By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 7, 2016 Hillary Clinton was not having a very good morning yesterday. The New York Post had devoted its full front cover to suggesting that Clinton has a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde personality disorder, based on an explosive new book by a former Secret Service agent who was stationed directly outside former President Bill Clinton’s Oval Office and is alleging outbursts and physical violence by the former First Lady. The book has shot to number one on the nonfiction bestseller list at Amazon.com, meaning more headwinds for the Clinton campaign. On top of that, news was swirling that Senator Bernie Sanders had a good shot of trouncing Clinton in the following day’s critical primary in California, where a massive 475 pledged delegates are at stake. (Five other states are also set to vote today in primaries: New Jersey, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 6, 2016  Tomorrow marks the final Super Tuesday of the primary season when voters in six states head to the polls: New Jersey, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, New Mexico and delegate-rich California, with 475 pledged delegates up for grabs in California alone. As the closely watched California showdown between Senator Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton approaches, with polls showing them running neck and neck, commentary in major newspapers continues to question if Clinton is the right person to lead her party. Last Tuesday, Douglas Schoen, who was actually a political adviser to President Bill Clinton, wrote in an article in the Wall Street Journal that was headlined “Clinton Might Not Be the Nominee” that a vote on changing the rules on superdelegates at the Democratic convention in July might flip the tables on a Clinton candidacy. Schoen wrote: “There is every reason … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 3, 2016  JPMorgan Chase’s perpetually controversial Chairman and CEO, Jamie Dimon, was in Bournemouth, Dorset on the south coast of England this morning to reassure his workers that he wasn’t there to tell them how to vote in the upcoming June 23 referendum on whether Britain should leave the European Union (the so-called “Brexit” or British Exit vote). He then proceeded to tell the sober-faced workers that if they voted for Brexit, he might axe upwards of 4,000 jobs across their country. Dimon first stated to the crowd of workers:  “I cannot and will not tell the British people how they should vote in this….” A few minutes later, he qualified that by telling the workers how many jobs he might have to cut if Brexit happened: “I don’t know if it means 1,000 jobs, 2,000 jobs, it could be as many as … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 2, 2016 In 1925 F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote: “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.” One thing that makes the rich different is that they will pay $5 for the May 30 issue of Barron’s, which is dispensing the peculiarly indecisive wisdom that “The Stock Market Won’t Crash – Yet.” The other thing that makes the rich different is that they’re the ones heavily invested in this stock market. According to the most recent 2013 Federal Reserve “Survey of Consumer Finances,” which is conducted every three years, the rate of direct or indirect stock ownership by the top income group “increased 3.9 percentage points from 2010 to 2013, reaching 92.1 percent, slightly above the 91.7 percent found in the 2007 survey.” According to a Gallup poll conducted between April 6-10 of this year, 46 … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 1, 2016  For the past three years, the Obama administration has snatched an idea directly out of the hit TV series, “West Wing.” That’s the Aaron Sorkin created fiction revolving around the beloved President Jed Bartlet (played by Martin Sheen) and the encyclopedic brains of his executive staff who toil 24/7 in a perpetual display of personal sacrifice on behalf of the country. West Wing ran on NBC from the Fall of 1999 to the Spring of 2006 – in other words, from the scandalous sexcapades in the Oval Office by President Bill Clinton and his catastrophic deregulation of Wall Street through the trumped-up invasion of Iraq by President George W. Bush. West Wing was, in other words, an anesthetic to the harsh reality of America’s actual Oval Office under a two-party system that had become grotesquely corrupt at the top. The Obama … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 31, 2016  Zurich Insurance Group has a terse statement on its web site today indicating that Martin Senn, its CEO who stepped down just five months ago, took his life last Friday. Senn was 59 years old. According to foreign news reports, Senn shot himself at the family’s vacation home in Klosters. Senn’s death comes less than three years after the sitting CFO of the same company, Pierre Wauthier, reportedly hung himself at his home near Lake Zug, Switzerland. Wauthier’s wife and two children were out of the country at the time and Wautheir was alone in the home, according to media reports. In the case of Wauthier’s death, police reported that he had left a typed suicide note, not a typical form of communication for one taking their life. On July 23, 2013, just five weeks before Wauthier is said to have … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 30, 2016  Goldman Sachs will interminably, thanks to Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone, conjure up images of “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” The vampire squid has now popped up in the middle of a potential new scandal involving the Clintons, while uproar over its payment of $675,000 to Hillary Clinton personally for three speeches is still simmering. Clinton, a presidential candidate, has thus far refused to release the transcripts of those speeches, despite numerous editorials calling on her to do so. On May 10, the New York Times gently dropped a bombshell on the hedge fund investing world of New York’s one-percenters. Hillary and Bill Clinton’s son-in-law, Marc Mezvinsky, who married their only child, Chelsea, in an opulent 2010 wedding, was shuttering the Eaglevale Hellenic Opportunity Fund … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 27, 2016 Typically, the bond market would be closing at 2:00 p.m. today, leaving the stock market rudderless and thinly traded. Typically, tens of thousands of Wall Street traders would have nothing more taxing than visions of barbecues and beaches and beer dancing about in their heads and would be sprinting out of the office to the Hamptons or Fire Island or Montauk as soon as the bond market closes at 2 p.m. But today is not typical thanks to Scrooge Yellen who will be speaking around 1:15 p.m today. This fact is furrowing brows on Wall Street and forcing traders to hang around to see what market-moving nuggets might be dropped by the petite central banker in chief. In reality, it’s Harvard that’s messing up the early holiday exodus on Wall Street. Harvard is giving Yellen the Radcliffe Medal for her “transformative … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 26, 2016  The release of the State Department’s Inspector General report unequivocally shreds Hillary Clinton’s repeated public pronouncements that she had approval from the State Department to use a private email server in her home for all of her government work while she served as Secretary of State. In the video of her press conference on March 10, 2015 (see below), Hillary opens the subject of the private server with this statement: “When I got to work as Secretary of State, I opted for convenience to use my personal email account, which was allowed by the State Department.” Before the video concludes, the former Secretary of State repeats two more times that she had approval for use of the private server. The Inspector General’s report now makes it crystal clear that this is yet another example of Hillary Clinton taking liberties with the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 25, 2016  There’s a lurking memo among government documents concerning the government takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac during the 2008 financial collapse on Wall Street that undermines the raging media propaganda wars now taking place. But first some necessary background.  Similar to Judith Miller’s shilling for the Iraq war in the pages of the New York Times, which spread like an uncontrolled virus to other media, hedge funds that hope to reap billions of dollars in windfall profits in the preferred and common stock of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which has continued to trade despite the government takeover, have set up a Machiavellian plot to get high-priced media real estate on board their scheme. Mainstream media as well as alternative media (that should know better) have taken the bait — hook, line and sinker. Two writers at the Wall Street … Continue reading →