By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 20, 2017  In 2006 the Federal Reserve’s books were audited by PricewaterhouseCoopers. But beginning in 2007 and for every year thereafter through 2014, the Fed’s books were audited by Deloitte & Touche. That’s a very long eight years that just happen to coincide with the greatest economic upheaval in the U.S. since the Great Depression. (Since 2015, KPMG has issued the annual audited statement of the Fed’s books.) We’re not suggesting that Deloitte didn’t do its job properly but we are suggesting that the Fed benefited by not having a bunch of different prying eyes looking at its books during those bizarre years when its assets ballooned from $914.8 billion at the end of 2007 to $4.5 trillion in 2014. In just the single year of 2013 the Fed’s assets jumped by a staggering $1 trillion from $2.9 trillion at the end of … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 19, 2017 Mark this date on your calendar: Friday, June 9, 2017. That’s the date that the big downward move in the largest tech stocks began. The day also saw a rotation into big bank stocks (which is like swapping a land mine for a hand grenade — there’s going to be an explosion, it’s just a matter of degree). The selloff on Friday was triggered by a research report from Robert Boroujerdi of Goldman Sachs. The report compared today’s FAAMG tech stocks (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Google-parent Alphabet) to the highfliers in the tech bubble that crashed in 2000: Microsoft, Cisco, Intel, Oracle and Lucent. Boroujerdi used a lexicon that the market did not want to hear: “death,” “extremes,” and “difficult to decipher risk narratives.” The exact sentence went like this: “This outperformance, driven by secular growth and the death of … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 15, 2017 A new poll is out from the Associated Press/NORC Center for Public Affairs Research at the University of Chicago. It doesn’t bode well for Donald Trump’s presidency nor for the U.S. economy. Despite Wall Street’s century-old propaganda campaign to convince Washington that it controls the levers to economic growth in the U.S., and thus must be placated on its every desire, informed citizens understand that economic power rests in the hands of the consumer in a nation where two-thirds of GDP is consumer spending. Likewise, consumer confidence in the President of the United States impacts one’s willingness to open the purse strings and buy. The thinking is: if the country is headed in the wrong direction, how safe is my job? Perhaps I should stop spending and put money away for a rainy day. The new poll shows that 64 percent … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 14, 2017 The next leg of the insatiable Wall Street heist has begun under the new U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. Under the guise of empowering Americans “to make independent financial decisions,” the Treasury released its set of recommendations for financial reform on Monday. Far from empowering Americans, the new recommendations would effectively place a bigger blindfold on consumers, blocking further their ability to differentiate between serially corrupt financial institutions on Wall Street and those that make an effort at playing by the rules. (The latter being an almost extinct species.) Wall Street’s fingerprints are all over the Treasury recommendations. The report has singled out for particular scalpel treatment the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), which Wall Street loathes because of its independence. The acronym “CFPB” appears 315 times in the 147-page report. One passage reads as follows: “A significant restructuring in the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 13, 2017 If Goldman Sachs thinks this Russian computer genius is worthy of endless prosecution for the past eight years, despite two courts overturning their efforts, perhaps he’s just the man the Department of Homeland Security and FBI need to stop the Russian assault on the U.S. election system. This morning Bloomberg News is reporting that in the leadup to the Presidential election of 2016, Russian hackers hit voting systems in a total of 39 states, confirming other reports that the U.S. public has not previously been made aware of the extent of Russian hacking into state voting systems. In testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee on June 8, former FBI Director James Comey stated in regard to Russian interference in our elections that “They’re coming after America,” adding that “They will be back.” This is where computer experts on Wall Street could help the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 9, 2017 President Donald Trump announced his nomination of Christopher Wray to take over James Comey’s job as Director of the FBI in a Tweet on June 7, the day before Comey’s much anticipated testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee. In the Tweet, Trump called Wray a “man of impeccable credentials,” which, undoubtedly, he is. He is also a man with a maze of conflicts of interests. It appears that someone has tried to scrub some of those conflicts from the official web site of the Justice Department. For example, try this Justice Department press release link, which now turns up a dead page. www.justice.gov/criminal/pr/2004/02/2004_3631_FORMER_ENRON_CHIEF_E.htm Fortunately for our readers, Google has cached the press release which is dated February 19, 2004. The opening sentence includes all three names making headlines today – Comey, Wray and Robert Mueller, the newly appointed Special Counsel who … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 8, 2017 President Trump’s firing of top law enforcement officials now covers a broad spectrum. In addition to FBI Director James Comey, Trump fired the Acting Attorney General of the U.S. Justice Department, Sally Yates, as well as Preet Bharara, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York where most major Wall Street criminal investigations take place. All of these individuals were involved in investigations of Trump associates’ involvement with Russia. Now, Trump is sending signals that his current U.S. Attorney General at the Justice Department, Jeff Sessions, may be next in line for sacking. Comey’s written testimony that was released yesterday in preparation for his appearance today before the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee completes the picture of a President who believes that the Federal government’s law enforcement apparatus can be re-engineered into his own Praetorian Guard, complete with taking loyalty … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 7, 2017 The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) just released its latest economic outlook which it sums up as “better but not good enough,” noting that, since the financial crisis of 2008, global growth remains “below past norms and below the pace needed to escape fully from the low-growth trap.” Projecting a modest pickup in global growth to 3.5 percent this year, the authors write: “After many years of weak recovery, with global growth in 2016 at the lowest rate since 2009, some signs of improvement have begun to appear. Trade and manufacturing output growth have picked up from a very low level, helped by firmer domestic demand growth in Asia and Europe, and private sector confidence has strengthened. But policy uncertainty remains high, trust in government has diminished, wage growth is still weak, inequality persists, and imbalances and vulnerabilities remain in financial … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 6, 2017 Headline writers at the New York Times need to sharpen their pencils. Yesterday’s New York edition carried a front page article that links two of the biggest Wall Street banks, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase, to the Jared Kushner affair with the Russian banker, Sergey Gorkov, Chairman of the state-owned Russian bank Vnesheconombank (VEB) which has been under U.S. sanctions since 2014.  But readers would have missed that completely if they only read the softball headline, which failed to mention either bank. Everyone on Wall Street has been waiting for the next shoe to drop in the Jared Kushner episode. Kushner is under FBI and Congressional probes over allegations that he met in December with Gorkov while simultaneously attempting to set up a secret channel to communicate with Russia using its equipment inside its own embassy – ostensibly to thwart U.S. intelligence … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 5, 2017  After building the case for months that Russia was a major meddler in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, on Sunday the Washington Post connected the dots between a “shadow universe” of right-wing front groups domiciled in the U.S. with tax-exempt privileges who have a lot more to show for their efforts than does Russia. At the center of the Post article, written by reporters Robert O’Harrow Jr. and Shawn Boburg, is lefty turned righty David Horowitz and his nonprofit group the David Horowitz Freedom Center. While sanctions have not been lifted against Russia as potential proof of a quid pro quo with the Trump administration, Horowitz boasts of at least six of his Freedom Center’s supporters who hold top slots in Trump’s administration to push for his long-held positions on a Muslim ban, border wall, school vouchers and ridicule of global … Continue reading →