By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 24, 2018 ~ On March 14 the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes with a “massive fraud.” According to the SEC, Holmes had made wild and false claims about the company’s purportedly revolutionary blood testing device as the company fraudulently raised $700 million from investors. But despite the SEC investigators’ well-developed “massive fraud” charges against Holmes, five days later the SEC let the 30-something woman off the hook with a $500,000 fine, surrender of her shares in the company, and barred her from being an officer or director of a publicly traded company for 10 years. In other words, when Holmes is in her early 40s, she will have the opportunity to once again run another massive fraud and bilk investors. This is exactly the kind of hubris we have come to expect from the SEC. (See related articles … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 23, 2018 ~ Yesterday the U.S. House of Representatives voted 258-159 to approve a rollback of provisions in the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation that grew out of the epic financial collapse of 2008 – which ushered in the greatest economic bust since the Great Depression. The bill originated in the U.S. Senate and is now awaiting the signature of President Donald Trump, who is expected to quickly sign it. If you are thinking that Congress would never have approved this rollback of reforms if Wall Street was still as dangerous as it was in 2008, think again. Members of Congress approved this dangerous giveaway to Wall Street because they simply can’t say no to Wall Street’s political donations, its lobbyists, and those high-paying jobs that might await them if they play their cards right. The Washington Post called the rollback “the most … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 22, 2018 ~ The name of a confidential FBI informant, Stefan A. Halper, was revealed by a right-wing news website known as the Daily Caller News Foundation on Saturday. Curiously, Virginia (Ginni) Thomas, wife of the sitting U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, has been collecting an undisclosed amount of compensation from the same nonprofit and its anonymous right-wing donors for years. At 9:35 a.m. this past Saturday morning, the Daily Caller ran this headline: “Cambridge Professor Spied On Trump Campaign Advisers.” The very next day, President Donald Trump Tweeted the following: “I hereby demand, and will do so officially tomorrow, that the Department of Justice look into whether or not the FBI/DOJ infiltrated or surveilled the Trump Campaign for Political Purposes — and if any such demands or requests were made by people within the Obama Administration!” Yesterday the Justice Department agreed to … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 20, 2018 ~ According to the Cambridge English Dictionary, a kleptocracy is “a society whose leaders make themselves rich and powerful by stealing from the rest of the people.” Stealing can also be interpreted as a public official depriving citizens of their right to honest services, as defined under 18 U.S.C. § 1346. Two men serving in the highest offices of the United States, one man black and one man white, are now the poster children for a government that more closely resembles a kleptocracy than a democracy. The two men also have three other things in common: they are both shameless in flaunting their disregard for conflicts of interest; their previous Federal financial disclosure reports contained serious falsehoods; and neither has been removed from their high office. Last week Donald Trump, the President of the United States, released his financial disclosure form … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 18, 2018 ~  The Vatican released a lengthy report yesterday on how the drive for accumulating money at any cost has turned Wall Street and much of the global financial system into an “amoral culture,” noting that the idea that markets will be self-policing is pure bunk. The Vatican has apparently decided to keep the debate alive that Senator Bernie Sanders started during the presidential campaign of 2016 when he repeatedly railed against Wall Street for having a “business model of fraud.” The Vatican’s entry into this critical conversation would be much more meaningful if each time it or the Pope lectures the world on the meaning of morality they would acknowledge the Catholic Church’s own moral failings over decades in protecting sexual predators of children, refusing to report the assaults to law enforcement and moving the predators from parish to parish — … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 17, 2018 ~  The intrepid investigative reporter, Ronan Farrow, who has a shiny new Pulitzer on his shelf for his investigations into Harvey Weinstein, published an article last night at The New Yorker that should alarm every American. It turns out that it was a law enforcement official who leaked the confidential  government file on Donald Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen out of concern that someone in the government was making other undisclosed files on Michael Cohen’s funny money transactions involving an additional $3 million disappear. Cable news has breathlessly been reporting for days now on the financial file that the law enforcement official leaked to Michael Avenatti, attorney for porn star Stormy Daniels, who was paid $130,000 from Cohen’s secret account – a limited liability corporation established in Delaware with the name Essential Consultants LLC.  (“Essential” suggesting that if you want the President’s … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 16, 2018 ~  On November 9 of last year, a mere six months ago, we asked the question: “Does Jerome Powell Hear the Alarm Bells from Flattening Yield Curve?” Jerome Powell is, of course, the new Chairman of the Federal Reserve — the U.S. central bank and the body in which the United States has entrusted its monetary policy, for better or worse. We wrote at the time: “As of 7:48 a.m. this morning, the spread between the 10-year Treasury Note (yielding 2.33 percent) and 30-year Treasury Bond (yielding 2.81 percent) is even smaller, at a meager 48 basis points or less than half of one percent. “It is a serious commentary on the bizarre financial times in which we live that a fixed income investor would be rewarded with less than half a percent of additional income to add 20 years of … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 15, 2018 ~  Donald Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, made the bizarre remark on Fox News recently that Jared Kushner might be “disposable” because men, in general, are disposable. Kushner is Trump’s son-in-law who was safely protected as he delivered a speech at the opening of the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem yesterday. What played out in Gaza yesterday was very different: under the Trump administration, all Palestinians in Gaza are “disposable,” even children. According to news reports this morning, more than 60 Palestinians died in Gaza yesterday with more than 2,000 injured. The United Nations reports that eight of those dead are children under the age of 16. The massacre was the direct result of the Israeli military firing live bullets at protesters. But Donald Trump’s White House doesn’t see it that way. At a press briefing yesterday, White House Deputy Press Secretary Raj Shah … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 14, 2018 ~ The actor Tom Selleck is appearing in a television commercial for American Advisors Group (AAG). The product he is pushing is the company’s reverse mortgages. He gazes sincerely at his TV audience of financially struggling retirees and tells them reassuringly that he’s done his homework on this company. Remembering that Tom Selleck is an actor and not necessarily a good researcher, we decided to go where every prudent consumer should go first when checking out a financial services company: to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s (CFPB) complaint database. There are 22 complaints against AAG and some are pretty frightening. Apparently, the CFPB, a Federal agency created under the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation of 2010, found enough consumer complaints to be valid to take action against AAG. On December 7, 2016 the CFPB fined AAG $400,000 for deceptive advertising and ordered … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 11, 2018 ~  There’s a guy in Manhattan who’s sleeping about as well as Michael Cohen these days. That’s the broker at Morgan Stanley Smith Barney who opened the brokerage account for Donald Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen. According to a document posted at the Twitter page of Michael Avenatti, the lawyer for porn star Stormy Daniels, this fellow may have some explaining to do to the Feds if he didn’t file a Suspicious Activity Report (SAR) with the U.S. Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, known on the street as FinCEN. Avenatti’s document shows the following regarding a Morgan Stanley Smith Barney account: “From  July 13, 2017 through  September  8,  2017,  Mr. Cohen deposited three checks in the amounts of $505,000,  $250,000, and $250,000 in his Morgan  Stanley account. “Each deposit was remitted from an account held at First Republic Bank in the name … Continue reading →