By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 27, 2018 ~  It’s increasingly looking like President Trump vetted his tax cut plan about as thoroughly as he vetted his cabinets picks. That is likely to have a serious negative impact on U.S. economic growth, the housing market and consumer spending. Yesterday Trump’s pick to head the Veterans Affairs Administration withdrew his name from consideration after allegations of drinking on the job and wrecking a government car while drunk surfaced in statements made by two dozen of his current and former colleagues. Later in the day, Trump’s Senate-confirmed head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, was being grilled at two separate House hearings on his wasteful spending of taxpayer dollars for first class travel to Italy and Morocco, a $43,000 soundproof phone booth for his office despite the agency already having secure facilities, and for accepting a dramatically below-market rate of $50 … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 26, 2018 ~  There is a great deal of hand-wringing in the U.S. media today over the plight of Deutsche Bank, the big German financial firm that has a hefty presence on Wall Street. Its first-quarter net profit slumped by 79 percent, it replaced its CEO of less than three years, John Cryan, this month with new CEO Christian Sewing whose game plan revolves around “painful” cuts. On September 15, 2008, a key moment in the 2008 financial collapse on Wall Street when Lehman Brothers filed bankruptcy, Merrill Lynch was forced into the arms of Bank of America and Citigroup teetered toward insolvency, Deutsche Bank’s shares closed the day at $58.80 (equivalent price adjusted for a subsequent stock split). Yesterday, its shares closed at $14.60 on the New York Stock Exchange. Not only has it not recovered from the financial crash but it’s … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 25, 2018 ~  Wall Street knows something that the rest of us don’t. Based on past experience, when Wall Street keeps secrets it never works out well for the rest of us. We’re thinking about the time Wall Street banks colluded on rigging prices on the Nasdaq market; or the time they rigged their research departments and told us to buy stocks that they were secretly callings dogs and crap; or the time they got S&P and Moody’s to give them triple-A ratings on subprime pools of debt while keeping it a secret that they had internal reports showing the loans didn’t meet their origination standards — and then they went out and secretly shorted that debt while continuing to sell it to their customers as a good investment. Yesterday, something decidedly weird happened as U.S. stock markets were being pummeled. Three of … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 24, 2018 ~  The U.S. Department of Justice has had an ongoing investigation into the potential rigging of the U.S. Treasury market by big banks on Wall Street for the past three years according to a series of past media reports. And yet, no formal charges have been brought. Lots of Wall Street watchers are wondering why – especially since private law firms have brought very specific charges in the matter into Federal court. There are only so many times the Justice Department can charge the largest Wall Street banks with felony counts for rigging markets before the public catches on that it’s a feature not a bug of their business model. Continuous rigging charges could lead to growing public demands and newspaper editorials to break up these serially-charged behemoths at a time when members of Congress – who depend on the largess … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 23, 2018 ~ If there’s any plaintiff’s law firm in America that should know racketeering when it sees it, it’s Cohen Milstein. It’s sued the major Wall Street banks repeatedly with a solid win rate for colluding to rig pretty much anything that trades. On Friday, in the same Federal District Court where its Wall Street actions are litigated, the Southern District of New York (SDNY), it filed its bombshell RICO lawsuit on behalf of the Democratic National Committee (DNC). The lawsuit does not name President Donald Trump as a defendant but it does name prominent members of his presidential campaign, including his son, Donald Jr., and son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, and advisers, Roger Stone and George Papadopoulos are also named, as are the Russian intelligence service, Russian Federation, several Russian operatives, Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. The lawsuit … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 20, 2018 ~  Make no mistake about it, the Big Law firms that played a major role in the Wall Street corruption that led to the financial crash of 2008 and have been burying corporate crimes through their crony ties to Washington for decades, are desperate to put their own man in the White House in 2020. On Tuesday, former Attorney General, Eric Holder, who headed the U.S. Department of Justice in the Obama administration, appeared on the MSNBC program, “All In with Chris Hayes.” Holder told Hayes that he was considering a run for the President of the United States in 2020 but had not made a final decision. (See video below.) Obviously, if Holder ran, it would be as a Democrat, something that is certain to enrage the progressive wing of the party. Holder effectively transplanted his pals from his law … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: April 17, 2018 ~  As women in careers as disparate as Hollywood movie stars, television news anchors and members of Congress have fueled the #MeToo movement and spoken out against America’s workplace culture that tolerates sexual harassment and assault in the workplace, the silence from women on Wall Street has been deafening. Some reporters who have written about the silence have speculated that Wall Street has cleaned up its act, owing to the big class action lawsuits that were brought in the 1990s against some of the largest and oldest Wall Street brokerage firms. (See my Editor’s Note below.) Wall Street women’s detailed court complaints in the 90s described lewd acts during the workday (such as the hiring of strippers) or at company-sanctioned holiday parties (like having a camera shoved under a skirt to take a picture). There was also the endless degradation of women on Wall … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 17, 2018 ~  It’s clear from the prosecutors’ filings in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York that they believe President Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, has lied to them and is concealing information from them. Last Friday evening, McClatchy newspapers dropped a bombshell that provided some insight into what some of those black redacted passages in the government’s court filings in the Cohen case might refer to. McClatchy reporters Peter Stone and Greg Gordon write that Special Counsel Robert Mueller “has evidence” that Cohen did, in fact, make a “late-summer trip to Prague during the 2016 presidential campaign.” Cohen has publicly denied any such trip and produced his passport to back up his story. The McClatchy article says “Cohen entered the Czech Republic through Germany, apparently during August or early September of 2016… He wouldn’t have needed a passport for … Continue reading →