By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 16, 2015  The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the federal agency created after the 2008 crash to protect the little guy from Wall Street predators, which has done a top-flight job of it, was portrayed as a commie organization in a advertisement that ran repeatedly during the Republican Presidential debate on November 10. To enhance the communist theme of the ad (see full video below) giant banners of CFPB Director, Richard Cordray, and Senator Elizabeth Warren, who pushed for the creation of the agency, hang on the wall in a nod to Soviet dictators. The advertisement is grossly misleading, overtly suggesting that the job of the CFPB is to deny car loans and mortgages to regular folks seeking credit. The agency, in fact, has absolutely nothing to do with approving credit applications. Its job is to root out and punish financial institutions that … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 12, 2015 Landing in our inbox this week was an 86 page report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) on the current status of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). The GAO is among a growing octopus of taxpayer-funded bodies attempting to reassure the American people that their tax dollars that were used to bail out Wall Street during the financial crash are being properly tallied up. The GAO report found the following: “While the total disbursed for TARP programs was $430.1 billion, OFS [Office of Financial Stability, an office in the U.S. Treasury Department] has collected $424.9 billion (or $442.4 billion if including the $17.5 billion in proceeds from the additional Treasury AIG shares) through repayments, sales, dividends, interest, and other income.  As of September 30, 2015, only $714 million in bank investments remain outstanding.” Lumping dividends, interest and other income together … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 11, 2015  Following the Republican Presidential debate in Milwaukee last evening, Senator Elizabeth Warren issued a blistering statement to supporters. It said, in part: “Did you see the attack ad about me during the GOP debate tonight? A right-wing group launched a full-scale assault on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau – the watchdog we set up after the 2008 financial crisis to fight back when big banks try to cheat people on credit cards, mortgages, and other financial products…If the Republicans want a fight over the CFPB, I say, ‘Bring it on.’” The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is one of the few positive outgrowths of the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation passed by Congress in 2010 after the epic financial crash in 2008. It’s a legitimate and real champion of the little guy.  But because the agency has been exposing student loan frauds … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 10, 2015 The fourth Presidential Republican debate will take place this evening in Milwaukee. The leading candidates (Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, Carly Fiorina, John Kasich, and Rand Paul) will take the stage at 9 p.m. ET. Lower polling candidates (Chris Christie, Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum and Bobby Jindal) will debate earlier at 7 p.m. ET. The event will be hosted by the Fox Business Network and the Wall Street Journal with a free live stream available for viewers at www.FoxBusiness.com. The 9 p.m. debate will be moderated by Fox Business News anchors Maria Bartiromo and Neil Cavuto with the Wall Street Journal’s editor, Gerard Baker. One person to watch as much as the candidates this evening is Maria Bartiromo for a pro-corporate/anti-government tone to her questions. Bartiromo has regularly sided with corporate bigwigs accused by the government … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 9, 2015  Republican Presidential candidate, Ben Carson, came under media scrutiny last week over his longstanding claim that he had been offered a “full scholarship” to West Point, which turned out to have been a mere suggestion that he might qualify for one by persons whose names he could not remember. Politico broke that story while other media outlets have challenged the accuracy of his portrayal of himself in books he has authored as prone to violence as a young man, including an attempt to stab a friend, followed by turning his life over to God and going on to become a world renown neurosurgeon. The scenario of God’s redemption of Carson has greatly appealed to evangelical Christians who now form a large base of Carson’s supporters for his White House bid. One highly significant area of Carson’s life that has not come … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 5, 2015  According to the Random House dictionary, Stockholm Syndrome is “an emotional attachment to a captor formed by a hostage as a result of continuous stress, dependence, and a need to cooperate for survival.” Regulatory capture – where big banks are actually the ones calling the shots to their regulators – appears to have morphed into Stockholm Syndrome based on a Congressional hearing yesterday.  House Financial Services Committee Chairman Jeb Hensarling dropped a bombshell on Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen in opening questions yesterday on the Fed’s role of supervising the largest, most systemically dangerous banks. Hensarling queried if the Fed had crossed the line from being regulator to manager. We think the question should have been has the Fed devolved from regulator to emotionally-attached hostage. (There’s plenty of evidence for the latter as we’ll explain later in this piece.) The exchange … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: November 4, 2015  The New York Times has just completed a three-part investigative series on the evisceration across America of the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of a right to a jury trial under the Seventh Amendment, which mandates: “In suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise reexamined in any court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.” Just as corporate prisons and corporate charter schools are proliferating across the American landscape with attendant horror stories, the doors to the Nation’s taxpayer funded courts have been largely closed to the average citizen. Consumers of everything from credit cards to phone service to nursing homes cannot obtain the product or service without surrendering their access to the U.S. court … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 3, 2015  It’s not every week that the regulator of the biggest banks in the U.S. and one of those biggest banks are both warning of growing financial risks. On Sunday, Bank of America – the parent of Merrill Lynch and its more than 15,000 financial advisors – released a report calling the outlook for markets next year “perilous” and warning that “markets have not priced in quantitative failure.” The report came from Michael Hartnett, Bank of America’s Chief Investment Strategist and his team. Yesterday, Thomas Curry, head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) which regulates all national banks in the U.S., gave his second speech in a week and a half, using both occasions to warn of increasing credit risks at the biggest banks. Curry spoke yesterday at the Risk Management Association’s annual conference in Boston. Curry dropped … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 2, 2015 Last March, Wall Street On Parade reported that the appointment calendar of Ben Bernanke during his Chairmanship of the Federal Reserve in the years of the greatest financial crash since the Great Depression, showed 84 redactions of meetings he conducted with unnamed persons between January 1, 2007 through the collapse of Bear Stearns on the weekend of March 15-16, 2008. According to the “official” record, those months were far from the core months of the financial crash, which are said to have been triggered with the collapse of Lehman Brothers on September 15, 2008 and the quick implosion of other major financial institutions that Fall. Last month, Bernanke released a 600-page tome on the crash, The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and its Aftermath. (It’s not every day that an author credits himself with courage in a book … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 29, 2015  Chances are pretty high that among the daily lexicon of most Americans, you are not going to hear the words “maker-taker.” And yet, outside of the debate about preventing Wall Street’s too-big-to-fail banks to create another epic taxpayer bailout in the future, the maker-taker debate is one of the hottest on Wall Street. On Tuesday of this week, the glacially-slow to respond Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) held a full day hearing on the “maker-taker” model and other stock market structure dysfunctions. In simple terms, maker-taker is another wealth extraction tool used by Wall Street firms to pick the public’s pocket in the name of stock market liquidity. In more complex terms, brokers servicing retail clients and institutions (like those managing your pension money) are incentivized to send their customers’ stock limit orders to trading venues that will pay them a … Continue reading →