By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 31, 2016  On March 7 of this year, President Obama called the full Financial Stability Oversight Council (F-SOC) to the White House for a meeting. F-SOC was created under the 2010 financial reform legislation known as Dodd-Frank to monitor systemic risks building up in the financial system and, ideally, nip them in the bud before they got out of hand. Every major Wall Street bank regulator sits on F-SOC. Immediately following his meeting with F-SOC on March 7, President Obama held a press conference (see video below) with the F-SOC members sitting around him at a large conference table. Sitting two seats away from the President was Mary Jo White, Chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Directly across the table was Thomas Curry, head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) that oversees national banks, and Jack Lew, U.S. … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 30, 2016  Who could blame the researchers at the Government Accountability Office (GAO) for thinking that responding to Congressional requests for studies on how to repair the nation’s ineffective maze of financial regulation is an exercise in futility. GAO has been spending boatloads of taxpayer money for the past two decades to define the problems for Congress as our legislative branch has not only failed to take meaningful corrective measures but actually made the system exponentially worse through the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999. During the 20 years that GAO has been warning about an ineffective financial regulatory system, taxpayers have been looted through a nonstop series of massive Wall Street frauds: the Nasdaq price fixing scandal; the rigged Wall Street research scandal leading to the $4 trillion dot.com bust; the four-decade Ponzi scheme of Bernie Madoff that was defined in … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 29, 2016  There were a lot of sweaty palms on Wall Street yesterday. As the Government Accountability Office released a report suggesting that regulation of Wall Street is a complex maze of inefficiency and fragmentation leaving gaping holes in which crooks can find fertile ground, the U.S. Justice Department was perp-walking a 2002 Harvard Law School graduate (whose family name resides on the student center there) on charges reminiscent of a Bernie Madoff startup. According to the unsealed complaint from the U.S. Justice Department’s regional U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, 39-year old Andrew Caspersen, whose father and grandfather were the former heads of Beneficial Corp.,  is alleged to have defrauded approximately $24.6 million from a charitable foundation by setting up a fake account, transferring $17.6 million of that amount to his “personal brokerage account” at an unnamed brokerage … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 28, 2016 As with the current occupant of the White House, the narrative of fierce independence from Wall Street during the campaign season typically fails under deeper scrutiny. In 2008 we pulled back the curtain on Obama’s claim that he wasn’t taking money from Wall Street lobbyists and found quite a different set of facts. Today, the claim that Donald Trump is not connected to Wall Street and is actually frightening the mega banks is also totally dislodged from the facts on the ground.  Five days ago, the Washington Post ran an article that was headlined “Why the rise of Donald Trump has even Wall Street worried.” It quoted an anonymous source who stated that “I can’t find connective tissue between the financial sector and Trump.” Similarly, eight days ago the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump’s creditors “mostly are small firms, from … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 24, 2016 Presidential candidate Donald Trump and the mega Wall Street bank JPMorgan Chase share a common trait: they can conduct themselves in a manner that insults the values of a civilized society and instead of losing ground, their star rises – or so it appears. Trump’s public vulgarity and anti-Presidential demeanor are perpetually on display at his Twitter page and in the Republican debates.  In just the past month, Trump has called Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly “crazy”; boasted of the size of his “manhood” during a Republican debate; and promised to ramp up the use of torture – illegal under both domestic and international law. The typically staid Senator Elizabeth Warren even lost her cool with Trump on March 21, Tweeting that “his insecurities are on parade: petty bullying, attacks on women, cheap racism, flagrant narcissism.” In a new CBS News/New York … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 23, 2016 According to a CBS News/New York Times poll conducted between March 17-20, 2016 among a random sample of adults nationwide, 85 percent of which were registered voters, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have the highest unfavorable ratings (57 percent and 52 percent respectively) since CBS first began asking the question in its polls more than three decades ago. The CBS poll is in line with a Gallup poll taken in January, which showed 60 percent of Americans viewed Donald Trump unfavorably versus a 52 percent unfavorable rating for Clinton. Another noteworthy finding from the poll, which is consistent with numerous other prior polls, is that Senator Bernie Sanders would do better against Trump in a general election matchup. The CBS poll found that Sanders would beat Trump by 15 points versus a win of only 10 points for Clinton. The danger … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 22, 2016  Wall Street On Parade’s strong preference for a President Bernie Sanders over a President Hillary Clinton is based on a well-formed belief that the United States will experience another financial crisis on Wall Street within the next few years. That crisis will, in hindsight, be viewed as the direct failure of President Obama to enact meaningful financial reform legislation after the 2008 crash, when he had the will of the people behind him, rather than pandering to his overlords on Wall Street who financed his campaign. Nothing more clearly demonstrates who has been calling the shots in the Obama administration than the President’s nominees to oversee Wall Street at the U.S. Justice Department, U.S. Treasury Department, Securities and Exchange Commission, and his outrageous refusal for more than five years to even follow his own Dodd-Frank financial reform law and appoint a … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 21, 2016 Americans have painful recollections of how allowing ratings agencies to take Wall Street money and dole out bogus triple-A ratings on subprime mortgages tanked the U.S. housing market in the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression. They fully understand that the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision that opened the floodgates to pay-to-play corporate financing of elections has grotesquely disfigured participatory democracy in America. Now they’re about to learn how America’s “free press” is able to be bought – literally. This past Friday, March 18, Laurence Kotlikoff, a Forbes contributor, Professor of Economics at Boston University and bestselling co-author of Get What’s Yours: The Secrets To Maxing Out Your Social Security, tweeted the headline of an article he had just posted at Forbes: “JPMorgan Chase – The True Story of America’s Most Corrupt Bank.” The Tweet linked to a two-page article … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 18, 2016 A young black girl got a civics lesson in dystopian society sitting in the front row of the Senate Banking hearing this past Tuesday. Her expression was that of someone watching a Halloween horror film. The young girl was the daughter of Lisa Fairfax, a George Washington University law professor who brought her family members along to share her confirmation hearing to potentially become a Commissioner at the Securities and Exchange Commission. Hopefully, what the young girl observed will be enough to head her off in a career direction of white collar criminal law. Senator Joe Donnelly delivered a heartfelt review of what is going on in his home state of Indiana, asking the two SEC nominees, Hester Peirce and Fairfax, what role the SEC should play in the matter. Donnelly stated: “Ms. Peirce, I want to tell you a little … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 17, 2016  Democrats sitting on the U.S. Senate Banking Committee at Tuesday’s confirmation hearing to take testimony from President Obama’s two nominees for the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) must have felt like they were having an out of body experience — listening to the human personification of billionaire Charles Koch’s money aping his Ayn Rand, anti-regulatory double-talk from a witness seat. What had to be particularly nauseating to them was that this nominee was sent to them by President Obama who ran as a Democrat on a platform of hope and change. While the political makeup of the SEC is prescribed by law, so that one of these two nominees had to be a Republican, why pick this particular Republican? On October 20, 2015, President Obama announced that his nominee to fill a Republican seat on the SEC would be Hester Peirce, … Continue reading →