By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 5, 2016  The Hillary Clinton presidential campaign has a new strategy to get Senator Bernie Sanders to shut up about the unseemly mountains of money Wall Street has showered on her and Bill Clinton throughout their careers: in campaign funds, in speaking fees, in home mortgages, and in donations to their charity, the Clinton Global Initiative. (Details here.) The new strategy is to effectively socialize Sanders to silence by embarrassing him every time he brings up the subject. Before Clinton took the stage last night at the MSNBC Democratic Debate at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, her Press Secretary, Brian Fallon, and Campaign Manager, Robby Mook, met with reporters from Bloomberg News to complain about Sanders’ innuendos that Hillary Clinton can be bought by Wall Street. According to a report at Bloomberg, Fallon stated at a Bloomberg Politics breakfast earlier yesterday … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 4, 2016 Last night ABC began its two-part series on the Bernie Madoff fraud. Viewers will be reminded about how investment expert, Harry Markopolos, wrote detailed letters to the SEC for years, raising red flags that Bernie Madoff was running a Ponzi scheme – only to be ignored by the SEC as Madoff fleeced more and more victims out of their life savings. Today, there are two equally erudite scribes who have jointly been flooding the SEC with explosive evidence that some Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) that trade on U.S. stock exchanges and are sold to a gullible public, may be little more than toxic waste dumped there by Wall Street firms eager to rid themselves of illiquid securities. The two anonymous authors have one thing going for them that Markopolos did not. They are represented by a former SEC attorney, Peter Chepucavage, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 3, 2016  Most folks don’t realize that on Monday, September 23, 2013, Goldman Sachs began trading as one of the 30 stocks in the Dow Jones Industrial Average Index (Dow). Because the Dow is stock-price weighted and Goldman sports a very high price, it has an outsized impact on point gains and losses in the index. As of yesterday’s close, Goldman Sachs is the priciest stock in the Dow, despite its plunging price of late. Yesterday, the Dow lost 295.64 points and Goldman Sachs was a major contributor to the decline, losing 4.98 percent of its share price to close at $151.70. If this keeps up, it might not be too long before you see Goldman yanked from the Dow. The percentage loss in Goldman yesterday was notable on multiple fronts. First, its percentage decline was 3.18 percent more than the loss in the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 2, 2016  Billionaires went to bed very cranky last night and are likely awakening to irritable bowel syndrome this morning. What has been working swimmingly well for them since the 2010 Citizens United decision was handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court, allowing the super wealthy to dump unlimited sums of money into Super Pacs to sway the outcome of elections, just had a wrench thrown into the gears. Voters in Iowa gave a resounding thumbs down to Jeb Bush and his massive Super Pac spending, giving him an embarrassingly low 2.8 percent of the Republican vote. According to data made available by BloombergBusiness (see chart below), Bush’s campaign spent $9.8 million in the final three months of last year while his Super Pac spent an astounding $54.3 million in the final six months of 2015. Also embarrassing for the billionaires giving to … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 1, 2016  Wall Street, based in New York City, collapsed the U.S. financial system under the weight of its own corruption in 2008. We’ve just come off another year of unprecedented corruption on Wall Street, topped off with two major U.S. banks, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase, pleading guilty to felony counts for rigging foreign currency trading. Elsewhere in the state of New York, the heads of both legislative branches, Dean Skelos, the Senate Majority Leader, and Sheldon Silver, Speaker of the Assembly, were convicted on corruption charges in the waning days of 2015.  Last evening, the CBS investigative news program, 60 Minutes, produced video evidence that 15 out of 16 lawyers in New York City were willing to discuss strategies with a potential client for laundering dirty money into the U.S. financial system through shell companies. In short, New York State is facing … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 31, 2016 Today’s digital edition of The New York Times captures the essence of the cancer eating away at our democracy: a leading newspaper is endorsing a deeply tarnished candidate for the highest office in America while a major Wall Street bank that has played a key role in her conflicted candidacy runs a banner ad as if to salute the endorsement. The slogan on Citigroup’s ad, “cash back once just isn’t enough,” perfectly epitomizes the frequency with which the Clintons have gone to the Citigroup well. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, among the top five largest lifetime donors to Hillary’s campaigns, Citigroup tops the list, with three other Wall Street banks also making the cut: Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley. (The monies come from employees and/or family members or PACs of the firms, not the corporation itself.) Hillary … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 29, 2016  There is quite a bit of inchoate dissonance as to whether JPMorgan Chase is a good investment. Recently, banking analyst Mike Mayo called JPMorgan Chase the “Lebron James of banking.” Lebron James is a famous basketball player who has won a lot of great awards for doing great things, including Olympic Gold. JPMorgan Chase is a bank that has, since Jamie Dimon took the helm as CEO on January 1, 2006, received a deferred prosecution agreement for two felony counts from the U.S. Justice Department for facilitating the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme and just last May agreed to a felony count for rigging foreign currency markets. In addition to the felony counts, there has been a serial stream of settlements for everything from rigging electricity markets to ripping off members of the U.S. military. We don’t know why Mike Mayo would … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 28, 2016  Yesterday, the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Financial Research (OFR) released its 2015 Annual Report to Congress. OFR was created under the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation of 2010 to keep the Financial Stability Oversight Council informed on emerging threats to financial stability in the U.S. Perhaps in an effort not to panic our sleeping Congress, or to further aggravate an already volatile stock market, the report said that “the United States financial system has continued to improve and threats to overall U.S. financial stability remain moderate.” From there, it went on to eviscerate that calm assessment with an endless stream of hair-raising concerns. One of those concerns is the interconnectedness of big Wall Street banks – a matter the OFR released a detailed paper on last February. One fact you won’t find in the OFR report is that five of the biggest … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 27, 2016 Expensive media real estate is reporting that presidential candidate, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, will meet with President Obama in the Oval Office today. Much is being made of the fact that the meeting comes less than a week before the politically important Iowa caucuses and just two days after Politico published an exclusive interview with the President in which he appeared to favor a Clinton presidency. (Memo to the President: this election is about finding an authentic non-establishment candidate, so your opinion as the quintessential establishment figure is not likely to sway folks – at least not in a good way.) The first thing that came to mind when we heard about the meeting was that one or more kingpins on Wall Street might have asked the President to whisper in Senator Sanders’ ear to stop repeating at every campaign … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 26, 2016  From June 2008 to the depth of the Wall Street financial crash in early 2009, U.S. domestic crude oil lost 70 percent of its value, falling from over $140 to the low $40s. But then a strange thing happened. Despite weak global economic growth, oil went back to over $100 by 2011 and traded between the $80s and a little over $100 until June 2014. Since then, it has plunged by 72 percent – a bigger crash than when Wall Street was collapsing. The chart of crude oil has the distinct feel of a pump and dump scheme, a technique that Wall Street has turned into an art form in the past. Think limited partnerships priced at par on client statements as they disintegrated in price in the real world; rigged research leading to the dot.com bust and a $4 trillion … Continue reading →