Search Results for: rap sheet

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 13, 2021 ~ Most Americans believe that the unprecedented Fed bailouts of Wall Street didn’t begin until December of 2007, on the cusp of Wall Street’s financial collapse in 2008. That’s wrong. The Fed’s first massive bailout of Wall Street started on 9/11. By the closing bell on September 10, 2001, the day before the attacks, the Nasdaq stock market was already in the midst of a full-scale implosion, having lost 66 percent of its market value and wiping out $4 trillion of wealth. The Wall Street mega banks were in the cross-hairs at the time of then New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer for bringing to market Initial Public Offerings of companies that the banks’ own research analysts were internally calling “crap” and “dogs” while the same banks issued buy recommendations on the “dogs” to the unknowing public. One internal email from … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 26, 2021 ~ What happened on July 20 with the 56-44 vote in the Senate to confirm Kenneth Polite (pronounced Po-leet) to head the most powerful criminal law enforcement office in the United States, the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice, is a cautionary tale that should concern every American. Despite Polite owing more than $1.5 million in debts according to his financial disclosure form and public mortgage records; paying over 18 percent interest on an outstanding balance on a credit card; 19.99 percent interest on a personal loan; and now accepting a job where his income will be slashed by about 77 percent – not one Senator on the Senate Judiciary Committee asked a single question about this man’s bizarre financial picture during his confirmation hearing on May 26 or in written questions that followed. Senator Dick Durbin, a Democrat from Illinois, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 18, 2021 ~ How embarrassing it must be for Jerome Powell, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, that three of the largest banks in the U.S. that are supervised by the Fed, have been deemed not trustworthy enough by the European Commission that they were banned from participating in this week’s historic European Union bond offering. It is also egg on the face of the U.S. Department of Justice, which has been handing out deferred prosecution agreements to these same banks for felony counts like it’s a meter maid doling out parking tickets. JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and Bank of America were banned along with seven non-U.S. banks from participating in this week’s European Union bond offering. The syndicated offering is part of what will grow over the next five years to be a $969 billion COVID-19 recovery fund for the European Union, part of the plan … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 11, 2021 ~ When the motherlode of stock market bubbles finally pops, exposing the corrupt edifices on which it was built, you can count on one thing for sure – there will be lots of testimony before Congress that no one could have seen it coming. The simple chart above, that took us 30 minutes to prepare in an Excel spreadsheet, is proof that anyone among the legions of Wall Street bank regulators at the Federal Reserve, the OCC, the FDIC, and the SEC can see what’s coming. The chart compares U.S. GDP to the total stock market value at December 31, 1999, prior to the bursting of the dot.com bubble; at December 31, 2007, prior to the bursting of the subprime and derivatives bubble; and on December 31, 2020, prior to the bursting of whatever the bailout boys decide to call this bubble. … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 7, 2021 ~ Remember the phrase “putting lipstick on a pig.” It became popular after the dot.com bust when it was learned that the big Wall Street banks had glowingly recommended “hot” new issues of stocks to their customers while secretly calling them “crap” and “dogs” in internal emails. Putting lipstick on a pig is what the Federal Reserve is attempting to do in the Financial Stability Report it released yesterday afternoon. Both the lipstick and the pig are captured in this paragraph on page 8 of the Fed’s report: “Banks remain well capitalized, and leverage at broker-dealers is low. Measures of hedge fund leverage are somewhat above their historical averages, but the data available may not capture important risks from hedge funds or other leveraged funds.” To unpack the scope of the Fed’s deception in this paragraph, one needs to first understand that … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 5, 2021 ~ The House Financial Services Committee has released its official Memorandum outlining the general topics it wants to cover in tomorrow’s hearing on the wild trading action in GameStop and other meme stocks in January that has raised serious questions about U.S. market integrity. The implosion of the Archegos Capital Management family office hedge fund in March, which has generated losses of more than $10 billion thus far at global systemically important banks, will likely be a key topic when the Senate Banking and House Financial Services Committees haul Wall Street bank CEOs to hearings on May 26 and 27, respectively. An insightful paragraph in the Memorandum for the House hearing tomorrow reads as follows: “Testimony given at the first two GameStop hearings raised concerns about the market dominance of some capital market participants, as well as correlated risks arising from the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 30, 2021 ~ During Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell’s press conference this past Wednesday, he took a question from Brian Cheung of Yahoo Finance. The question was: “It seems like to people on the outside who might not follow finance daily, they’re paying attention to things like GameStop, now Dogecoin. And it seems like there’s interesting reach for yield in this market to some extent — also Archegos. So, does the Fed see a relationship between low rates and easy policy to those things, and is there a financial stability concern from the Fed’s perspective at this time?” As part of Powell’s long, meandering answer, he said this: “Leverage in the financial system is not a problem.” Within a second or so, Powell repeated himself: “Leverage in the financial system is not an issue.” (Read the full transcript here.) Either Powell has not read … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 23, 2021 ~ According to the most recent 13F filings made with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the biggest banks on Wall Street are each sitting on hundreds of billions of dollars of stock positions – which we are now learning include highly leveraged stock positions for hedge funds called family offices. The purpose of the SEC’s 13F filing is to provide transparency to the public as to the beneficial owners of publicly-traded stocks. Institutions holding more than $100 million in assets are supposed to file the 13F. But as the public learned to its horror over the past month, a reckless family office hedge fund called Archegos Capital Management built up stock positions estimated at $100 billion by borrowing about $90 billion of that from a handful of the largest Wall Street banks. Archegos had been in operation since 2013, but had never … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 23, 2021 ~ Yesterday the Federal Reserve released its “audited” financial statements with the following caveat, among numerous others: “Due to the unique nature of the Reserve Banks’ powers and responsibilities as part of the nation’s central bank and given the System’s unique responsibility to conduct monetary policy, the Board has adopted accounting principles and practices in the FAM [Financial Accounting Manual for Federal Reserve Banks] that differ from accounting principles generally accepted in the United States of America (GAAP).” The Federal Reserve is the regulator of the largest bank holding companies in the United States and, since December of 2007, has been shoveling trillions of dollars at the trading houses owned by these bank holding companies almost on a non-stop basis, if you include Quantitative Easing (QE) programs 1, 2, 3 and 4 and the repo loan bailout that began on September 17, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 16, 2021 ~ Less than five months ago, Goldman Sachs and its Malaysian subsidiary were criminally charged by the U.S. Department of Justice “for a sweeping international corruption scheme, conspiring to avail itself of more than $1.6 billion in bribes to multiple high-level government officials across several countries so that the company could reap hundreds of millions of dollars in fees.” The case has become infamously known as the 1MDB scandal, named after the Malaysian sovereign wealth fund that was ripped off. Goldman Sachs admitted to the charges and paid a criminal penalty and disgorgement of over $2.9 billion to settle the charges with the Department of Justice. That sum was on top of the $2.5 billion in cash it paid to settle with the government of Malaysia. Stripping shareholders of $5.4 billion of their capital for criminal conduct in the midst of the worst … Continue reading →