Search Results for: Janet Yellen

President Obama Proclaims National Character Counts Week As NYU Enshrines a Very Different Message

By Pam Martens: October 21, 2013 As the U.S. sinks to a rank of 19 on Transparency International’s list of the least corrupt countries, President Obama has issued a proclamation declaring this to be the week that we come together as a Nation to reflect on our moral values.  The President’s Proclamation reads in part: “…During National Character Counts Week, we reflect on the ways we support one another, the ways we come together and seek common ground, and the lessons we teach our children about what citizenship means in the United States of America…The children we raise today are surrounded by proud examples of integrity, and moral courage, but it is our task as parents, community members, and leaders to teach them not only the skills they need to succeed, but also the values that keep our country strong…” Yes, our children are surrounded by wonderful, wholesome role models … Continue reading

A Few Glitches in the President’s Month Long Charm Offensive

By Pam Martens: August 26, 2013  The sine qua non of image handlers dealing with negative revelations in the media is to infuse the happy faces of children and puppies into the equation.  Did you hear that the Obamas have a new puppy? Her name is Sunny and like her big brother, Bo, she’s a Portuguese Water Dog. There’s photos and even a video at WhiteHouse.gov showing the adorable pair frolicking on the White House lawn.  As former NSA contractor, Edward Snowden, has continued to leak documents to newspapers showing that President Obama has overseen a surveillance dragnet on innocent Americans and U.S. allies, raising serious questions about this former constitutional law professor’s respect for democratic ideals, the President took to the road in a bus during the month of August to promote a new agenda to help the middle class. This past weekend the emphasis was on making college … Continue reading

Is President Obama Trying to Socialize the Press to Silence Over Larry Summers?

By Pam Martens: August 1, 2013  President Obama met in a closed door session with the House Democratic Caucus yesterday and was told that Lawrence (Larry) Summers is a decidedly bad choice for Federal Reserve Chairman. That assessment triggered a strident response from the President. He defended Summers and praised him for his hard work during the 2008 financial crisis.  The President’s praise of Summers has been met with a new volley of press today that is keeping it fresh in the minds of the voting public that were it not for Summers’ brashness and bullying of opponents to deregulate Wall Street, repeal the Glass-Steagall Act, and keep trillions of dollars of derivatives off regulated exchanges during the Clinton administration – there might not have been a 2008 financial crisis. Summers served as both Deputy Secretary at the Treasury and Secretary during Clinton’s Presidency.  It’s tough to convince the public that a … Continue reading

Professors Point to JPMorgan Chase as Poster Boy of a Financial System Dependent on Corruption to Sustain Itself

Wall Street Bull (Thumbnail)

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 18, 2023 ~ The full day conference sponsored by nonprofit watchdog Better Markets last Wednesday was a unique opportunity to gain brilliant insights from academic experts who have battled on the frontlines of the most unprecedented and ongoing era of corruption in U.S. financial history. (You can watch it on YouTube at this link.) In fact, at the close of the conference, Anat Admati, Professor of Finance and Economics at Stanford Graduate School of Business, summed up the U.S. financial system in five words: “Corruption has become the system.” Admati’s celebrated 2013 book, The Bankers’ New Clothes: What’s Wrong with Banking and What to Do about It, co-authored with German economist Martin Hellwig, will have an expanded new edition coming out in early January. The new edition includes coverage of the banking failures this spring and four new chapters: “Too Fragile Still,” “Bailouts and Central … Continue reading

Credit Suisse and the Fed’s Plunge Protection Team

Credit Suisse

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 4, 2022 ~ At 6:53 a.m. this morning (ET), Dow futures were up 454 points. That followed the Dow Jones Industrial Average gaining 765 points yesterday. No one who has been a trader on Wall Street or a stock broker for multiple decades believes this rally is real. Wall Street veterans are thinking that either the Fed’s plunge protection team or the Treasury’s plunge protection team is behind the rally. Equally unbelievable, as the chart above indicates, is the fact that the major mega banks on Wall Street closed in the green yesterday. Many of these are counterparties to Credit Suisse derivatives and thus subject to the potential for contagion. Until everyone who works on Wall Street is 25 years old and too young to remember what happened in 2008 after Citigroup began to quake, Wall Street traders are not going to believe that … Continue reading

