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 →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 22, 2018 ~ The name of a confidential FBI informant, Stefan A. Halper, was revealed by a right-wing news website known as the Daily Caller News Foundation on Saturday. Curiously, Virginia (Ginni) Thomas, wife of the sitting U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, has been collecting an undisclosed amount of compensation from the same nonprofit and its anonymous right-wing donors for years. At 9:35 a.m. this past Saturday morning, the Daily Caller ran this headline: “Cambridge Professor Spied On Trump Campaign Advisers.” The very next day, President Donald Trump Tweeted the following: “I hereby demand, and will do so officially tomorrow, that the Department of Justice look into whether or not the FBI/DOJ infiltrated or surveilled the Trump Campaign for Political Purposes — and if any such demands or requests were made by people within the Obama Administration!” Yesterday the Justice Department agreed to … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 20, 2018 ~ According to the Cambridge English Dictionary, a kleptocracy is “a society whose leaders make themselves rich and powerful by stealing from the rest of the people.” Stealing can also be interpreted as a public official depriving citizens of their right to honest services, as defined under 18 U.S.C. § 1346. Two men serving in the highest offices of the United States, one man black and one man white, are now the poster children for a government that more closely resembles a kleptocracy than a democracy. The two men also have three other things in common: they are both shameless in flaunting their disregard for conflicts of interest; their previous Federal financial disclosure reports contained serious falsehoods; and neither has been removed from their high office. Last week Donald Trump, the President of the United States, released his financial disclosure form … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 18, 2018 ~  The Vatican released a lengthy report yesterday on how the drive for accumulating money at any cost has turned Wall Street and much of the global financial system into an “amoral culture,” noting that the idea that markets will be self-policing is pure bunk. The Vatican has apparently decided to keep the debate alive that Senator Bernie Sanders started during the presidential campaign of 2016 when he repeatedly railed against Wall Street for having a “business model of fraud.” The Vatican’s entry into this critical conversation would be much more meaningful if each time it or the Pope lectures the world on the meaning of morality they would acknowledge the Catholic Church’s own moral failings over decades in protecting sexual predators of children, refusing to report the assaults to law enforcement and moving the predators from parish to parish — … Continue reading →