By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 17, 2017 U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin appears to have inaugurated a perpetual bring your wife to work day. It’s become so farcical that it frequently feels like the United States Treasury Department has morphed into a low-budget, badly scripted reality TV show where the female star is so out-of-touch that she must continually scurry about in her haute couture erasing the haughty things she has written about the little people on multiple continents. We’ll get to that shortly, but first some background: It all started back on January 19 when actress and then fiancée Louise Linton sat by her man during his Senate Finance Committee confirmation hearing to become U.S. Treasury Secretary. At the hearing, Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon had this to say about his repugnance to see Mnuchin fill the post as U.S. Treasury Secretary: “Mr. Mnuchin’s career began … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 13, 2017  A man holding one of the most important and powerful jobs for keeping the U.S. banking system safe from another epic crash like that of 1929 and 2008 has tongues wagging over the bizarre speech he delivered at the Clearing House Annual Conference last Wednesday in New York. Keith Noreika is the acting head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the Federal agency responsible for supervising national banks and inspecting them for safety and soundness. What Noreika recommended last Wednesday, however, would make the U.S. banking system significantly more dangerous than it already is. Noreika thinks there is no good reason to prevent giant corporate conglomerates from owning insured depository banks that are backstopped by the U.S. taxpayer. He had this to say in his speech last week: “The narrative persists to keep commercial interests from owning or … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 10, 2017 If you feel lost in the cacophony of contrasting claims that Wall Street was adequately reformed under the Dodd-Frank legislation of 2010 or that it remains an insidious wealth transfer system for the 1 percent, then you need to invest one-hour of your time to listen carefully to some of the smartest experts in America address the topic. A free one-hour video is now available (see below) which should settle the debate once and for all that the Dodd-Frank legislation of 2010 has failed to deliver the needed reforms to Wall Street’s corrupt culture and fraudulent business models and that nothing short of restoring the Glass-Steagall Act is going to make the U.S. financial system safe again. Don’t let the grainy quality of the video turn you off (it was made from a live webinar): the integrity of the voices will … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 9, 2017 In November of 2016, there was more than 100 basis points (one percent) difference between the yield on the 2-year and the 10-year U.S. Treasury Note. As of this morning, that difference stood at 68 basis points, a dramatic flattening in the yield curve and harkening to the levels seen during the onset of the financial crisis in 2007. 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 risk to the maturity date on his … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 8, 2017 According to the now publicly available transcript of the testimony that former U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin gave before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC) on March 11, 2010, he was not put under oath, despite the fact that the bank at which he had served as Chairman of its Executive Committee for a decade, Citigroup, stood at the center of the financial crisis and received the largest taxpayer bailout in U.S. history. The fact that Rubin was not put under oath might have had something to do with the fact that he showed up with a team of six lawyers from two of the most powerful corporate law firms in America: Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison and Williams & Connolly. One of Rubin’s lawyers from Paul, Weiss was Brad Karp, the lawyer who has gotten Citigroup out of serial … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 7, 2017 On March 11, 2016, the National Archives released a trove of documents related to the work of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC) and their investigation of the causes of the 2007-2010 financial crisis. As a result of reviewing those documents, Senator Elizabeth Warren sent a September 15, 2016 letter to the Inspector General of the Justice Department and to then FBI Director James Comey seeking to find out why the Justice Department had not prosecuted any of the individuals or corporations that were referred to it by the FCIC. Senator Warren indicated in her letter to James Comey that her staff had “identified 11 separate FCIC referrals of individuals or corporations to DOJ in cases where the FCIC found ‘serious indications of violation[s]’ of federal securities or other laws consistent with this statutory mandate. Nine specific individuals were implicated in … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 6, 2017 Secret side agreements are a common maneuver by corporate law firms. Here’s how they work. An agreement that is legal and passes the smell test is drafted and submitted to a court or a regulatory body for public consumption. Then, a separate, secret side agreement is written and signed by both sides and it contains all of the smelly, shady, ethically questionable hard details on how the original agreement will be carried out. Donna Brazile, the former interim Chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) during the 2016 presidential campaign, has written a new book, “Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns that Put Donald Trump in the White House,” and has revealed the secret side agreement that the DNC had with Hillary Clinton’s campaign. In 2015, Hillary Clinton’s campaign set up a joint fundraising committee called the Hillary … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 1, 2017 Yesterday, the New York Times ran an error-filled article on the indictment of Trump adviser George Papadopoulos that seemed intent on cementing the notion that Russia hacked thousands of emails from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and then offered those hacked emails to the Trump campaign to smear dirt on Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential campaign. The problem was that the actual Federal indictment unsealed on Monday against Papadopoulos made no such claim regarding emails hacked at the Democratic National Committee. Where the thousands of emails referenced by the Russians actually came from was not spelled out in the indictment. They could have just as easily been emails hacked from Hillary Clinton’s unsecure server in the basement of her home during her time as Secretary of State. Instead of correcting its own erroneous reporting, today’s New York Times is blasting … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 31, 2017 The digital front page of today’s New York Times carries this dramatically misleading headline: “Trump Campaign Got Early Word Russia Had Democrats’ Emails.” Within the article, there are six separate references suggesting that the unsealed indictment against Trump adviser George Papadopoulos supports the premise that the Russians had the hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee (DNC), before the emails became publicly known. For example, New York Times reporter Scott Shane makes the following references in the article: “Court documents revealed that Russian officials alerted the campaign, through an intermediary in April 2016, that they possessed thousands of Democratic emails and other ‘dirt’ on Hillary Clinton…” And this: “That was two months before the Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee was publicly revealed and the stolen emails began to appear online. The new court filings provided the first clear evidence … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 25, 2017 Last evening, the Washington Post dropped a bombshell on the already discredited leadership of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) under its former Chair, Debbie Wasserman Schultz. The Post reported that Marc Elias, a law partner at the politically connected law firm Perkins Coie, retained the company, Fusion GPS, that compiled the infamous Russian Dossier on Donald Trump. The Post said he did so on behalf of the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC. (The current leadership of the DNC has stated that it had no knowledge of these actions.) After the Washington Post story broke, New York Times reporters Ken Vogel and Maggie Haberman Tweeted that they had been lied to by those involved. Haberman Tweeted: “Folks involved in funding this lied about it, and with sanctimony, for a year.” Vogel Tweeted: “When I tried to report this story, Clinton campaign … Continue reading →