Search Results for: Federal Reserve

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 →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 12, 2023 ~ The outspoken nonprofit watchdog, Better Markets, and its co-founder, President and CEO, Dennis Kelleher, have planned a unique full-day webinar for tomorrow from 9:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. ET. (Register here at no cost. You do not need Zoom to watch the program.) For millions of Americans who understand that the U.S. cannot remain a superpower, or even compete effectively on the world stage without a first-class banking system and a properly functioning Wall Street, this is an opportunity to hear from people who have been on the front lines of the battle for genuine reform for decades. Wall Street On Parade has covered the efforts of many of these individuals over the years. This virtual conference of some of the smartest minds in the country when it comes to banking and Wall Street could not come at a more critical time. … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 5, 2023 ~ JPMorgan Chase is in a protracted legal battle in a federal district court in Manhattan over highly credible allegations that it “actively participated” in Jeffrey Epstein’s sex-trafficking of minors. The lawsuit has been brought against JPMorgan Chase by the Attorney General of the U.S. Virgin Islands where Epstein owned a private island compound that was a frequent venue of the sex trafficking operation. Part of the bank’s damage control strategy has been to sue one of its former top executives, Jes Staley, making him a third-party defendant in the same case, and attempting to convince the Judge and the media that Staley is mainly responsible for the bank keeping sex trafficker Epstein as a client for more than 15 years (and perhaps as long as 28 years). The bank says in court documents that it wants to claw back Staley’s $140 million … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 23, 2023 ~ The speed at which the largest U.S. banks are shedding deposits is unlike anything seen in the last half century – at least. But then again, the speed at which those same banks gained deposits from the various stimulus programs during the COVID-19 pandemic was also unprecedented. According to Federal Reserve data, for the week ending April 13, 2022, deposits at the 25 largest domestically-chartered commercial banks in the U.S. stood at $11.68 trillion (a new record) before doing a bungee dive in the following week to $11.4 trillion – likely triggered by the horrific scenes on network television of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine along with the severe economic sanctions against Russia announced on April 6, 2022 by the U.S. and other nations. This likely triggered a rush by Russian oligarchs to get their billions of dollars out of U.S. banks. As … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 22, 2023 ~ The stock prices of KeyCorp and Comerica had already lost more than 40 percent of their market value over the past year through the closing bell on Monday. KeyCorp was sporting a depressed share price of $10.89 at the close yesterday after trading in the single digits during the banking crisis in March. Then S&P Global delivered more bad news yesterday. It downgraded the credit rating on both KeyCorp and Comerica by one notch.  Outlooks were indicated as “stable” for both banks by S&P. Three other banks were also downgraded by one notch yesterday by S&P: Valley National Bancorp, UMB Financial Corp. and Associated Banc-Corp. S&P lowered outlooks on two other banks to negative: River City Bank and S&T Bank. The ratings action on KeyCorp is particularly noteworthy. According to the Federal Reserve, as of June 30 KeyCorp had $193 billion in … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 21, 2023 ~ Remember all of that sensational social media buzz in 2016 about a politically-connected ring of pedophiles operating out of a pizza parlor in Washington, D.C.? The story was debunked by Snopes but not before it had gone viral. While the pizza parlor was getting plenty of attention, an actual, highly sophisticated, child sex-trafficking ring had been operating with impunity for more than a decade out of the largest bank in the United States, JPMorgan Chase. Based on astonishing internal documents from JPMorgan Chase obtained during discovery in a federal lawsuit and filed on the court docket last week, it now appears that the U.S. Department of Justice has turned a blind eye toward this bank’s facilitation of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking crimes for more than 16 years, during the administrations of four separate Presidents of the United States. The heavy-lifting for what … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 15, 2023 ~ The Bill Clinton administration’s repeal in 1999 of the 1933 Banking Act, commonly known as the Glass-Steagall Act, ushered in the greatest kleptocracy America has ever known. The Cambridge dictionary defines “kleptocracy” as: “a society whose leaders make themselves rich and powerful by stealing from the rest of the people.” In fact, the actual goal of repealing Glass-Steagall was to do just that. The momentum for the repeal of Glass-Steagall came from the announcement in 1998 that Wall Street veteran, Sandy Weill, wanted to merge his trading firms, Salomon Brothers and Smith Barney (under the Travelers Group umbrella), with Citicorp, parent of the federally-insured Citibank commercial bank. Because of the Glass-Steagall Act, such a merger was illegal at the time. The 1933 Congress that passed the Glass-Steagall Act had watched the stock market lose 89 percent of its value over the years … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 8, 2023 ~ Brace yourself for some tremors in the stock prices of banks today — especially those that have counterparty risk to the biggest U.S. banks. In a move that sent Dow futures on a steady downward plunge beginning at 5 a.m. EDT this morning (clocking in at down 268 points by 8:14 a.m.), last evening the credit ratings agency, Moody’s Investors Service, took more sweeping actions in the U.S. banking sector. Moody’s cut the ratings of 10 banks by one notch, placed six banks on review for potential downgrade, and changed its outlook to negative on 11 other banks. Causing particular alarm on Wall Street was the fact that four of the six banks that Moody’s put on review for potential downgrade rank among the 15 largest banks in the United States. They are: U.S. Bancorp, the 5th largest bank in the U.S. with … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 7, 2023 ~ Deposits at the 25-largest domestically-chartered U.S. commercial banks peaked at $11.680 trillion on April 13, 2022, according to the updated H.8 data maintained at the Federal Reserve Economic Database (FRED). As of the most current H.8 data for the week ending on Wednesday, July 26, 2023, deposits stood at $10.709 trillion at those 25 commercial banks, a dollar decline of $970 billion and a percentage decline of 8.3 percent. Equally noteworthy, the decline shows no signs of letting up. According to the FRED data, between July 5 and the most current reading on July 26, the 25 largest U.S. banks shed $174 billion in deposits. Despite all of the misleading news reports about depositors seeking out the perceived safety of the largest banks since the banking crisis in the spring, it’s actually been the smaller banks that have staged a comeback … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 3, 2023 ~ At 5:13 p.m. ET on Tuesday, after the stock market closed, Fitch downgraded the U.S. credit rating from AAA to AA+. Fitch is now the second of the three major credit rating agencies to have taken the historic step of removing the triple-A rating from the U.S. S&P made its first-ever downgrade to the U.S. credit rating on August 5, 2011, also from AAA to AA+, and has kept it there ever since. Moody’s is now the only member of the Big Three credit rating agencies that has maintained a triple-A rating on the U.S. As the chart above indicates, the stock market responded negatively to this development yesterday, particularly over the fact that it came at a time when the U.S. Treasury is boosting the amount of debt it is issuing. Yesterday, the U.S. Treasury announced its plans to increase … Continue reading →