By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 26, 2016 Yesterday, speaking before a rally audience in Rhode Island, Donald Trump called the coordination of election strategy between presidential candidates Senator Ted Cruz and Governor John Kasich “collusion.” (See video clip below.) He then made the following off the wall statement:  “If you collude in business, or if you collude in the stock market, they put you in jail.” That statement is profoundly important on multiple levels. For one, it raises the question of just how closely Donald Trump has followed the serial crimes of Wall Street and the Justice Department’s failure to deliver jail time. Despite holding a degree from the Wharton School, perhaps Trump thumbs through the real estate section of the New York Times and skips over the Wall Street news. Maybe Trump is entrenched in an illusion that it’s his charisma and star quality that is responsible … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 25, 2016 Brad Deutsch, the attorney who authored the letter last week charging the Hillary Clinton campaign’s joint fundraising committee with dubious dealings that appear to violate Federal election law, isn’t just any ole lawyer. Prior to joining the law firm Garvey Schubert Barer in July 2014, Deutsch worked for more than a decade at the government’s top watchdog over Federal campaign financing – the Federal Election Commission (FEC). Deutsch, now lead counsel to Senator Bernie Sanders’ campaign for President, would seem to be well qualified in defining what is and is not legal under Federal election law. From 2006 to 2014, Deutsch was Chief of Staff and Senior Legal Advisor to Commissioner Steven T. Walther at the FEC. Prior to that, he served as Assistant General Counsel at the FEC from 2004 to 2006 where he supervised a team of Federal election … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 22, 2016  Buried in a report released yesterday by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) was a stunning piece of news. Customers of JPMorgan Chase, the bank that Wall Street analyst Mike Mayo has preposterously called the “Lebron James of banking,” were major victims of Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme – to the tune of $5.4 billion – because of negligence on the part of the bank. The report states the following: “In 2014, DOJ [Department of Justice] assessed a $1.7 billion forfeiture – the largest penalty related to a BSA [Bank Secrecy Act] violation – against JPMorgan Chase Bank. DOJ cited the bank for its failure to detect and report the suspicious activities of Bernard Madoff. The bank failed to maintain an effective anti-money-laundering program and report suspicious transactions in 2008, which contributed to their customers losing about $5.4 billion in Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 21, 2016  According to a study released by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in March of last year, U.S. taxpayers have already injected $187.5 billion into Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two companies that prior to the 2008 financial crash traded on the New York Stock Exchange, had shareholders and their own Board of Directors while also receiving an implicit taxpayer guarantee on their debt. The U.S. government put the pair into conservatorship on September 6, 2008. The public has been led to believe that the $187.5 billion bailout of the pair was the full extent of the taxpayers’ tab. But in an astonishing acknowledgement on February 25 of this year, the Government Accountability Office, the nonpartisan investigative arm of Congress, issued an audit report of the U.S. government’s finances, revealing that the government’s “remaining contractual commitment to the GSEs, if … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 20, 2016 New York State has the toughest financial fraud law in the country. Under New York’s 1921 Martin Act, the State Attorney General’s office can bring both criminal or civil charges. Despite that important fact, no CEO or CFO or key executive of any major Wall Street bank has been prosecuted by the New York State Attorney General for their role in the 2008 crash — which crippled the U.S. economy and has left the nation with GDP growth of two percent or less ever since. Despite the Martin Act’s unique anti-fraud statutes, Wall Street banks have been churning out serial new crimes since the 2008 crash, proving that both Justice Department prosecutors in Washington and timid prosecutors in New York are failing miserably at their jobs in deterring Wall Street crime. What power brokers in New York do best is flood … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 19, 2016  Eight long years after the greatest Wall Street crash since 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression, U.S. mega banks on Wall Street still pose a systemic risk to the safety and soundness of banking and the overall financial stability of the United States. The public no longer has to guess as to whether the above statement is factual or simply the wild imagining of Wall Street activists. No less than the bank-cozy Federal Reserve confirmed on April 13 that three of the largest Wall Street banks (JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo) did not have credible plans to unwind themselves without taxpayer assistance if they were to fail, raising the specter of another epic taxpayer bailout adding to the already staggering $19 trillion national debt, much of which resulted from the last bailout. In the case of JPMorgan Chase, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 18, 2016  According to OpenPrimaries.org, 43 percent of Americans identify as politically independent. In New York state, voters who haven’t chosen a party affiliation total more than 2 million – more than 20 percent of all registered voters in New York. Unfortunately for them, they will be shut out of tomorrow’s New York primary where the stakes for the country’s future have never been greater. New York state is one of only 11 U.S. states that hold a “closed primary,” meaning that unless you are registered as either a Republican or a Democrat, you are precluded from voting in that party’s primary on April 19 in New York. Not only will Independents be barred from voting but those registered as Greens (about 26,000) or part of the Working Families Party (about 48,000) will also be locked out. This hits the Bernie Sanders campaign … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 15, 2016  During the series of Democratic debates, including the one last night hosted by CNN, Hillary Clinton has repeatedly trumpeted the record of President Obama in signing tough legislation to rein in Wall Street abuses when questioned on her money spigot flowing from Wall Street. According to her logic, since Obama’s campaign and his Super Pacs took plenty of money from Wall Street and went ahead and enacted tough Dodd-Frank reform legislation, why should her integrity be questioned. Early in last night’s debate, when Sanders raised the fact that she and a Super Pac supporting her have taken $15 million from Wall Street, Clinton had this to say:  “Well, make — make no mistake about it, this is not just an attack on me, it’s an attack on President Obama. President Obama…You know, let me tell you why. You may not like … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 14, 2016  Yesterday the Federal Reserve released a 19-page letter that it and the FDIC had issued to Jamie Dimon, the Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, on April 12 as a result of its failure to present a credible plan for winding itself down if the bank failed. The letter carried frightening passages and large blocks of redacted material in critical areas, instilling in any careful reader a sense of panic about the U.S. financial system. A rational observer of Wall Street’s serial hubris might have expected some key segments of this letter to make it into the business press. A mere eight years ago the United States experienced a complete meltdown of its financial system, leading to the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression. President Obama and regulators have been assuring us over these intervening eight years that things are … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 13, 2016  The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that two Federal regulators, the Federal Reserve and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), are set to “reject” the living wills of potentially four systemically important banks, including the largest bank in the U.S., JPMorgan Chase. The three other banks named are Bank of New York Mellon, State Street and Bank of America. Under Section 165 of the financial reform legislation known as Dodd-Frank, banks designated as systemically important must submit living wills to the Fed and FDIC explaining how they can be “rapidly” liquidated if they fail without bringing down the rest of the financial system – as occurred in 2008. A serious dust-up occurred on July 15, 2014 during a Senate Banking hearing between Senator Elizabeth Warren and Fed Chair Janet Yellen on the matter of these living wills. Warren told Yellen that at … Continue reading →