By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 1, 2018 Last evening, the front page digital edition of the New York Times dropped another bombshell in what increasingly feels like a badly scripted daily soap opera that could perhaps be called “As the White House Turns” or “Days of Our Messed Up Lives.” The Times report focused on big loans that were made to Jared Kushner’s family business by two financial firms after he met at the White House with executives from those firms. There was a $184 million loan from private equity firm Apollo. There was also a $325 million loan by mega Wall Street bank Citigroup shortly after a visit by Citigroup’s CEO Michael Corbat to Kushner’s office at the White House in the spring of 2017. Despite nepotism laws governing the Executive Branch, Kushner is both the son-in-law to President Trump as well as a Senior Advisor. Despite … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 28, 2018 Investors have been whiplashed so far this week and it’s only Wednesday morning. On Monday, the Dow rocketed ahead by 399 points. On Tuesday, it plunged by 299 points. What changed investor sentiment so dramatically in 24 hours? David Stockman, the former Director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan who blogs at Contra Corner, appeared on CNBC yesterday to size up the situation. Commenting on the new Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, who gave testimony for the first time in his new role before the House Financial Services Committee yesterday, Stockman said he thinks Powell is “missing three giant skunks sitting on the wood pile.” The biggest skunk according to Stockman is an “epic monetary fiscal collision” that Stockman says he hasn’t seen before in his lifetime. Stockman explained that starting this October, which … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 27, 2018 MarketWatch’s Tomi Kilgore reported on February 13, 2018 that JPMorgan analyst Stephen Tusa “became even more bearish” on General Electric (which has been a component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average since its creation in 1896). Kilgore reports further that the JPMorgan analyst had “slashed his stock price target to $14” from his previous target of $16. Only Deutsche Bank’s stock analyst, John Inch, says Kilgore, has a lower target, at $13. JPMorgan, along with all of the other major Wall Street firms, is still allowed to issue research ratings on stocks despite the firms being charged by the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2003 in the epic research scandal on Wall Street. Yesterday morning, as the Dow was on its way to closing up a whopping 399 points, GE plunged to a nickel below the JPMorgan analyst’s prediction, touching an … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 26, 2018 On Monday, February 5 and again on Thursday, February 8, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed the day with more than 1,000-point losses. We decided it might be instructive to see what JPMorgan’s Dark Pools were up to that week now that the three-week old data has been released by the self-regulator FINRA. We’ll get to that shortly, but first some necessary background. Dark Pools are effectively unregulated stock exchanges that operate in darkness inside Wall Street’s largest firms. If you have been following the past decade of criminal felony counts for colluding in market rigging and multi-billion dollar fines for abusing the public against these same firms, you might be forgiven for thinking that Federal regulators have lost their minds to allow these same firms to operate Dark Pools. But it’s actually worse than it first appears: not only are … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 24, 2018 On Thursday, the President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, William C. Dudley, held a press conference to effectively tell Puerto Ricans to suck it up as they attempt to recover from an epic humanitarian crisis caused by Hurricane Maria, which devastated infrastructure and wiped out electricity to the entire Island in September. When it comes to corrupt Wall Street banks that are in the process of failing, the Federal Reserve can always find trillions of dollars to funnel into the banks’ coffers at almost zero interest rates to prop them back up. It does that through its power to electronically create money out of thin air. Take, for example, the $16 trillion it secretly lavished on Wall Street banks and their foreign counterparts during the financial crash of 2007 to 2010. For deviant banks and their shareholders, the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 22, 2018  Carmen Schentrup would have celebrated her 17th birthday yesterday had she not been gunned down in a hail of bullets from an AR-15 semi-automatic assault weapon on February 14 at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida by an expelled student who had bought the gun legally when he was just 18 years old. Last evening her brother, Robert, appeared at a CNN Town Hall that was convened to discuss the shooting. He posed the following question to Congressman Ted Deutch who was present at the Town Hall: “If a majority of Americans have long supported stricter gun control regulations, but our elected officials who are supposed to represent the people have done nothing, does this mean that our democracy is broken?” Congressman Deutch, a Democrat who does support strong gun laws, told the anguished young man that our … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 21, 2018 Nothing buttresses Senator Bernie Sanders’ position that fraud on Wall Street is not a bug but a feature better than the news last week that the Citigroup Board was bumping up CEO Michael Corbat’s pay by 48 percent to $23 million for 2017. Corbat has sat at the helm of the bank since October 2012 as the bank has paid more than $12 billion in fines and restitution for serial abuses of the public and investors, including its first criminal felony count in more than a century of existence. The felony count came on May 20, 2015 from the U.S. Department of Justice over the bank’s involvement in a bank cartel that was rigging foreign currency markets. Numerous other charges against the bank have focused on money-laundering. Citigroup’s long history of involvement in money-laundering also gives the appearance of being a … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 20, 2018 On February 14, the week after the Dow Jones Industrial Average experienced two separate days of more than 1,000-point losses, the House Financial Services’ Subcommittee on Capital Markets, Securities and Investment convened a hearing to discuss various legislative proposals to return to the wild west era of derivatives trading on Wall Street. (Many, including Wall Street On Parade, believe that we’ve never left that era – the risks have simply been hidden behind a dark curtain. See related articles below.) One lonely voice for sanity on the witness panel, which was stacked with industry trade groups, was Andy Green, Managing Director at the Economic Policy Center for American Progress. Green’s written testimony stated that the legislative proposals “slice, dice, or otherwise poke holes – sometimes large holes – in the firewalls placed in the derivatives markets by post 2008 reforms….” Green … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 16, 2018 In towns across America there are laws that prevent government officials from meeting secretly. Typically, the officials must first publish a notice to the public with the date and time of the meeting; circulate the notice in a widely read publication and post the notice on the official website in order to give the public advance notice and the ability to attend the meeting or hearing. The ability of the U.S. public to attend government meetings; hear firsthand what is being done with taxpayers’ dollars; ask questions about any perceived conflicts that might exist; and file Sunshine law requests for documents is how citizens hold government officials accountable. When we lose that, we lose the entire concept of America as a country of the people, by the people and for the people. Thus, any effort at all to whittle away at … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 15, 2018 Last Friday, Christian Mueller-Glissmann, an equity strategist at Goldman Sachs, took to the airwaves at CNBC to discuss last week’s market selloff and entered a new phrase into the lexicon of investing. Mueller-Glissmann said: “The way this market has traded in this correction has been very much in line with our thesis from last year which was called the ‘Balanced Bear.’ You might remember this – this idea that equities and bonds can sell off together.” In response to a question from his CNBC interviewer as to whether this means there is nowhere to “go and hide” in a market like this, Mueller-Glissmann responded: “Exactly. I think you’re dealing with a much higher portfolio risk, not only with equities being riskier but a much higher portfolio risk because there’s very little places to hide.” If there’s nowhere to hide, we’d like … Continue reading →