By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 16, 2017  Less than two weeks after Mary Jo White was nominated to become Chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission by President Barack Obama on January 24, 2013, White filed an ethics disclosure letter advising that she would “retire” from her position representing Wall Street banks at the law firm Debevoise & Plimpton. White wrote on this subject in great detail, stating: “Upon confirmation, I will retire from the partnership of Debevoise & Plimpton, LLP. Following my retirement, the law firm will not owe me an outstanding partnership share for either 2012 or any part of 2013. As a retired partner, I will be entitled to the use of secretarial services, office space and a blackberry at the firm’s expense. For the duration of my appointment, I will forgo these three benefits, though I may pay for some secretarial services at my … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 15, 2017 Increasingly, under the mantra of liquidity, trading activity on Wall Street that would have resulted in criminal charges in another era is yawned at by regulators. The week that Donald Trump shocked markets around the globe by getting himself elected President of the United States, Wall Street banks like Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and others traded millions of shares of each other’s stocks – as well as trading millions of shares of their own publicly traded stock. The trades were not directed to a regulated stock exchange like the New York Stock Exchange. Instead, the trades were conducted internally by the Wall Street bank’s own Dark Pool – an entity appropriately named for its darkness and hands-off regulation. In an effort to create the illusion that there is some element of transparency about what is going on in these … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 14, 2017  Today’s news headlines are not the stuff of confidence-building. It seems like a 241-year old democracy should have gotten its act together a lot better by now. Bloomberg News is reporting that 17 of the most prestigious colleges and universities in the country (including Harvard, Yale and Stanford) have filed court papers seeking to join a lawsuit in a Brooklyn Federal court against President Donald Trump’s hastily constructed Executive Order. The Order called for an immigration ban which has drawn a flurry of lawsuits, nationwide protests and a rebuke by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The schools told the court that during the last academic year, more than one million international students studied at U.S. universities and now, as a result of the immigrant ban, 42,000 scholars, including Nobel Laureates, are calling for a boycott of educational conferences in the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 13, 2017 In 2005 and 2006, Wall Street Journal reporters distinguished themselves in covering the charges of fraud being hurled at the giant insurer AIG and its CEO, Maurice (Hank) Greenberg. At that point, the Bancroft family had owned the Wall Street Journal for more than a century. But in 2007, Rupert Murdoch and his corporate entity, News Corp, bought the newspaper. The paper’s editorial page has subsequently taken bizarre positions on Wall Street’s crimes, refusing to allow the facts to get in their way. Last evening, hitting a new low in the arena of “alternative facts,” the Wall Street Journal opined that Maurice (Hank) Greenberg, the former Chairman and CEO of the giant bailed-out insurer, AIG, had received a “vindication” by last Friday’s settlement with New York State Attorney General, Eric Schneiderman. The editorial characterized the case against Greenberg as a “revenge … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 10, 2017 Students and teachers at Franklin High School in Seattle are walking a little taller and prouder this morning. One of their own, 37-year old Noah Purcell, the Solicitor General of the State of Washington, has in the span of less than a week, beat the most powerful man in the world – not once but twice. Purcell convinced District Court Judge James Robart in oral arguments on February 3 and all three judges sitting at the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in oral arguments on February 7 that President Donald Trump had illegally imposed an Executive Order banning immigrant entry into the United States from seven majority-Muslim countries. The 29-page wide-ranging decision from the Ninth Circuit says as much about the power of Purcell to hone sweeping constitutional concepts into a finely-tuned legal argument as it does about the ability of … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 9, 2017 At 3:08 p.m. Pacific time, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a 29-page decision on President Donald Trump’s Executive Order regarding banning immigration to the United States for 120 days and banning people from seven majority Muslim countries from entering the United States for 90 days. The Court found that the States of Washington and Minnesota, which had taken their case to a lower Federal District Court and won a Temporary Restraining Order, did indeed suffer harms from the Executive Order. The Court wrote: “We therefore conclude that the States have alleged harms to their proprietary interests traceable to the Executive Order. The necessary connection can be drawn in at most two logical steps: (1) the Executive Order prevents nationals of seven countries from entering Washington and Minnesota; (2) as a result, some of these people will not enter state … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 9, 2017 Jeb Hensarling is the Republican Chair of the Financial Services Committee in the U.S. House of Representatives. Despite the seriousness of that job, Hensarling displays amazing ignorance of the inner workings of Wall Street at the hearings over which he presides. Unlike Senator Bernie Sanders who stumped around the country for more than a year during his primary campaign, reinforcing to Americans what they already suspected, that “the business model of Wall Street is fraud,” Hensarling wants to kill the few restraints on this criminal cartel that currently exist. He has been well financed by Wall Street to get the job done. Among Hensarling’s largest donors for his 2016 re-election campaign were every major Wall Street bank, including two admitted criminal felons (JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup’s Citicorp) as well as those charged with market rigging and serial frauds against the investing … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 8, 2017 The price of gold (see above chart) has been rising and its volume spiking since President Donald Trump signed his infamous Executive Order on immigration on January 27. That action ushered in a new U.S. era of uncertainty in which thousands of agreements, such as Lawful Permanent Resident status known as a green card, can be casually broken by one man in the Oval Office signing an Executive Order and setting off pandemonium in lives and airports around the globe. It raises the fear of what other established laws or rights the President might attempt to sign away. Gold typically rises when there is fear in stock markets. But the stock market has not been following its typical relationship to gold by selling off. Since Trump’s presidential win in early November, the Standard and Poor’s 500 has been on a steady … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 7, 2017 While President Donald Trump is proving himself to be a divider not a uniter, the Attorneys General of Washington State and Minnesota are getting the unity job done. Their case against the President’s ban on immigrants entering the U.S. from seven majority Muslim nations – even those holding valid visas and, sporadically, legal permanent residents with valid green cards – has been a clarion call to fellow citizens to stop Trump now before his Executive Orders come for their own rights. On Friday, Judge James Robart blocked Trump’s order nationwide. The case is now under appeal at the Ninth Circuit Court and the docket already has 92 entries. Constitutional scholars, law professors, more than a dozen nonprofits, almost 100 tech companies, and 16 Attorneys General from other states are asking the court to keep Judge Robart’s order in place. The public … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 6, 2017 In 2008, when corrupt and insolvent financial firms on Wall Street were being bailed out by the U.S. taxpayer after a vote by Congress, the firms were simultaneously funneling millions of those bailout dollars as bonuses to the very executives who had played a role in the firm’s demise. The American people were told by our government that the bonuses had to be paid because they were part of a legally binding contract between the company and the employee and contract law is sacrosanct in the U.S. Now flash forward to President Donald Trump’s Executive Order of January 27, 2017. The President issued a wide-ranging travel ban that set off chaos at the nation’s airports; disrupted thousands of lives; and prevented lawful residents of the United States from returning to their families and homes after travel abroad. The President directed a … Continue reading →