By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 15, 2016  At the end of the first quarter of this year, Switzerland’s central bank held $119.7 billion in publicly traded stocks. The Swiss National Bank’s (SNB) web site indicates that it is now allocating 20 percent of its foreign currency reserves to stock investing. Twelve days ago, SNB made its quarterly filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission showing large positions in individual U.S. stocks. In just five tech names, SNB held over $5.3 billion with $1.489 billion invested in Apple; $1.2 billion invested in Alphabet, parent of Google; $1 billion in Microsoft; $803 million in Amazon and $741.5 million in Facebook. Both Apple and Microsoft are among the 30 stocks that make up the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA), a heavily watched gauge of the U.S. economy’s health. The Swiss National Bank owns over $1 billion in two other names … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 12, 2016 Yesterday we published our 1,007th article here at Wall Street On Parade on the insidiously corrupt financial system in the United States known as Wall Street. It’s a system that now operates as an institutionalized wealth transfer mechanism that is hollowing out the middle class, leaving one of every five children in our nation living in poverty, while funneling the plunder to the top one-tenth of one percent. Tens of millions of Americans clearly understand that an entrenched system of corruption such as this, perpetuated through a revolving door between Wall Street and Washington, while enshrined by a political campaign finance system that recycles a portion of the plunder to ensure greater plunders, will inevitably leave the nation’s economy in tatters — again. That’s because systemic corruption and legalized bribery within the financial arteries of the nation can only create grossly … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 11, 2016 There’s something big and scary going on behind the scenes but, as usual, the public isn’t reading about it on the front pages of the newspapers. Yesterday, the broad stock market, as measured by the Standard and Poor’s 500 Index, declined a modest 0.29 percent while big Wall Street banks like Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase fell by triple that amount. Bank of America, which bought the big retail brokerage firm, Merrill Lynch, in the midst of the 2008 crash, fell by 8.6 times the rate of the decline in the S&P to give up 2.50 percent. Equally noteworthy, two major insurers, MetLife and Prudential Financial, saw percentage market losses far in excess of the S&P. MetLife declined by 2.74 percent while Prudential Financial lost 1.68 percent. Prudential Financial has been named a Systemically Important Financial Institution (SIFI) by the Financial Stability … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 10, 2016 Michael Bloomberg served three terms as the Mayor of New York City from January 2002 to January 2014. The last term was made possible by the Mayor spending an estimated $60-$90 million of his own money repealing the two-term limits – an act that outraged many New Yorkers. According to Forbes, during Michael Bloomberg’s 12-year stint as Mayor, his wealth exploded more than ten-fold, from $3 billion to $31 billion. The bulk of Bloomberg’s wealth has derived from leasing his Bloomberg data and news terminals at a cost of approximately $24,000 per terminal per year to tens of thousands of Wall Street trading desks and global banks around the world. The Mayor’s wealth and where it comes from is a reality that poses an inherent conflict of interest for any news outlet but it is especially so for a news organization … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 9, 2016 A politically connected law firm in Washington, D.C., Perkins Coie, may find itself in the embarrassing and reputation-damaging position of being named a co-defendant in a high profile case where it is the sole legal counsel of record for the defendants. The Federal lawsuit was brought by Senator Bernie Sanders’ supporters against the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and its Chair, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, for overt acts to undermine the Sanders’ campaign while boosting the prospects of Hillary Clinton as the Democratic Presidential nominee. Under the DNC’s own bylaws, it must act in a fair and impartial manner to all Democratic candidates during the primaries. After the lawsuit was filed, Wikileaks released almost 20,000 emails that had been hacked at the DNC by an unknown party. The emails buttressed the allegations in the lawsuit and created so much media notoriety against the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 8, 2016 On Friday, July 1, just ahead of the long Fourth of July weekend, a happy, exuberant process server, 38-year old Shawn Lucas of One Source Process, served a lawsuit at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington, D.C. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of Senator Bernie Sanders’ supporters and named the DNC and its then Chair, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, as defendants. It leveled the following serious charges: fraud, negligent misrepresentation, deceptive conduct, unjust enrichment, breach of fiduciary duty, and negligence. The suit seeks class action status and was filed in the Federal District Court in the Southern District of Florida. (Wilding et al v DNC Services Corporation and Deborah ‘Debbie’ Wasserman Schultz; Case Number 16-cv-61511-WJZ). A video of the service of process (see embedded video below) shows Shawn Lucas saying he was “excited” and “thrilled” to be the process server on … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 5, 2016 The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released its nonfarm payroll data this morning, showing that 255,000 jobs were created in July. The unemployment rate remained at 4.9 percent. May data was revised up from the eyebrow-raising low number of 11,000 jobs to 24,000 jobs while June was also revised upward from 287,000 jobs to 292,000. That brought the monthly average to 190,000 jobs over the past three months. Unfortunately, drilling down into the more granular details, a far less rosy picture emerges; a picture which is far more consistent with an economy feeling the continued weight of unprecedented wealth and income inequality; a picture that is far more correlated to an economy where “58 percent of all new income since the Wall Street crash has gone to the top 1 percent,” to quote Senator Bernie Sanders. The data for July shows … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 4, 2016 Having closely observed how Citigroup collapsed under the weight of its own corruption and risk-taking hubris in 2008 and spread its contagion across Wall Street, a headline we never dreamed we would see in our lifetime is shown above from Risk Magazine’s web site. The article under the heart-stopping headline is dated January 27, 2016 and informs readers that Citigroup is now viewed by clients as one of the top-three market makers in single name Credit Default Swaps in both North America and Europe.  Credit Default Swaps are the instruments that blew up the giant insurance company, AIG, in 2008, requiring the U.S. government to bail out the company to the tune of $185 billion. The bailout money went in the front door of AIG and was then funneled out the backdoor to the big Wall Street banks that had used … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 3, 2016 Deutsche Bank is starting to resemble the financial basket case that Citigroup became in 2008, leading to Citigroup’s partial ownership by the U.S. government for a time and the bank requiring the largest taxpayer bailout in U.S. financial history. Citigroup’s teetering condition and its interconnectedness to other mega banks played a critical role in the Wall Street crash and collapse of the U.S. economy. That Deutsche Bank (which is highly interconnected to other major Wall Street banks and locked and loaded with tens of trillions of dollars in derivatives) is now showing the same kind of stresses as Citigroup back in 2008, raises the obvious question about just how effectively the Obama administration has reined in systemic financial risk after six years of reassurances that Dodd-Frank financial reform was getting the job done. On this date a year ago, Deutsche Bank’s … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 2, 2016 In the Afterword that appears in the paperback edition of “Flash Boys,” author Michael Lewis writes that following the publication of the hardcover edition of the book in 2014 and his appearance on 60 Minutes (in which he called the U.S. stock market rigged and mapped out the case against high frequency trading) “it has sounded like a desperate bid by a slumlord to gussy the place up to distract inspectors. In any case, the slumlords seem to realize that doing nothing is no longer an option: Too many people were too upset.” Doing nothing while going through the motions of doing something perfectly defines the Securities and Exchange Commission. Today the Securities and Exchange Commission is continuing its illusion of dealing with the rigged structure of the U.S. stock market by holding a meeting of its Equity Market Structure Advisory … Continue reading →