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Recent Posts
- Jamie Dimon’s Washington Post OpEd Gets Pummeled at Yahoo Finance
- In the Span of 72 Hours, Four People Tied to a Hewlett-Packard Criminal Case Died in Two Separate Events
- Crypto Took Down Another Federally-Insured Bank and Just Handed Its CEO a 24-Year Prison Sentence
- All the Devils from 2008 Are Back at the Megabanks: Leverage, Off-Balance-Sheet Debt, Over $192 Trillion in Derivatives, Shaky Capital Levels
- New Study Says the Fed Is Captured by Congress and White House — Not the Megabanks that Own the Fed Banks and Get Trillions in Bailouts
- Data from the Fed’s Emergency Funding Program Shows Spring 2023 Banking Crisis Was Far Deeper than Americans Were Told
- These FDIC-Insured Banks Have Lost 69 to 40 Percent of their Market Value Year-to-Date
- Exposure at Hedge Funds Has Skyrocketed to Over $28 Trillion; Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Are at Risk
- We Charted the Plunge and Rebound in the Nikkei Versus Nomura and Citigroup; the Correlation Is Frightening
- Former U.S. Labor Secretary Says Billionaires Have No Right to Exist Because their Wealth Comes from Five Illegal or Bad Practices
- Citigroup Is Having a Helluva Summer: A Protest on Thursday Will Turn Up the Heat
- Nikkei Has Biggest Drop in History: Here’s What’s Causing the Global Market Selloff
- JPMorgan Is Tapping Illiquid Assets in its Global Collateral Program; the New York Fed Is Paying for Its Services
- Bank Regulators Issue Warnings on Fintech and Banking as Disasters Pile Up
- Donald Trump Gives a Speech on Not Letting China Win the Crypto Race – Not Realizing China Banned Crypto Mining and Transactions Four Years Ago
- The New York Fed Has Contracted Out Key Functions to JPMorgan Chase; We Filed a FOIA and Got These Strange Invoices
- On the Eve of Netanyahu’s Address to Congress, Senator Bernie Sanders Delivers a Breathtaking Assessment of His War Crimes
- Trump’s Sit-Down with Netanyahu at Mar-a-Lago Will Cost U.S. Taxpayers Millions While Profiting Trump’s Business
- Protecting Trump and His Jet-Setting Adult Children During His Presidency Cost Taxpayers Over $1 Billion
- A Congressman and a Doctor Reported a Woman Being Shot at Trump Rally: She’s Vanished from Official Reports
- Jamie Dimon Goes Missing from Earnings Call, After Dumping $183 Million of His JPMorgan Chase Stock Earlier this Year
- U.S. Senate Candidate Backed by Hedge Fund Billionaires Was Sitting in Front Row at Trump Rally as the Sniper Fired into the Bleachers
- Project 2025: The Fossil Fuel and Banking Money Behind the Madness
- The Fund Created to Unwind a Failing Megabank Has a Problem: There’s No Money in It
- Joe Biden Versus the New York Times
- Grand Jury Transcript in Jeffrey Epstein Case Is Released, Raising Questions about Epstein’s Darkest Secrets Being Protected in JPMorgan Cases
- The Supreme Court Crowns a King, Immunizing Future Criminal Acts Under Project 2025 – a Right Wing Manifesto
- The Debate Disaster and the Supreme Court’s “Chevron” Repeal Have a Money Trail Leading to Charles Koch
- Congressman Andy Barr Stacks a Hearing on the Fed’s Stress Tests with Lobbyists for Megabanks
- The Fed Posts Historic Operating Losses As It Pays Out 5.40 Percent Interest to Banks
- Goldman Sachs’ Bank Derivatives Have Grown from $40 Trillion to $54 Trillion in Five Years; So How Did Its Credit Exposure Improve by 200 Percent?
- The Fed and FDIC Wake Up Suddenly to the Threat of Derivatives, Flunking the Four Largest Derivative Banks on their Wind-Down Plans
- Is the Stock Market Setting Investors Up for a Tech Bust Similar to the Dot.com Bust?
