By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 17, 2018 If you are raising children, caring for aging parents, working multiple jobs to pay the mortgage or simply spending your free time protesting the policies of the current administration, you may have missed the latest series of scandals swirling around the so-called leader of the free world. Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Donald Trump’s longtime personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, “arranged a $130,000 payment” to a former porn star just weeks prior to the 2016 presidential election as part of a gag order meant to silence her from disclosing to the public an “alleged sexual encounter” with Trump while he was married to his current wife, Melania. The former porn star is Stephanie Clifford whose stage name is Stormy Daniels. Jacob Weisberg, Editor-in-Chief of the Slate Group, appeared on MSNBC last evening and had this to say about the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 16, 2018 Nomi Prins’ latest book, Collusion: How Central Bankers Rigged the World, ensures her place as one of this century’s most informed Wall Street historians. It’s the perfect segue from Prins’ earlier “It Takes a Pillage,” and her 2014 book All the Presidents’ Bankers. If you are serious about understanding the corrupting influences that have left the U.S. vulnerable to another epic financial crash, buy all three books and read them as one. Prins is a veteran of Wall Street who has now written six books and dozens of articles to help Americans navigate the snake pit that has replaced the financial system of the United States. It all started with her first book in 2004, Other People’s Money: The Corporate Mugging of America, where she explained her motivation as follows: “When I left Wall Street, at the height of a wave … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 12, 2018 On Wednesday, the House Financial Services Committee held a hearing on a topic of critical importance to all Americans: restructuring the Federal Reserve into a modern day central bank instead of a captured regulator controlled by the very banks it purports to supervise. Dean Baker, the Senior Economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, presented an important assessment of reforms needed at the Fed but you will be hard pressed to find any mainstream media coverage of his testimony. Instead, President Trump’s characterization yesterday of Haiti and African nations as “sh**hole countries” is dominating the news. How much critical work is falling by the wayside because mainstream media, dependent on ratings, elects to pursue only the most sensational stories – which they have no shortage of finding under President Trump. Congress began its latest push to reform the Federal … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 11, 2018 The arrogance of the captured Wall Street regulators in Washington grows exponentially with each passing day. The only Wall Street bank which has admitted to three criminal felony charges – all coming within the past three years – has been allowed to send one of its trading executives to head a key post at Wall Street’s top cop – the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Failing up continues to be the business model in the nation’s capitol. The Trump administration, in its continuing Swamp-filling mandate from the billionaires behind the dark curtain, has elevated Brett Redfearn as Director of the Division of Trading and Markets at the SEC. Redfearn has worked at JPMorgan Securities from November 2004 to October 2017 when he was named to the new SEC post. In 2014 the U.S. Justice Department slapped JPMorgan with two criminal felony … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 10, 2018 On Monday, Institutional Investor’s Jonathan Kandell wrote a fascinating profile of Citigroup. He tried in every conceivable way to be kind to the company but the facts just kept getting in his way. Interestingly, the official name of the behemoth bank holding company, Citigroup, appears just once in the article. Its homey, cuddly moniker, “Citi,” appears 84 times. As the bank’s public relations legions attempt to erase the stain of Citigroup’s performance during the 2008 financial crisis and its Frankenbank birth in 1998 in violation of the Glass-Steagall Act and Bank Holding Act of 1956, changing the bank’s name is likely in the cards. When Sandy Weill and John Reed proposed to merge the disparate parts of Weill’s Travelers Group, which owned an insurance firm (Travelers), investment bank (Salomon Brothers) and retail brokerage (Smith Barney) with Reed’s Citicorp, parent of the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 9, 2018 Today’s print edition of the New York Times carries an OpEd by Thomas Chatterton Williams with the terse headline, “Oprah Don’t Do It.” The column follows a powerful speech delivered by Oprah Winfrey at the Golden Globe Awards on Sunday evening. (See video below.) That speech set Twitter and cable news ablaze with talk of an Oprah run for President in 2020. By Monday evening, CNN was reporting that she is “actively thinking” about a Presidential run. In hearing that pronouncement on CNN, our first thought was that media outlets wouldn’t have the guts to tell a black female celebrity with the stature of Oprah Winfrey that she could doom the already shaky credibility of the Democratic Party with a run for the White House; that her lack of prior government service and national security naiveté would be weaponized against her … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 8, 2018 Under the Obama presidency, a key executive of the scandalized Wall Street bank, Citigroup, was secretly in charge of selecting the people who would fill top administration posts in Obama’s White House and cabinet, while the bank was in the midst of the largest taxpayer bailout in U.S. history. The staffing recommendations included top posts at the Justice Department, which would fail to prosecute any major Wall Street executives for the crimes leading up to the financial crash of 2008.  (See our prior reporting on this here and here.) Under Trump, who ran on a populist platform, the top cop of Wall Street at the Securities and Exchange Commission, Jay Clayton, is a lawyer who had represented 8 of the 10 largest Wall Street banks prior to his nomination by Trump and confirmation by the U.S. Senate to become SEC Chairman. The U.S. Treasury … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 5, 2018 How does one make an unreleased book an even bigger bestseller than it already is? Threaten a libel suit and demand that the publisher not release the book – ever. Michael Wolff’s explosive book on the chaos and incompetency of the Trump administration, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, is now the number one bestseller on Amazon. Yesterday Wolff posted blistering excerpts from the book at the Hollywood Reporter. The President is variously characterized by his own appointees as “a moron,” “dumb as s**t,” “a hopeless idiot,” or someone who has “lost his mind.” Trump’s lawyer, Charles Harder of Harder Mirell & Abrams LLP, whipped off an 11-page letter to Wolff and Steve Rubin, President of Henry Holt and Company, the book’s publisher. Most of the letter consisted of boilerplate demands to retain documents and emails, an effort to strongly … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 4, 2018  On Monday, 37-year old Arthur Gregg (A.G.) Sulzberger took the helm as the new Publisher of the New York Times, succeeding his father, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., whose tenure in the post lasted for the past quarter of a century. A.G. has previously held positions at the Times as metro reporter, national correspondent, associate editor for strategy and deputy publisher. He marked the occasion of becoming the fifth generation of his family to assume the mantle of Publisher by invoking his great-great grandfather, Adolph Ochs, who promised readers he would “give the news impartially, without fear or favor, regardless of party, sect, or interests involved.” A.G. then added his own 900-word promise for “independent, courageous, trustworthy journalism” on his watch. In one particularly poignant passage from the missive, A.G. writes: “The Times will hold itself to the highest standards of independence, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 3, 2018  The sitting President of the United States, Donald Trump, is actively taunting North Korea on Twitter over who has the bigger, more powerful nuclear button. On September 23, Trump tweeted: “Just heard Foreign Minister of North Korea speak at U.N. If he echoes thoughts of Little Rocket Man, they won’t be around much longer!” Little Rocket Man is Trump’s preferred insulting moniker for North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un.  Yesterday, following a New Year’s speech by Kim in which he bragged about his country’s nuclear capability to hit the U.S. mainland, Trump had this to say on Twitter: “North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the ‘Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times.’ Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger … Continue reading →