By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 3, 2018 ~  What Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City and Donald Trump’s latest legal fixer did last night was to effectively tell Trump’s mortal enemy, the Washington Post, that Trump paid his personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, a $420,000 slush fund last year to clean up dirt on the President. Cohen is the target of a criminal investigation by the U.S. Attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York. Cohen’s home, office, hotel room and safety deposit box were raided by the FBI on April 9. In an interview with Sean Hannity of Fox News last evening, and then later with the Washington Post, Giuliani buried both himself and the President deeper into a web of half truths or outright lies while managing to taint the legal work he does at his law firm, Greenberg Traurig, a corporate law … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 2, 2018 ~  Since 2010 we have been investigating and reporting on activities of the billionaire Koch brothers’ political funding network to subvert democracy in the United States. In 2011 we broke the news that Charles Koch had entertained sitting U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas at Koch’s private club in California. Thomas would later rule in favor of the Citizens United decision which opened the spigots to unlimited corporate money in U.S. political campaigns. In the same article we reported that while the Citizens United case was pending before the U.S. Supreme Court, Virginia Thomas, the wife of the Justice, created a nonprofit Tea Party advocacy group, Liberty Central, Inc., with a former lawyer for the Charles G. Koch Foundation, Sarah Field, acting as her General Counsel and a former Koch lobbyist, Matt Schlapp, serving on her board at inception. The nonprofit received over … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 1, 2018 ~  Former U.S. Treasury Secretary, Robert Rubin, has decided he wants to rewrite his resume, removing the ugly warts from his days at Citigroup. That mega bank started as a financial supermarket that Rubin helped to make possible behind the scenes in the Bill Clinton administration, followed by a giant crash and the largest bank bailout in U.S. history from 2007 to 2010. Rubin strolled out the door of Citigroup in early 2009 $120 million richer than when he originally rolled his shopping cart into the well-stocked aisles of hubris at Citigroup almost a decade earlier. The New York Times has apparently decided to help Rubin exorcise Citigroup from his past. In an OpEd in the New York Times New York edition today, neither he nor the New York Times in its bio mentions so much as a syllable about Rubin’s … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 30, 2018 ~  Tonight, at 7 p.m., Wall Street historian and author, Nomi Prins, will be speaking at The Strand bookstore at 828 Broadway in New York City. (See admission details here.) The appearance marks the launch of her latest book, Collusion: How Central Bankers Rigged the World, set for release tomorrow. While former FBI Director James Comey’s new book, A Higher Loyalty, has been getting lots of attention on cable news, Collusion is a far more important book. America can recover from a disastrous presidency, the topic of Comey’s book. But America might not be able to fully recover from another epic financial crash brought on by disastrous central bank policy – the subject of Prins’ book. Collusion not only proves that the 1 percent got bailed out while the 99 percent got sold out as a result of policies of the U.S. … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 27, 2018 ~  It’s increasingly looking like President Trump vetted his tax cut plan about as thoroughly as he vetted his cabinets picks. That is likely to have a serious negative impact on U.S. economic growth, the housing market and consumer spending. Yesterday Trump’s pick to head the Veterans Affairs Administration withdrew his name from consideration after allegations of drinking on the job and wrecking a government car while drunk surfaced in statements made by two dozen of his current and former colleagues. Later in the day, Trump’s Senate-confirmed head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, was being grilled at two separate House hearings on his wasteful spending of taxpayer dollars for first class travel to Italy and Morocco, a $43,000 soundproof phone booth for his office despite the agency already having secure facilities, and for accepting a dramatically below-market rate of $50 … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 26, 2018 ~  There is a great deal of hand-wringing in the U.S. media today over the plight of Deutsche Bank, the big German financial firm that has a hefty presence on Wall Street. Its first-quarter net profit slumped by 79 percent, it replaced its CEO of less than three years, John Cryan, this month with new CEO Christian Sewing whose game plan revolves around “painful” cuts. On September 15, 2008, a key moment in the 2008 financial collapse on Wall Street when Lehman Brothers filed bankruptcy, Merrill Lynch was forced into the arms of Bank of America and Citigroup teetered toward insolvency, Deutsche Bank’s shares closed the day at $58.80 (equivalent price adjusted for a subsequent stock split). Yesterday, its shares closed at $14.60 on the New York Stock Exchange. Not only has it not recovered from the financial crash but it’s … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 25, 2018 ~  Wall Street knows something that the rest of us don’t. Based on past experience, when Wall Street keeps secrets it never works out well for the rest of us. We’re thinking about the time Wall Street banks colluded on rigging prices on the Nasdaq market; or the time they rigged their research departments and told us to buy stocks that they were secretly callings dogs and crap; or the time they got S&P and Moody’s to give them triple-A ratings on subprime pools of debt while keeping it a secret that they had internal reports showing the loans didn’t meet their origination standards — and then they went out and secretly shorted that debt while continuing to sell it to their customers as a good investment. Yesterday, something decidedly weird happened as U.S. stock markets were being pummeled. Three of … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 24, 2018 ~  The U.S. Department of Justice has had an ongoing investigation into the potential rigging of the U.S. Treasury market by big banks on Wall Street for the past three years according to a series of past media reports. And yet, no formal charges have been brought. Lots of Wall Street watchers are wondering why – especially since private law firms have brought very specific charges in the matter into Federal court. There are only so many times the Justice Department can charge the largest Wall Street banks with felony counts for rigging markets before the public catches on that it’s a feature not a bug of their business model. Continuous rigging charges could lead to growing public demands and newspaper editorials to break up these serially-charged behemoths at a time when members of Congress – who depend on the largess … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 23, 2018 ~ If there’s any plaintiff’s law firm in America that should know racketeering when it sees it, it’s Cohen Milstein. It’s sued the major Wall Street banks repeatedly with a solid win rate for colluding to rig pretty much anything that trades. On Friday, in the same Federal District Court where its Wall Street actions are litigated, the Southern District of New York (SDNY), it filed its bombshell RICO lawsuit on behalf of the Democratic National Committee (DNC). The lawsuit does not name President Donald Trump as a defendant but it does name prominent members of his presidential campaign, including his son, Donald Jr., and son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, and advisers, Roger Stone and George Papadopoulos are also named, as are the Russian intelligence service, Russian Federation, several Russian operatives, Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. The lawsuit … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 20, 2018 ~  Make no mistake about it, the Big Law firms that played a major role in the Wall Street corruption that led to the financial crash of 2008 and have been burying corporate crimes through their crony ties to Washington for decades, are desperate to put their own man in the White House in 2020. On Tuesday, former Attorney General, Eric Holder, who headed the U.S. Department of Justice in the Obama administration, appeared on the MSNBC program, “All In with Chris Hayes.” Holder told Hayes that he was considering a run for the President of the United States in 2020 but had not made a final decision. (See video below.) Obviously, if Holder ran, it would be as a Democrat, something that is certain to enrage the progressive wing of the party. Holder effectively transplanted his pals from his law … Continue reading →