above junk bond status. Moody’s … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 25, 2018 ~  On May 5 Leslie Cockburn, a former prize-winning 60 Minutes producer and journalist with no prior political credentials, won the Democratic nomination for Virginia’s 5th Congressional District. Two qualities sum up how Cockburn has come this far this fast: she is willing to work twice as hard as the average politician and she is sincere in her desire to do the people’s work in what Americans previously called the People’s House – until it became the lapdog of Koch money and corporate interests. What would have been a major obstacle to most new candidates became an edge for Cockburn. Virginia’s 5th District is huge – it’s larger than New Jersey with 440,000 voters spread across 308 precincts. For a candidate willing to spend 7 days a week traveling the District from end to end, genuinely listening to the concerns of … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 24, 2018 ~ On March 14 the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes with a “massive fraud.” According to the SEC, Holmes had made wild and false claims about the company’s purportedly revolutionary blood testing device as the company fraudulently raised $700 million from investors. But despite the SEC investigators’ well-developed “massive fraud” charges against Holmes, five days later the SEC let the 30-something woman off the hook with a $500,000 fine, surrender of her shares in the company, and barred her from being an officer or director of a publicly traded company for 10 years. In other words, when Holmes is in her early 40s, she will have the opportunity to once again run another massive fraud and bilk investors. This is exactly the kind of hubris we have come to expect from the SEC. (See related articles … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 23, 2018 ~ Yesterday the U.S. House of Representatives voted 258-159 to approve a rollback of provisions in the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation that grew out of the epic financial collapse of 2008 – which ushered in the greatest economic bust since the Great Depression. The bill originated in the U.S. Senate and is now awaiting the signature of President Donald Trump, who is expected to quickly sign it. If you are thinking that Congress would never have approved this rollback of reforms if Wall Street was still as dangerous as it was in 2008, think again. Members of Congress approved this dangerous giveaway to Wall Street because they simply can’t say no to Wall Street’s political donations, its lobbyists, and those high-paying jobs that might await them if they play their cards right. The Washington Post called the rollback “the most … Continue reading →