- Chase Bank Customers Are Reporting a Wave of Wire Fraud in their Accounts; the Bank Won’t Make Good on the Looted Funds
- The Senate Race in Ohio Is the Sickest in U.S. History in Terms of Billionaire Money from Outside the State
- Sullivan & Cromwell’s Legal Work for Sam Bankman-Fried’s Crypto House of Fraud Is Getting a Closer Look in Two Federal Court Cases
- Crypto Tries to Recreate the Koch Money Machine to Pack Congress with Shills
- French Fears Ignite Selloff in U.S. Megabanks and Foreign Peers
- Crypto Just Got Exponentially More Dangerous: Meet Fairshake
- Nvidia Hit a $3 Trillion Market Cap Last Week; Dark Pools Are Making Over 300,000 Trades in the Stock Weekly
- The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Is Making Enemies in All the Right Places
- A Former Exec at Citibank Raises Alarm Bells in Federal Court Over Failed Risk Controls Inside the Bank
- Charles Koch’s Money Is Being Used in Elections in Ways Only Orwell Could Have Imagined
- Freakonomics and Frankenbanks: JPMorgan Chase Sucked Up 18 Percent of All Profits of 4,568 FDIC-Insured Banks in the First Quarter
- Academic Study Provides Hard Numbers to the Sick, Revolving Door Culture at Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Citigroup
- $244 Billion of Treasury Debt to Hit the Market Today and Tomorrow as Interest Rates Spike on Ballooning Supply
- CFTC Fines J.P. Morgan Securities — a Fed Primary Dealer — $100 Million for Failing to Surveil Potential Spoofing and High Frequency Trading for Eight Years
- Another FDIC-Insured Bank Got in Bed with Fintech; It’s Now Got a Dumpster Fire and Desperate Pleas from Customers for their Money
- Citigroup Gets Fined $79 Million Two Years After It Caused a $300 Billion Flash Crash in European Stock Markets
- After Weeks of Howling by MAGA Republicans for the Chair of the FDIC “to Resign,” a Democrat Delivers the Decisive Stab in the Back
Search Results for: koch
Nobel Laureate Stiglitz Says Bitcoin Should Be “Outlawed”
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 30, 2017 Bitcoin has soared this year by more than ten-fold, defying all of the Wall Street veterans who have compared it to the Tulip Bubble and/or a Ponzi scheme. That doesn’t mean that Bitcoin is a legitimate investment; it just means that bubbles have no set expiration date. The Nobel laureate economist, Joseph Stiglitz of Columbia University, appeared on Bloomberg television yesterday and had this to say about Bitcoin: “One of the main functions of government is to create currency. And Bitcoin is successful only because of its potential for circumvention, lack of oversight. So it seems to me it ought to be outlawed. It doesn’t serve any socially useful function.” Consider the remarks Stiglitz made yesterday to our more detailed assessment along the same lines back in 2014. We wrote: “The business writers at Reuters are also dead wrong on Bitcoin … Continue reading
Trump & Company Channel Ayn Rand
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 31, 2017 Ayn Rand made her mark by writing and lecturing on a philosophy called Objectivism. It’s a philosophy that flips upside down everything that most Americans hold dear. Under Objectivism, greed is good, selfishness is noble, helping one’s fellow human beings is for suckers and an outright evil. The philosophy also holds that big government is bad and obscenely rich corporate titans are the real heroes of society. (See related articles below.) The Koch brothers’ network of billionaires has been financing the proliferation of Rand’s books into high schools and colleges for decades. Trump is the personification of the Ayn Rand creed and his elevation from reality TV host to the Oval Office is valid proof that the Kochs and their ilk have spent their money wisely. Trump’s gilded mansions and lifestyle are also mother’s milk to the one percenters he has … Continue reading
Wall Street’s Latest Plot: Blame the Financial Crash on the French
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 21, 2017 Wall Street appears to have a plan to get the deregulation it wants by pinning the start of the epic financial crash of 2007-2010 on (wait for it) the French, rather than its own unbridled greed, corruption and toxic manufacture of junk bonds known as subprime debt that it paid to have rated AAA by ethically-challenged and deeply conflicted rating agencies. (The same rating agencies that are getting paid by Wall Street to rate its debt issues today.) One of the men helping to peddle this narrative is Steve Hanke, a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, a taxpayer-subsidized nonprofit that was secretly owned by the billionaire Koch brothers for decades. Hanke’s bio at Cato lists him as a Professor of Applied Economics at John Hopkins University in Baltimore and provides the following titillating background: “Prof. Hanke served as a State … Continue reading
U.S. House Financial Services Committee Needs New Leadership
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 12, 2017 When members of the U.S. House Financial Services Committee question Fed Chair Janet Yellen this morning following her testimony on monetary policy, many Republicans on the panel will be posturing for their money masters who fund their political campaigns rather than asking questions that benefit the average American. You can tell that there has been a Koch Network-corporate takeover of the House Financial Services Committee by the statement that its Chairman, Jeb Hensarling, plastered on the front page of the Committee’s web site following the heroic actions of the Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Richard Cordray, on Monday. Cordray reopened the nation’s courts to millions of Americans who have been the victims of predatory actions by the banks that fund Hensarling’s seat in Congress. On Monday, Cordray went up against the most powerful players on Wall Street and the … Continue reading
