By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 28, 2015  The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) of the Federal Reserve will release its statement today at 2 p.m. (ET). It is widely expected that the Fed will be holding rates steady. The Fed has been signaling for more than a year that the U.S. economy is strong enough for it to raise interest rates gradually. Based on comments from various Fed speakers, many had expected the rate hike to come in September. Wall Street on Parade has taken a skeptical view of the Fed’s happy talk about the economy – preferring to look at the cold, hard data coming from inside and outside the Fed. It now seems quite plausible that the Fed’s agenda all along has been to talk up the U.S. dollar to prevent capital flight while waving pom-poms to boost confidence and spur consumer spending. Corporate media seems … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 27, 2015 The Securities and Exchange Commission will be holding a public meeting today on the structure of today’s opaque and deeply fragmented stock markets (without conceding that they are also rigged, as many informed voices contend). The meeting will begin at 9:30 a.m. and will be webcast on the SEC’s website. The meeting is considered by many to be a few crumbs sprinkled about the corrupted landscape by Mary Jo White, Chair of the SEC, in the face of a growing campaign to oust her from office. During the second week of September, CREDO Action had a “Dump (Mary Jo) Truck” making the rounds between Union Station, K Street and the White House. CREDO Action has also collected over 116,000 signatures on a petition urging President Obama to ask for the SEC Chair’s resignation. In June, Senator Elizabeth Warren sent a stern, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 25, 2015 On Friday, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont spoke before the Democratic National Committee’s Women’s Leadership Forum in Washington, D.C., calling the United States an oligarchy and reasserting his call for a “political revolution.” Sanders said that “In the last election, last November, 63 percent of the American people didn’t vote, 80 percent of young people didn’t vote, and today, millionaires and billionaires are buying the election. Is that what democracy in this country is supposed to be about? I think not…We need a political revolution.” Sanders said his campaign has already made political history, earning the support of 750,000 donors with an average contribution of $30 each. He said that number of contributions at this point in a campaign sets a new historical record. Sanders said his plan for winning the White House is to “rally millions of working class people … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 22, 2015  One of the common complaints heard about the U.S. financial regulatory system is that it’s so fragmented that one hand doesn’t know what the other is doing. For example, both the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and the Federal Reserve Board of Governors (Fed) regulate the largest banks – including the biggest banks on Wall Street. But neither of these regulators has any clarity on the securities trading risks that these banks holding trillions in insured deposits are taking. Neither does the FDIC that insures the deposits with backstopping from the taxpayer. That’s the Securities and Exchange Commission’s job. The same banks are also taking big risks in commodities and futures trading – but that’s left to the oversight of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). And on and on it goes. A speech given yesterday by Thomas … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 21, 2015 Just when you thought Wall Street’s heist of the U.S. financial system couldn’t get any crazier, along comes a regulator’s report on FDIC-insured banks exposure to derivatives. According to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), one of the regulators of national banks, as of June 30 of this year, Goldman Sachs Bank USA had $78 billion in deposits, and – wait for it – $45.7 trillion in notional amount of derivatives. (Notional means face amount of derivatives.) According to the OCC report, Goldman Sachs Bank USA’s notional derivatives are an eye-popping 563 percent of its risk-based capital. You and every other little guy in America are backstopping this bank because it’s, amazingly, FDIC insured. Compared to its Wall Street peers, Goldman Sachs Bank USA is a midget. JPMorgan Chase Bank NA has just shy of $2 trillion in … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 20, 2015  During the recent Democratic Presidential debate that aired on CNN on October 13, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont said: “Let us be clear that the greed and recklessness and illegal behavior of Wall Street, where fraud is a business model, helped to destroy this economy and the lives of millions of people.” Most Americans clearly understand that reality, and yet, Wall Street’s regulators continue to look the other way at the most outrageous conflicts of interest. On June 2, 2014, Wall Street’s self-policing body, FINRA, disclosed for the first time details on which publicly traded companies were being traded in dark pools and the source and volume of that trading. Dark pools are effectively unregulated stock exchanges and are operated by some of the largest commercial banks on Wall Street – which are also backstopped by the taxpayer for any losses … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: October 19, 2015  A funny thing happened in 2012 after Andrew Ross Sorkin, a financial writer at the New York Times, wrote his spectacularly false narrative telling readers that the repeal of Glass-Steagall Act had nothing to do with the crash because problem firms like Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and AIG didn’t own insured commercial banks — which would have been prohibited under the Glass Steagall Act, had it not been repealed in 1999. In fact, all three of the firms did, indeed, own banks insured by the FDIC at the time of the crash. We figured that Sorkin had just made an error, or, well, three monster errors, so we wrote to his editor. We heard nothing. We wrote to the New York Times public editor who is supposed to uphold the integrity of the paper. Nothing. We wrote to the publisher. Nothing. To this very … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 15, 2015 Yesterday, the U.S. Treasury auctioned one-month Treasury bills at a zero percent interest rate. By late afternoon, the bills were trading in the secondary market at a negative yield of 0.0152. As the above chart shows, short term Treasury bill rates today are tracking a pattern similar to that of the Great Depression. That spike in the yield in the above chart in 1937 came as a result of the Federal Reserve increasing bank reserve requirements – a credit tightening – which sent the economy into a further leg of the downturn and more deflation. After the tightening in 1937, GDP fell by 10 percent and unemployment returned to 20 percent. The well known lesson of the 1937 folly is the major reason many Fed historians do not believe the Fed has any serious intention of raising its Federal Funds rate … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 14, 2015 In the minds of millions of viewers, Hillary Clinton came across in last night’s Democratic debate on CNN as polished, articulate and knowledgeable about the issues. But for those of us who understand that the greatest threat to America is not some foreign power but home-grown financial terrorists wielding trillions of dollars in high-risk derivatives in taxpayer-insured banks on Wall Street, she is the same old problem, not the solution. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, on the other hand, who calls himself a Democratic Socialist, was in Congress leading the fight to stop the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999 and is still leading the charge to restore it before the next financial crash destroys what’s left of the U.S. economy. (The Glass-Steagall Act prohibits insured banks from being affiliated with high risk investment banks or stock brokerage firms.) It … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 13, 2015 The average American, scraping to get by, put food on the table, pay the mortgage, has no time at all to drill down and root out the real facts that would enable him or her to separate propaganda from the economic reality facing the U.S. and the rest of the globe. That’s why we created Wall Street On Parade. It’s a labor of love for our fellow citizens to give you a meaningful jungle guide to survive this era of unprecedented corruption and hubris with a roof still over your head and a shirt on your back. In a few years, when you look back, you’ll realize “jungle guide,” if anything, was a serious understatement. This morning stock markets around the globe are flashing red. The perceived wisdom is that the news driving stocks lower is a report out of China that … Continue reading →