By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 25, 2016  Hillary Clinton was stumping in Iowa last week, promising supporters that if she is elected President she will fight to get rid of the U.S. Supreme Court decision, Citizens United, which allows unlimited corporate money to influence elections. At one campaign stop, Hillary said the decision is having “pernicious effects on our electoral system.” Hillary elaborated further on her views in an opinion piece for CNN last week, writing: “It’s time to reclaim our democracy, reform our distorted campaign finance system and restore access to the ballot box in all 50 states. “That starts with reversing Citizens United. And that’s where my comprehensive plan to restore common sense to campaign finance begins. As president, I’ll appoint Supreme Court justices who recognize that Citizens United is bad for America. And if necessary, I’ll fight for a constitutional amendment that overturns it.” That’s … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 22, 2016  We are in the midst of an unprecedented collapse in commodity and oil markets, fueling fears about every kind of debt from emerging markets to junk bonds held in U.S. listed Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs). In this midst of this raging fear, what has the U.S. Federal Reserve proposed? It’s proposed a plan to make banks “safer” by making them issue more debt and become more highly leveraged. We’re not kidding folks. Back in October, Fed Chair Janet Yellen had this to say about the plan: “The long-term debt requirement we are proposing today, combined with our other work to improve the resolvability of systemic banking firms, would substantially reduce the risk to taxpayers and the threat to financial stability stemming from the failure of these firms. This is an important step toward ending the market perception that any banking firm … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 21, 2016 According to a report from one of the regulators of national banks, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, as of September 30, 2015, insured U.S. commercial banks and savings associations had exposure to $192.2 trillion notional (face amount) of derivatives.  (Yes, that’s trillion with a “t”.) The report goes on to terrify with the revelation that only four banks hold 90.8 percent of all derivatives: Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America. But that’s far from an accurate picture. Buried deep in the report is Table 2, which broadens the landscape beyond just the commercial banking units of the mega Wall Street firms to what is lurking in the holding companies. In Table 2 we learn that Morgan Stanley ranks right up there with the other big boys on Wall Street, holding $31 trillion notional in derivatives. … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 20, 2016 Market action since the Federal Reserve’s first, in a promised series, of rate hikes on December 16 to put the U.S. back on a path of “normalization” and end its seven-year zero-interest-bound policy has reminded us of that line from the movie “Six Days Seven Nights.” Actress Anne Heche goes on what was supposed to be a pre-honeymoon vacation to instead experience a plane crash, be held hostage, and fight for her very survival. At one point she says words to the effect: I don’t know how much more of this vacation I can take. Investors might be forgiven for feeling the same way about the Fed’s idea of “normalization.” What U.S. investors woke up to this morning was another day of market hell. Futures on the Dow Jones Industrial Average were showing a loss of more than 300 points; Europe … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 19, 2016 The conventional wisdom was that the Fed’s rate hike on December 16 of last year was going to help big bank stocks by boosting their ability to charge heftier interest rates on loans. That theory has pretty much been relegated to the dust bin of financial fairy tales along with the Fed’s prediction that the slump in oil prices would be “transitory.” Bank stocks have been cratering like it’s early 2008 all over again and oil prices can’t find a floor, having broken through $60, $50, $40 and now $30 a barrel over the past 12 months. On top of the oil rout, which may spell corporate credit downgrades, bankruptcies, higher loan loss reserves – none of which are good for bank stocks – there are other bank risks not on the public’s radar screen. Among big U.S. bank stocks, Citigroup … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 18, 2016 Leave it to NBC to remind us that corporate media is tone deaf when it comes to facing up to outrageous conflicts of interest. The final presidential debate before the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary aired last night on NBC and was co-moderated by Lester Holt and Andrea Mitchell. Given the public focus on Hillary Clinton’s financial ties to Wall Street, it was clear that hard-hitting policy questions on reforming Wall Street would need to be asked during the debate. So why put Andrea Mitchell on that stage instead of an objective media moderator? Mitchell is married to Alan Greenspan, the man whose 18-year stint as Fed Chairman included a two-term appointment by Bill Clinton’s White House. Greenspan was correctly dubbed by Time Magazine as “25 People to Blame for the Financial Crisis”; was the man who played a key … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 14, 2016  As Presidential candidate and Senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders, stumps around the country telling tens of thousands of plundered Americans that Wall Street’s business model is fraud, Hollywood is amplifying that message to millions of moviegoers this year with a series of films that roll back the curtain on how Wall Street has morphed into a crime syndicate.  Wall Street is accustomed to having its legions of high-paid lobbyists and sycophants at the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal doing the heavy lifting in its serial campaign to recast the financial crash in 2008 and its attendant economic implosion as something other than outright fraud. Even when new, serial, diabolical frauds sprang up post-crisis, like JPMorgan’s London Whale, or the cartel rigging of the interest rate benchmark Libor, and the multi-bank foreign currency conspiracy, the lie repeated a thousand times … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 13, 2016 Yesterday, there were two assessments on the state of the union. Both came with fancy charts. One was delivered by the President of the United States, who sounded very much like the Pope in seeking peace among members of Congress and individual citizens. The other was delivered by a hard core realist – Jeffrey Gundlach, CEO of investment management firm, DoubleLine Capital. If you watched the President’s State of the Union speech at WhiteHouse.gov, you got to see the interesting charts – some are still available here along with a transcript of the speech. One chart, shown below, reads: “Today, the top 3 percent of the richest Americans hold half the nation’s wealth.” That correct assessment, unfortunately, makes another statement by the President impossible to justify. The President told the highly cynical American people the following: “Anyone claiming that America’s economy … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 12, 2016 Presidential candidate, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, is stumping across America urging citizens to help him create a meaningful political revolution to take back the country from the death grip of the one percent. His message is resonating. Sanders is attracting crowds of tens of thousands of disillusioned Americans. Political revolution is also in the air in the state of New York where a group called “Fed Up New Yorkers” has just launched a newspaper whose stated purpose “is to lessen Big Money’s grip on our political system and on our society.” The newspaper founders say their project is both “a publishing project and a political plan.” Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of the project is Neil Fabricant, retired president of George Washington University’s Graduate School of Political Management and a former legislative director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. Fabricant is … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 11, 2016 Why are the mega Wall Street banks throwing gasoline on the fire of this stock market rout? One of the damndest things in Wall Street history happened last week. No, we’re not talking about the Dow and S&P having the largest drop in the first week of the New Year in history, although that was certainly noteworthy. We’re talking about those mega Wall Street banks that can rarely bring themselves to put out a sell rating on a stock they follow, deciding to throw gasoline on a plunging stock market last week by issuing negative outlooks. A cynical person (like someone who has just seen The Big Short movie) might be inclined to suspect that the Wall Street banks have gotten their short positions in place and are now ready to make some serious fast money. Bloomberg News ran an article … Continue reading →