By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 14, 2016 One would have had to have been in a coma for the past eight years not to realize there has been an ongoing Wall Street banking conspiracy in the United States. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) tallied it up and found it amounted to $16 trillion in secret loans from the Federal Reserve – an unfathomable bailout never approved by Congress. On May 20 of last year the U.S. Justice Department documented a vast conspiracy by global banks in the foreign currency markets with the banks admitting to the felony charges. The former heads of Federal regulatory agencies have written books about the conspiracy. Frontline and Sixty Minutes have produced documentaries on it. Banking whistleblowers have organized to fight it in an effort to save the country. A major motion picture, The Big Short, was released this year which put one … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 13, 2016 After the prior Chair of the Democratic National Committee, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, resigned in disgrace in July after Guccifer 2.0 and WikiLeaks released emails showing that the DNC had actively engaged in derailing the presidential candidacy of Senator Bernie Sanders to tip the field to Hillary Clinton, the woman who replaced Wasserman Schultz as Interim Chair of the DNC, Donna Brazile, is under the gun for putting her finger on the scale for Hillary Clinton. On March 12, 2016, Brazile was serving in the dual capacity as a Vice Chair of the DNC and a contributor to CNN. The recent WikiLeaks release of emails shows that on that date at 4:39 p.m., Brazile sent an email to Jennifer Palmieri, Communications Director for the Hillary Clinton campaign, titled: “From time to time I get the questions in advance.” The title clearly conveys … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 12, 2016  There have been many questions and much disappointment among progressives that Senator Elizabeth Warren withheld her endorsement of Senator Bernie Sanders for President when it could have potentially led to his victory in the primaries. After remaining silent on Sanders, Warren then gave an unrestrained endorsement of Hillary Clinton in June as well as in a keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention in July. The convention endorsement led to loud chants of “we trusted you” from the audience. Yesterday, WikiLeaks released more emails that had been hacked from the email account of John Podesta, Chair of the Hillary Clinton 2016 campaign. Podesta was also a former Chief of Staff to Bill Clinton during his presidency, co-chair of the Barack Obama 2008 presidential campaign and a Counselor to Obama during his presidency. The emails show in great detail just how aggressively … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 11, 2016 The Presidential election of 2008 was held on November 4, with Barack Obama winning on a promise of delivering “hope” and “change” to a nation in the midst of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. At that time, Citigroup was a financial basket-case. It had already received $25 billion from the government’s bailout program known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) in October; it was secretly receiving hundreds of billions of dollars more each month in below-market rate, revolving loans from the Federal Reserve — information which the Fed refused to make public despite multiple Freedom of Information Act requests from the media; and Citigroup was just 19 days from more hemorrhaging, requiring an additional government infusion of $20 billion and asset guarantees of more than $300 billion. Citigroup’s stock was at $13.99, a decline of 63 percent … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 10, 2016 As repugnant as the thought is to the majority of Americans, it appears there is no escaping a locker room guy inhabiting the White House for the next four years. If it’s not Donald Trump, it will be Bill Clinton. In 1998, seven years before the then 59-year old Donald Trump said he could get away with grabbing women in the “p—y” because he was a celebrity, as a newly leaked video reveals, high-powered Washington D.C. lawyer Vernon Jordan was asked what he and then President Bill Clinton talked about on the golf course. He answered: “We talk p—y,” as reported by Newsweek and Time Magazine at the time. But Bill Clinton, whose penchant for scandal is that of a moth to a flame, has done a lot more than just engage in sexist locker room banter, according to a long … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 4, 2016 Yesterday, building on the momentum afforded her by a series of articles in the New York Times, Hillary Clinton asked the audience at a campaign stop in Toledo, Ohio: “What kind of genius loses a billion dollars in one year.” Clinton was referring to the New York Times revelation on Sunday that Donald Trump’s 1995 tax return showed a loss of $916 million. (See video clip below.) If Hillary really wants to know what kind of genius can lose a billion dollars in one year or $6.2 billion in the case of traders at JPMorgan Chase, she should ask the bank’s CEO Jamie Dimon. The $6.2 billion London Whale loss at JPMorgan Chase is far more scintillating a feat since it involved wild derivative gambles in London in 2012 using the taxpayer-backstopped, insured savings deposits at the largest bank in the U.S. The … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 3, 2016 The gyrations in Deutsche Bank’s shares last week together with a June report from the International Monetary Fund indicating that the bank was “the most important net contributor to systemic risks” has cast a trading pall over all of the global banks. Against that backdrop, most Americans would be stunned to learn that the German Deutsche Bank, which perpetually finds itself on the wrong side of the law, was bailed out in five separate U.S. emergency lending operations during the 2007-2010 financial crisis, receiving more than twice the emergency financial assistance as that received by Lehman Brothers, the failed U.S. investment bank. According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), Deutsche Bank received cumulative loans totaling $77 billion under the Federal Reserve’s Primary Dealer Credit Facility (PDCF) and $277 billion in cumulative loans under the Term Securities Lending Facility (TSLF) for a total of $354 … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 30, 2016 One day after Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen failed to reassure the House Financial Services Committee that too-big-to-fail banks no longer pose a threat to the U.S. financial system, the stock market settled the debate. Germany’s largest bank had a dizzy spell and Wall Street banks swooned under a collective anxiety attack. The writing has been on the wall for a very long time that this scenario was going to eventually play out given the lack of serious reform of Wall Street. What was notable about yesterday’s market activity is that among the major Wall Street banks, Goldman Sachs fared worst, falling 2.75 percent, followed by Morgan Stanley which shed 2.30 percent and Citigroup, which lost 2.28 percent. All of the major Wall Street banks were dragged down by the 6.67 percent decline in the shares of Deutsche Bank by the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 29, 2016 Last Thursday, September 22, 2016, the body of Ann Korkki, a Senior Administrative Assistant in the Wealth Management division of JPMorgan Chase in Denver, Colorado was found with the body of her sister, Robin Korkki, inside their luxury vacation villa at the Maia Resort on Seychelles, an island in the Indian Ocean off the East African coast. Ann Korkki was 37; her sister Robin was 42. According to the local Seychelles newspaper, there was no sign of violence on the bodies of the women who were on a one week vacation at the resort. The mother and brother of the sisters are currently in Seychelles “pressing U.S. and local officials for details” and making arrangements to bring the sisters back to the U.S. according to a news report in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, which covered the story because the sisters had … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 28, 2016 On September 22, 2016 eight Senate Democrats, including Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Jeff Merkley and Sherrod Brown, wrote to the Department of Labor requesting an investigation of the banking behemoth, Wells Fargo, to determine if it violated labor laws. The letter came amidst the public outcry over news that Wells Fargo’s employees had opened as many as 2 million customer accounts without authorization in order to meet stringent sales quotas for cross-selling products. The Senators wrote in the letter: “…dozens of former and current Wells Fargo employees have come forward to describe the lengths they went to in order to meet the bank’s aggressive sales quotas. When quotas weren’t met, employees faced threats of termination; mandated hours of unpaid overtime; harassment; and other forms of retaliation. For years Wells Fargo employees have described a management culture characterized by ‘mental abuse,’ being … Continue reading →