Nonfiction Book Explains the Oligarchs’ Plot to Break Up the U.S. – To Make It Easier to Sell Off Its Parts

Sarah Kendzior, Author and Anthropologist

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 12, 2022 ~ Sarah Kendzior turned 44 on September 1. She has already had two bestselling books. She holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from Washington University with a focus on authoritarian regimes.   We mention this as background because Kendzior’s latest book, They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent, to be released tomorrow by Flatiron Books, needs to be read as the work of a serious scholar. Six years ago Kendzior correctly predicted in numerous articles what the rise of Trumpism would bring to the United States. On August 3, 2016, three months before the presidential election, Kendzior wrote the following for Foreign Policy under the headline: “Welcome to Donald Trump’s America”: “For over a year, pundits — especially Republicans who have a stake in legitimizing their party’s abject surrender — have been claiming that Trump will eventually pivot from his extremist positions. They … Continue reading

BlackRock Begins Buying Junk Bond ETFs for the Fed Today: It’s Already at Work for the Central Bank of Israel

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 12, 2020 ~ It’s off to the races today for BlackRock. The New York Fed, with authority from the Federal Reserve Board and backstopped with taxpayers’ money, will begin the first phase of the Fed’s unprecedented leap into shoring up the sagging prices of investment grade corporate debt and junk bonds. BlackRock has been selected by the New York Fed to be the investment manager for these bailout facilities and will begin Phase I today by buying up Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) containing investment grade corporate bonds as well as junk bonds. Making the situation particularly dicey is that BlackRock just happens to be one of the largest purveyors of said ETFs. The screaming conflict-of-interest that this raises in the minds of many is not ruffling any feathers at the New York Fed (which is itself a bundle of conflicts wrapped in a … Continue reading

Icahn Called BlackRock “An Extremely Dangerous Company”; the Fed Has Chosen It to Manage Its Corporate Bond Bailout Programs

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 30, 2020 ~ In 2015, the legendary Wall Street investor, Carl Icahn, called BlackRock “an extremely dangerous company.” (See video clip below.) Icahn was specifically talking about BlackRock’s packaging of junk bonds into Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) and calling them “High Yield,” which the average American doesn’t understand is a junk-rated bond. The ETFs trade during market hours on the New York Stock Exchange, giving them the aura of liquidity when one needs it. Icahn said: “I used to laugh with some of these guys…I used to say, you know, the mafia has a better code of ethics than you guys. You know you’re selling this crap.” Icahn warned that “if and when there’s a real problem in the economy, there’s going to be a rush for the exits like in a movie theatre, and people want to sell those bonds, and think … Continue reading

Charts Run Counter to Fed Talk of Rate Hike

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 28, 2015  The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) of the Federal Reserve will release its statement today at 2 p.m. (ET). It is widely expected that the Fed will be holding rates steady. The Fed has been signaling for more than a year that the U.S. economy is strong enough for it to raise interest rates gradually. Based on comments from various Fed speakers, many had expected the rate hike to come in September. Wall Street on Parade has taken a skeptical view of the Fed’s happy talk about the economy – preferring to look at the cold, hard data coming from inside and outside the Fed. It now seems quite plausible that the Fed’s agenda all along has been to talk up the U.S. dollar to prevent capital flight while waving pom-poms to boost confidence and spur consumer spending. Corporate media seems … Continue reading

Should a Free Press Have to Beg the Federal Reserve for Ben Bernanke’s Appointment Calendar?

By Pam Martens: January 2, 2014 Each business day, the President of the United States makes his daily schedule available to the press. The President is the Commander in Chief of the military, the man who signs or vetoes legislation, the individual with the power to initiate military action against another nation.  To most Americans, he is viewed as the most powerful individual in the country. If such a powerful individual involved with so many delicate negotiations can share his daily appointment calendar with the American people, why can’t the Washington money men whose mandate is also to serve the country’s interest. The U.S. Treasury Secretary’s daily appointment calendar is posted on the Treasury’s web site. The web site tells us that the calendars “are generally posted every quarter.” However, the last six months of Jack Lew’s schedule are missing from this archive. What we do know from Jack Lew’s … Continue reading