We’re All Minorities Now
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 21, 2017 The one percent now effectively owns Washington: the making of our laws, the writing of Executive Orders, the running of Federal agencies with the power to put crooks among the one percent in prison – or not, and they are now the overseers of gutting Federal programs that benefit the 99 percent. One thought comes to mind about this state of affairs. The abolitionist and writer, Frederick Douglass, once said: “Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.” The majority of Americans, whether they are yet aware or not, now walks in the shoes of Frederick Douglass. We’re all minorities now. The billionaires and their lackeys rule. How did a … Continue reading
As the U.S. Stumbles, the World Is Watching — Nervously
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 14, 2017 Today’s news headlines are not the stuff of confidence-building. It seems like a 241-year old democracy should have gotten its act together a lot better by now. Bloomberg News is reporting that 17 of the most prestigious colleges and universities in the country (including Harvard, Yale and Stanford) have filed court papers seeking to join a lawsuit in a Brooklyn Federal court against President Donald Trump’s hastily constructed Executive Order. The Order called for an immigration ban which has drawn a flurry of lawsuits, nationwide protests and a rebuke by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The schools told the court that during the last academic year, more than one million international students studied at U.S. universities and now, as a result of the immigrant ban, 42,000 scholars, including Nobel Laureates, are calling for a boycott of educational conferences in the … Continue reading
Trump’s Immigration Ban: Americans Can Listen In on Court Hearing Today
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 7, 2017 While President Donald Trump is proving himself to be a divider not a uniter, the Attorneys General of Washington State and Minnesota are getting the unity job done. Their case against the President’s ban on immigrants entering the U.S. from seven majority Muslim nations – even those holding valid visas and, sporadically, legal permanent residents with valid green cards – has been a clarion call to fellow citizens to stop Trump now before his Executive Orders come for their own rights. On Friday, Judge James Robart blocked Trump’s order nationwide. The case is now under appeal at the Ninth Circuit Court and the docket already has 92 entries. Constitutional scholars, law professors, more than a dozen nonprofits, almost 100 tech companies, and 16 Attorneys General from other states are asking the court to keep Judge Robart’s order in place. The public … Continue reading
Who Will Protect the Whistleblower Under Trump’s Corporate Regime?
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 13, 2016 Whistleblowers certainly haven’t enjoyed halcyon days under either Presidents Obama or George W. Bush (see related article below) but President-elect Donald Trump’s cabinet could actually produce an upsurge in corporate corruption by making whistleblowers fearful of coming forward at all. Now that Trump has announced his intention to put Big Oil in charge of the State Department; an executive opposed to the new overtime pay laws at the helm of the “Labor” Department; and the vampire squid Goldman Sachs’ alumni in charge of “anything that smells like money,” it seems safe to say this isn’t exactly the populist President the working class had in mind. In fact, it looks very much like a corporate coup d’état with three military generals thrown in to the mix as the Praetorian Guard in case the sold-out laborers grab their pitchforks. Trump’s nominee for Labor … Continue reading
Who’s Behind PropOrNot’s Blacklist of News Websites
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 7, 2016 A shadowy group called PropOrNot (shorthand for Propaganda Or Not) that has gone to a great deal of trouble to keep its funders and principals secret, is promulgating a blacklist of 200 alternative media websites that it has labeled “Russian propaganda outlets.” On Thanksgiving Day, Washington Post reporter Craig Timberg amplified this smear campaign in an article giving credence to the anonymous group’s research. While a handful of state-funded sites are included on the list, both the Washington Post and PropOrNot have come under withering criticism for engaging in McCarthyism by including dozens of respected sites like Naked Capitalism, Truthout, Truthdig, Consortium News and, initially, CounterPunch, on the list. (CounterPunch has since been removed and Naked Capitalism’s lawyer has sent a scorching letter to the Washington Post demanding a retraction and an apology.) The widely read Paul Craig Roberts also landed … Continue reading
U.S. Journalists and Professors Appearing on RT America Get Blacklisted
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 2, 2016 Some independent journalists and university professors in the United States who have appeared on RT television to criticize either runaway corruption on Wall Street or in Washington, have landed on two newly created blacklists. RT is a Russian state-financed news network formerly known as Russia Today. Its English-language RT America unit broadcasts from Washington, D.C. A shadowy group called PropOrNot, that has not disclosed either its funders or its principals, has created a blacklist of 200 independent media web sites that it is calling tools of Russia. On the list are some of the most popular and widely read alternative media outlets like Naked Capitalism, Truthout and Truthdig, which regularly carry articles by some of the most knowledgeable and informed voices in America. Another popular site, CounterPunch, was originally on the list but has now been removed following what PropOrNot calls … Continue reading