By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 21, 2017 Wall Street appears to have a plan to get the deregulation it wants by pinning the start of the epic financial crash of 2007-2010 on (wait for it) the French, rather than its own unbridled greed, corruption and toxic manufacture of junk bonds known as subprime debt that it paid to have rated AAA by ethically-challenged and deeply conflicted rating agencies. (The same rating agencies that are getting paid by Wall Street to rate its debt issues today.) One of the men helping to peddle this narrative is Steve Hanke, a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, a taxpayer-subsidized nonprofit that was secretly owned by the billionaire Koch brothers for decades. Hanke’s bio at Cato lists him as a Professor of Applied Economics at John Hopkins University in Baltimore and provides the following titillating background: “Prof. Hanke served as a State … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 18, 2017 Promising to cut corporate taxes, roll back regulations on Wall Street, and get government off the back of business, Donald Trump was enjoying a honeymoon with the stock market and the CEOs of the most iconic brands in the U.S. What a difference four days can make. Yesterday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 274 points. Also yesterday, Trump announced that he was cancelling his business advisory council on infrastructure. That move followed his prior day’s axing of his star-studded CEO councils on manufacturing and Strategy & Policy Forum. According to published reports, Trump was saving face by axing the councils after getting a heads up that the CEOs were leaving en masse. The rapid move by top CEOs to distance themselves and their brands from the President came after Trump delivered impromptu remarks on Tuesday in the lobby of Trump … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 17, 2017 As the stock market repeatedly set new highs this year, confidence in the President was eroding among the general public. That erosion of confidence now extends to dozens of the top corporate leaders in America. There is apparently a new social standard in America. When it was revealed in the final weeks of Trump’s Presidential bid that he had stated on video that he could sexually assault women (“grab ‘em by the p*ssy), it was not a serious impediment for the top executives of the largest corporations in America to continue to pander to Trump, take top posts in his administration and serve on his business advisory councils. Even though it is generally accepted that women “drive 70-80% of all consumer purchasing, through a combination of their buying power and influence” the male executives that sit atop the most famous brands … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 16, 2017  According to continuing reports from the trenches, buttressed by a Bloomberg News article out today by Neil Weinberg, Wall Street’s largest firms are still firing whistleblowers for having the temerity to bring corrupt conduct to their superiors’ attention — despite whistleblower protection statutes embedded in the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. One Dodd-Frank provision expressly prohibits retaliation against whistleblowers and provides whistleblowers legal remedies if they are discharged or retaliated against. Another section provides potentially hefty awards through the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) if the whistleblower provides original information leading to a successful enforcement action that results in sanctions of over $1 million. Just this past April, the Board of Barclays, a big player on Wall Street, had to admit that it had hired an outside law firm to investigate its own CEO’s handling of a … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 15, 2017 When there is an epic financial crash in the U.S. that collapses century old Wall Street institutions and brings about the greatest economic collapse since the Great Depression, one would think that the root causes would be chiseled in stone by now. But when it comes to the 2008 crash, expensive corporate media real estate is happy to allow bogus theories to go unchallenged by editors. What is happening ever so subtly over time is that the unprecedented greed, corruption and unrestrained manufacture of fraudulent securities by iconic brands on Wall Street that actually caused the crash are getting a gentle rewrite. The insidious danger of this is that Wall Street is never reformed or adequately regulated – that it remains a skulking financial monster with its unseen tentacles wrapped tightly around every economic artery of American life, retaining its ever … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 14, 2017 According to the latest data from the New York Stock Exchange, margin debt has hit new peaks four times this year, starting with a new record of $513 billion in January; $528 billion in February; $536.9 billion in March; and reaching a whopping $549 billion in April. The most recent reading for June shows a decline to $539 billion – but that is still an increase of 64 percent from the margin level of January 2008, the year of the epic financial crash on Wall Street. Spiraling margin debt, where investors pledge securities at their brokerage firm to obtain a loan, typically to buy more securities, is frequently associated with stock market crashes. The dot.com bust followed a margin buying binge in 1999 and early 2000. Margin debt exploded from $153 billion in January 1999 to $278.5 billion by March of … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 10, 2017 On April 7, 2011 the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 12,409.49. Yesterday, it closed at 22,048.70, an increase of more than 9600 points over the six-year span. A bull market of this magnitude lasting more than half a decade would have been expected by Wall Street experts to have sucked in even the most cynical Wall Street naysayers. It hasn’t. Each April, the polling firm, Gallup, conducts its annual Economy and Personal Finance Survey. It asks U.S. adults whether they personally or jointly have money invested in the stock market, either in individual stocks or stock market funds, including through vehicles such as 401(k)s and Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs). Gallup began its 2011 survey on April 7, 2011, the day that the Dow closed at 12,409.49. That year’s survey found that 45 percent of Americans owned no stocks. Despite a … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 9, 2017 On August 7 the Federal Reserve released an updated report on consumer debt. It raises more questions about how the big Wall Street banks are making all those billions of dollars in profits. Since 2012, the benchmark 10-year U.S. Treasury note has yielded below 2.5 percent for the majority of that period. But according to the Federal Reserve chart above, on all consumer credit card accounts assessed interest, the interest rate charged to consumers has moved from 12.96 percent in 2012 to 14 percent as of May 2017. (The 14 percent figure is defined as follows by the Fed: “The rate for accounts assessed interest is the annualized ratio of total finance charges at all reporting banks to the total average daily balances against which the finance charges were assessed (excludes accounts for which no finance charges were assessed).” From 2012 … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 8, 2017 Yesterday, Neel Kashkari, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, spoke to the Rotary Club of Downtown Sioux Falls, South Dakota and then opened up the mic to questions from the audience. One question concerned today’s lack of true innovation rather than just innovations in social media. Kashkari responded as follows: Kashkari: “This is a big complicated topic. A big question mark in the economics profession is why is productivity growth in the U.S. economy so low. It’s much lower than it has been in prior decades. And, we think, you pull out your iPhone or Twitter or Facebook – you think, wow, all this stuff is happening. Well, some experts say the things that we’re creating now – that we’re innovating now – just aren’t that impactful. They don’t really move the needle very much. So if you compare … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 7, 2017 Last Monday, Thomas Hoenig, the Vice Chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), sent a stunning letter to the Chair and Ranking Member of the U.S. Senate Banking Committee. The letter contained information that should have become front page news at every business wire service and the leading business newspapers. But with the exception of Reuters, major corporate media like the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News, the Business section of the New York Times and Washington Post ignored the bombshell story, according to our search at Google News. What the fearless Hoenig told the Senate Banking Committee was effectively this: the biggest Wall Street banks have been lying to the American people that overly stringent capital rules by their regulators are constraining their ability to lend to consumers and businesses. What’s really behind their inability to make more loans is … Continue reading →