By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 22, 2018 ~  The fact that the President’s former attorney, Michael Cohen, pleaded guilty yesterday to an array of fraud charges and fingered the President as an unindicted co-conspirator in campaign finance fraud, which dominated cable news last night for a non-stop six hours, has failed to get front-page placement in newspapers across rural America. This news censorship may explain why suburban and urban voters give such a low approval rating to Donald Trump while rural voters continue to give the President high marks. Rural voters are simply being starved of important national news by their local newspapers. Consider the stark difference in reporting between the digital front pages of big city papers and their rural peers this morning: The New York Times leads today with the headline Cohen Pleads Guilty, Implicating President. The Washington Post has this: Cohen pleads guilty, implicates Trump in … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 21, 2018 ~ The Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, is slated to deliver a speech on Friday morning at an annual symposium in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. President Donald Trump has made it known that he wants some economic help from the Fed in terms of keeping interest rates low. Speaking of Powell directly, Trump told Reuters yesterday: “I’m not thrilled with his raising of interest rates, no. I’m not thrilled.” All eyes on Wall Street will be watching for any hints in Powell’s speech that he’s sending a message to Trump that he won’t be taking any loyalty oath to the President. But aside from possible coded messaging to Trump to take his jackboot off the Fed’s turf, there are other important reasons to pay attention to the Jackson Hole gathering. It’s called the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City’s Economic … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 20, 2018 ~ Last Thursday the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) issued a statement regarding a new $10.5 million fine against Citigroup. The statement read: “Citigroup’s lax supervision and weak internal accounting controls allowed a handful of rogue traders to mismark positions over several years and, separately, resulted in the unnecessary loss of hundreds of millions of dollars of its shareholders’ assets to fraud.” Lax supervision, weak accounting controls, and losing hundreds of millions of dollars to fraud are not words the American taxpayer wants to be reading about Citigroup in 2018. This is the very same bank that received the largest bailout by the U.S. taxpayer in global banking history following its implosion during the Wall Street crash of 2008 due to grossly faulty internal controls. The reason that Citigroup was bailed out while Lehman Brothers was left to fail was that, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 17, 2018 ~ August 16, 2018 will be remembered as the day there was a collective awakening by America’s media that there was something intrinsically and morally and constitutionally wrong with not just the functioning of the President of the United States – but with America itself. In response to an August 10 appeal from the Boston Globe to newspaper editorial boards around the country to write and publish their thoughts on Trump’s “dirty war against the free press,” more than 300 newspapers responded yesterday. The Globe’s own editorial yesterday contained one of the most poignant phrases, stating that the President tosses out lies about the media “much like an old-time charlatan threw out ‘magic’ dust or water on a hopeful crowd.” You can read the coast-to-coast outpouring of editorials on what a free press means to democracy here. One of the most … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 16, 2018 ~  Spasms in big Wall Street bank stocks have been happening on a serial basis over the past three years. (See here and here.) Yesterday offered another one of those bank warning signs to a Congress intent on further deregulation of an already dangerously deregulated market. As the stock market grappled yesterday with fears of sinking emerging market currencies leading to loan defaults at European banks that are derivative counterparties to the biggest banks on Wall Street, the Wall Street banking sector was a sea of red. Two banks in particular sold off more than others. Deutsche Bank is the big German lender that trades on the New York Stock Exchange. It closed with a loss of 2.61 percent versus a much milder decline of 0.76 percent in the Standard and Poor’s 500 Index. Posting a final trade of $11.19, Deutsche … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 15, 2018 ~ It has been soundly demonstrated that the President of the United States has a knowledge vacuum in proper presidential decorum, diplomacy, and accepted norms of behavior. Just yesterday the President Tweeted that a former black female colleague in the White House, Omarosa Manigault Newman, is a “crazed, crying lowlife” and a “dog.”  On June 25, the President Tweeted that a sitting black female member of Congress, Maxine Waters, is “an extraordinarily low IQ person,” despite her being elected to 14 consecutive terms to the House of Representatives. There’s a serious danger that the current occupant of the Oval Office defines American etiquette so far down that we are shunned by enlightened countries as a backward, rogue nation. America has already gone rogue in withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accord, the United Nations Human Rights Council, and the Iran nuclear deal. … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 14, 2018 ~ In 2010 we broke the news that a secretive nonprofit called Donors Capital Fund (with the fingerprints of billionaire Charles Koch all over it) had forked over $17,778,600 to fund a widely distributed race-baiting film in the weeks before the 2008 election – an election in which the first black man, Barack Obama, was the Democratic candidate for President. Donors Capital Fund accepts donations from multiple donors and keeps their identities secret, so exactly who funded the actual payment for the film is still unknown. Recently, we decided to see what Donors Capital Fund has been up to lately. We went to the publicly filed tax returns available online at the Foundation Center and Guidestar. The most recent available tax return is for 2016. Curiously, the schedule of the tax return that shows to whom disbursements were made was missing … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 13, 2018 ~ On Friday the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed with a loss of 196 points as contagion jitters from Turkey’s worsening situation rattled markets. Among the big Wall Street banks, these were the biggest losers: Citigroup, down 2.39 percent; Morgan Stanley, down 2.12 percent; Goldman Sachs, down 1.78 percent; Bank of America, down 1.30 percent; and JPMorgan Chase closed off by 0.98 percent. Deutsche Bank, the big German lender whose U.S. subsidiary has a big footprint on Wall Street, lost 4.68 percent. Deutsche Bank has now lost 41 percent of its market value since February. But the selloff didn’t stop there. Two big U.S. life insurers also tumbled on Friday. MetLife lost 3.19 percent while Prudential Financial was off by 2.97 percent. What do Wall Street banks and U.S. life insurers have to do with a selloff in Turkey’s currency? Not … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 10, 2018 ~ Earlier this week, James Freeman, the Assistant Editor of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, wrote an opinion piece headlined as “We’ll Never Know How Bad the Federal Reserve Is.” Freeman is also a Fox News contributor so one might be prone to suspect there is that typical right-wing bias to bash the Fed. Freeman, however, has a legitimate beef. His new book, “Borrowed Time: Two Centuries of Booms, Busts and Bailouts at Citi,” with co-author Vern McKinley was published this week and Freeman laments in the article about how the Fed “hides and then destroys documents.” If you’re a journalist attempting to compile a truthful and accurate account about a financial institution or a financial era and a key institution holding those documents refuses to release them, then the American people have lost the ability to exercise oversight of … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 9, 2018 ~ As we have previously reported, there is indisputable documentation that Charles Koch, the fossil fuels billionaire who sits at the helm of Koch Industries, is in charge of the de-regulatory agenda in the Trump administration through a web of front groups. More proof came yesterday. Reuters announced that the Trump administration had “formally told” around 40 staff members of the Office of Financial Research (OFR) that “they will lose their jobs as part of a broader reorganization of the agency….” Reuters also reported that the agency’s budget has already been cut by 25 percent “to around $76 million.” Imagine having only $76 million to police an industry where just one of the big Wall Street banks, JPMorgan Chase, had profits of $8.32 billion in its last quarter. Charles Koch has long understood that if you can’t repeal the legislation that … Continue reading →