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 →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 10, 2018 ~  It’s about a six-minute drive from Donald Trump’s luxurious Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida to the palm-lined street where First Republic Bank has a branch to service the super wealthy. It is not known if Donald Trump has an account at this branch, but according to Trump’s Federal financial disclosure report, he maintains a checking account at First Republic Bank. Unfortunately for Trump, Michael Cohen, his personal attorney, also maintains an account with First Republic Bank. Cohen had his home, office, hotel room and safety deposit box raided by the FBI on April 9 and has been the subject of titillating news reporting every evening since over his wire of $130,000 as hush money to porn star Stormy Daniels, who alleges an affair with Trump. The wire was sent from Cohen’s Essential Consultants LLC account at First Republic Bank. … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 9, 2018 ~  Three years ago this month the U.S. Department of Justice brought felony charges against two of the largest Wall Street banks, JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup, for their involvement in rigging foreign currency markets. On the same date, two foreign banks, Barclays PLC and the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), were charged with felonies in the same matter. A fifth bank, UBS, was charged with a felony for its role in rigging the interest rate benchmark known as Libor. All five banks pleaded guilty to the charges. Citigroup was fined $925 million by the Justice Department for its foreign currency conduct that ran from as early as December 2007 until at least January 2013, roughly five years. JPMorgan was fined $550 million for rigging activity that ran from as early as July 2010 to January 2013, about two and a half … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 8, 2018 ~   Last evening two highly respected reporters at the New Yorker published the accounts of four women concerning the sitting New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s physical and psychological assaults on them. Schneiderman announced his resignation as the state’s top cop three hours after the article was published. The reporters on the story are Jane Mayer, one of the most accomplished investigative reporters in the U.S., and Ronan Farrow, a recent recipient of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for his series of articles on movie producer Harvey Weinstein’s history of sexual assaults on numerous women. The accounts of the four women involving Schneiderman are nothing short of horrifying. Two of the women, Michelle Manning Barish and Tanya Selvaratnam, went on the record using their names. Barish was involved with Schneiderman on and off for about two years from … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 7, 2018 ~  In the past few days, two reliable media enablers of Donald Trump have veered off script with stinging rebukes of the President’s epic pattern of lies. The question is – what took them so long. Editorials in the foreign press dating back as far as a year ago recognized that Trump’s insatiable need to lie rendered him unfit for the presidency of the United States. Since April of last year the Los Angeles Times has been running a series of forensic editorials attempting to explain what it is in Trump’s personality that would explain “his moral vacuity and his disregard for the truth, as well as his stubborn resistance to sensible advice.” The editorials have been headlined: “Our Dishonest President,” “Why Trump Lies,” and “Enough is Enough,” to mention just three. The Washington Post determined that Trump’s lies are so … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 4, 2018 ~ On January 26 of this year, the Dow Jones Industrial Average set a record high of 26,616.71. It has been backing and filling since then but the trend line has been decidedly down. Yesterday, the Dow closed at 23,930.15 – almost 2700 points lower than its high set in January, despite the passage of a massive corporate welfare tax cut and hundreds of billions of dollars in announced stock buybacks. (Just this week, Dow component Apple announced it would be implementing a new $100 billion share repurchase program.) Yesterday, the Dow closed just barely in positive territory after having been down almost 400 points intraday. But, notably, big Wall Street bank stocks such as JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley all closed the day in the red. These banks share a common feature – and … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 3, 2018 ~  What Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City and Donald Trump’s latest legal fixer did last night was to effectively tell Trump’s mortal enemy, the Washington Post, that Trump paid his personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, a $420,000 slush fund last year to clean up dirt on the President. Cohen is the target of a criminal investigation by the U.S. Attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York. Cohen’s home, office, hotel room and safety deposit box were raided by the FBI on April 9. In an interview with Sean Hannity of Fox News last evening, and then later with the Washington Post, Giuliani buried both himself and the President deeper into a web of half truths or outright lies while managing to taint the legal work he does at his law firm, Greenberg Traurig, a corporate law … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 2, 2018 ~  Since 2010 we have been investigating and reporting on activities of the billionaire Koch brothers’ political funding network to subvert democracy in the United States. In 2011 we broke the news that Charles Koch had entertained sitting U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas at Koch’s private club in California. Thomas would later rule in favor of the Citizens United decision which opened the spigots to unlimited corporate money in U.S. political campaigns. In the same article we reported that while the Citizens United case was pending before the U.S. Supreme Court, Virginia Thomas, the wife of the Justice, created a nonprofit Tea Party advocacy group, Liberty Central, Inc., with a former lawyer for the Charles G. Koch Foundation, Sarah Field, acting as her General Counsel and a former Koch lobbyist, Matt Schlapp, serving on her board at inception. The nonprofit received over … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 1, 2018 ~  Former U.S. Treasury Secretary, Robert Rubin, has decided he wants to rewrite his resume, removing the ugly warts from his days at Citigroup. That mega bank started as a financial supermarket that Rubin helped to make possible behind the scenes in the Bill Clinton administration, followed by a giant crash and the largest bank bailout in U.S. history from 2007 to 2010. Rubin strolled out the door of Citigroup in early 2009 $120 million richer than when he originally rolled his shopping cart into the well-stocked aisles of hubris at Citigroup almost a decade earlier. The New York Times has apparently decided to help Rubin exorcise Citigroup from his past. In an OpEd in the New York Times New York edition today, neither he nor the New York Times in its bio mentions so much as a syllable about Rubin’s … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 30, 2018 ~  Tonight, at 7 p.m., Wall Street historian and author, Nomi Prins, will be speaking at The Strand bookstore at 828 Broadway in New York City. (See admission details here.) The appearance marks the launch of her latest book, Collusion: How Central Bankers Rigged the World, set for release tomorrow. While former FBI Director James Comey’s new book, A Higher Loyalty, has been getting lots of attention on cable news, Collusion is a far more important book. America can recover from a disastrous presidency, the topic of Comey’s book. But America might not be able to fully recover from another epic financial crash brought on by disastrous central bank policy – the subject of Prins’ book. Collusion not only proves that the 1 percent got bailed out while the 99 percent got sold out as a result of policies of the U.S. … Continue reading →