By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 20, 2018 For over a year, Carole Cadwalladr has been reporting in the U.K.’s Guardian newspaper about the bizarre overlap between the people and companies involved in Donald Trump’s rise to the Presidency in the U.S. and the June 23, 2016 Brexit vote in the U.K. where citizens voted in a referendum to take the U.K. out of the European Union. Now, one of those companies, Cambridge Analytica, is the subject of intense focus on both sides of the pond. Last evening in the U.S., cable news aired video of Alexander Nix, the CEO of Cambridge Analytica, speaking with undercover reporters about a political dirty tricks campaign the company could run. Nix cited an example of setting up hidden cameras to catch a politician saying he would accept a bribe or the company could send in girls to seduce the politician. Nix said: … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 19, 2018 According to news reports last Friday and over the weekend, Facebook has landed squarely in the middle of the next explosive leg of the Trump-Russia scandal. According to the Guardian’s Observer newspaper in the U.K., a digital data mining company known as Cambridge Analytica collected private information from approximately 50 million Facebook users in order to support Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016. Trump’s campaign hired Cambridge Analytica in the spring of 2016 and “paid it more than $6.2 million,” according to a Reuters report. A Cambridge Analytica whistleblower, Christopher Wylie, told the Observer that “We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles. And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons. That was the basis that the entire company was built on.” According to the reports, the “inner demons” were unleashed through personalized … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 14, 2018 It now appears that a major contributing factor to the abrupt shutdown of the Russia-Trump probe by the House Intelligence Committee was a fear that the Committee was getting too close to Trump’s dealings with Deutsche Bank and Deutsche Bank’s dealings with Russia. The draft report released by the Democrats after belatedly learning that their Republican colleagues had abruptly ended the probe, included this paragraph: “Donald Trump’s finances historically have been opaque, but there have long been credible allegations as to the use of Trump properties to launder money by Russian oligarchs, criminals, and regime cronies. There also remain critical unanswered questions about the source of President Trump’s personal and corporate financing. For example, Deutsche Bank, which was fined $630 million in 2017 over its involvement in a $10 billion Russian money-laundering scheme, consistently has been the source of financing for … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 13, 2018 If Wall Street can glam up a story around a stock or a man or both, it can sell the hell out of the shares to the dumb money. If enough dumb money invests, the Dark Pools spring into action and drive the price even higher. That brings in hedge funds.  Pretty soon you’re talking about real money. This is how we got the 1929 stock market crash, the Great Depression, the dot.com bust in 2000, the Enron, Worldcom and Tyco flameouts, and whatever we end up calling the bust that lies ahead of the current brainless bubble market. Take yesterday’s market, for example. Boeing lost 2.91 percent of its value, driving the Dow lower, while Tesla gained 5.61 percent driving the Nasdaq higher. Boeing turned 100 years old on July 15, 2016. It has a half trillion dollars in back … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 12, 2018 The illusions of the Trump era – spun as making America great again, while sluicing more and more wealth to the one percent – has revived citizen interest in what it would actually take to restore fairness and integrity to the nation. The first place to look is how to restructure the American corporation so that it is no longer poisoning our campaign finance system, our election outcomes, and perverting the legislative process in Washington. The majority of Congress now works for its corporate paymasters. That has resulted in perverse economic outcomes across the national landscape that have, in turn, created the greatest wealth inequality in America since the late 1920s. While reforming the way political campaigns are financed in America has received a great deal of attention, far too little attention has been given to the grotesque disfiguration of far … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 9, 2018 After seven decades, Toys ‘R’ Us may have run out of options and be forced to liquidate all of its U.S. stores according to media reports. (The company called the reports “speculation.”) Toys ‘R’ Us had filed for bankruptcy protection on September 19 of last year, listing assets of $6.57 billion and debts amounting to an astounding $7.89 billion. If the news reports are accurate, more than 36,000 U.S. jobs could be at stake. According to the company’s 10K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on April 12, 2017, as of the beginning of last year, the company employed “64,000 full-time and part-time individuals worldwide, with 36,000 domestically and 28,000 internationally.” Those figures, the filing said, do not include the tens of thousands of part-time employees the company hires for the holiday season. The liquidation would also put a vast … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 8, 2018 The U.S. Senate is about to set in motion the next financial crash on Wall Street but you would never know it from watching cable news channels CNN or MSNBC last evening. Both news channels obsessed for endless hours over the Trump-Russia scandal and a hush money payoff to porn star Stormy Daniels, neglecting one of the most critical topics of the day: what was happening on the Senate floor this week. Some of the most informed Democratic voices in the U.S. Senate are making impassioned and heartbreaking appeals to their colleagues this week on the floor of the U.S. Senate to vote down Senate bill S.2155, which carries the Orwellian title: “The Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief and Consumer Protection Act.” The bill is a Republican/Wall Street lobbyist masquerade to ostensibly help small community banks but will effectively gut enhanced oversight … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 7, 2018 Wall Street is losing its bedtime snuggly and comfort blanket in the White House. After a tortuous 14 months replete with crazy tweets from the President, Russia-probe indictments and guilty pleas, failure to talk Trump out of withdrawing from the Paris climate accord, revelations of hush money paid to a porn star by Trump’s personal attorney, and news of Trump campaign aides’ murky meetings with Putin operatives, Gary Cohn has finally called it quits over tariffs. It’s not like Cohn, the former President of Goldman Sachs who became President Donald Trump’s first Director of the National Economic Council, didn’t understand Trump’s obsessive demand for loyalty. Cohn has watched for more than a year as those who didn’t show adequate subservience to the President were shown the door. In the case of the former FBI Director James Comey, he was not only … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 6, 2018 On January 20, 2017, the date of Donald Trump’s inauguration as President of the United States, the giant aerospace company, Boeing, closed the trading day at $159.53. Yesterday, it clocked in at $352.75 by the closing bell. The Trump era has added 122 percent to the pockets of Boeing shareholders, giving it a market cap of $207.6 billion. Trump’s erratic reign had been good for Boeing – right up until Thursday, March 1, when Trump announced that he would be imposing 25 percent tariffs for foreign-made steel and 10 percent for aluminum. The stock market took a dive along with Boeing on the announcement. Boeing is not just your average publicly-traded stock. It’s one of the 30 components in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which is an index that affords greater weight to a stock based on its price. At yesterday’s … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 5, 2018 Today’s front page of the print edition of the New York Times has articles on the Oscars, the election in Italy, Ben Carson’s reign at HUD and the death of an elderly Briton who once broke the four-minute mile among numerous other less than urgent news pieces. What it does not have on its front page is any headline showing concern that the seminal piece of Wall Street reform legislation of the Obama era, which already has enough loopholes to set off champagne corks on K Street, may be dismantled this week by a vote in the Senate. The move would come in the midst of the 10th anniversary of the greatest Wall Street collapse and economic catastrophe since the Great Depression, both of which were underpinned by casino capitalism — Wall Street banks making obscenely leveraged bets for the house … Continue reading →