By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 23, 2015  We may have just gotten our answer to the puzzling question of why we can put a man on the moon but the Securities and Exchange Commission can’t create a consolidated tape of our markets for forensic auditing purposes: a consolidated tape would tell us just who it is that is messing around with stock futures in the middle of the night as well as creating flash crashes during the trading day. We thought it was very peculiar that prior to the opening of the U.S. stock market this morning, futures on the Standard and Poor’s 500 index had staged a miraculous rally on the heels of distressing manufacturing news out of China last night. According to the preliminary Caixin/Markit China Manufacturing Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) which was released last evening, manufacturing activity in China dropped to 47.0 in September, the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 22, 2015  Last Friday, one day after the Fed’s announcement that it would hold rates steady at the zero bound range, the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 290 points. It calmed itself a little yesterday but was off more than 200 points in the first five minutes of trading this morning. One catalyst for the market gyrations is that Ann Saphir, a reporter for Reuters, boldly asked Fed Chair Janet Yellen at Thursday’s press conference what has been on many minds for more than a year: is the Fed ever going to raise interest rates or are zero rates here for the rest of our lifetimes. This was the exact exchange: Ann Saphir: “Ann Saphir with Reuters. Just to piggyback on the global considerations, as you say, the U.S. economy has been growing, are you worried that given the global interconnecting this, the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 19, 2015 If you want to engage in a serious effort to reform Wall Street, buy two copies of economist and financial writer John Kay’s book coming out in the U.S. on Tuesday. Keep one copy of the book for yourself (share it with family and friends) and send the other copy to a member of the Senate Banking committee. That committee is highly likely to be looking at reforming Wall Street again in the near future, given the convulsions in equity, credit and commodity markets of late and an endless stream of ongoing charges of corruption against the mega banks. In his book, Other People’s Money: The Real Business of Finance, Kay demonstrates not only a sagacious understanding of the grotesque underpinnings of financial markets but he maps out a series of common sense, structural reforms to bring the financial industry back … Continue reading →

Janet Yellen Press Conference, September 17, 2015

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 17, 2015 Donald Trump has led the Republican Party into a dangerous trap. Republicans are now competing for tv ratings rather than a serious run for the White House. It’s the “Republican Hopefuls Reality TV Show,” promoted heavily in advance by CNN as a modernized form of gladiator battle. According to the Oxford Dictionary, Reality TV is a television program “in which real people are continuously filmed, designed to be entertaining rather than informative.” Wikipedia goes further, writing that “the focus tends to be on drama and personal conflict, rather than simply educating viewers.” Completely in step with the above definition, last night’s three-hour Republican debate, aired on CNN from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Hills, California, featured 11 Republican presidential contestants hurling slurs, innuendo, below the belt personal insults and frequently childish digs at each other. The entertainment industry magazine, Variety, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 16, 2015 Tomorrow at 2 p.m. investors worldwide will learn if the U.S. Federal Reserve has decided to cease its endless blather about its elusive plan to hike interest rates and actually boost rates from the zero bound range it has enforced since December 2008. A hike in rates will be comforting to foreign investors who rely on a strong U.S. Dollar to protect the value of investments they make in this country: investments like multi-million dollar condos in Manhattan, manufacturing plants in South Carolina, stakes in publicly traded U.S. companies, private equity funds and mega amounts of commercial real estate. A stable or rising U.S. Dollar – supported by Fed talk that the U.S. economy is growing strongly enough to withstand a rate hike – is mothers’ milk to the ears of foreign investors since it means that if they should choose … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 15, 2015  While the U.S. taxpayer was involuntarily shoveling over $2 trillion in bailout funds and loans into Citigroup from 2008 to 2010, the bank was committing at least one admitted felony on its foreign currency trading desk. And if ongoing testimony in a London court is to be believed, the U.S. Justice Department could have brought charges against individuals instead of settling its case for one single felony charge against the banking unit only. Citigroup’s banking unit, Citicorp, along with three other global banks (JPMorgan Chase, Barclays and RBS) admitted to a felony charge of rigging the foreign currency market brought by the U.S. Justice Department on May 20. Approximately $5 trillion in foreign currency trades are made globally each day, with billions of dollars to be made through advance knowledge of where prices will be fixed. Last Wednesday, the same day … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 13, 2015 Two key legal events occurred last week and were reported as separate news items when, in fact, they are highly correlated. First, the U.S. Justice Department’s Deputy Attorney General, Sally Quillian Yates, released a memo on Wednesday effectively reversing former Attorney General Eric Holder’s standard operating procedure of big money settlements on Wall Street with no individuals being charged. Yates launched the new think in a speech the next day at NYU’s School of Law – not exactly the most auspicious of venues for setting a higher moral tone. Yates lost much of her credibility in the first five minutes of her talk. First she told the audience that was packed with Wall Street’s white collar defense attorneys that in “the few years since its launch, the Program on Corporate Compliance and Enforcement has made its mark here in New York.” … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 10, 2015 On Monday, August 24 the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged 1089 points within the first few minutes of trading. Close to half of that loss was recouped by the closing bell when the Dow clocked in with a loss of just 588 points. So if the small investor didn’t panic, he made out okay, right? Not necessarily. Small investors frequently have in place standing stop-loss orders that are sitting on the stock exchange order books to sell a stock at a pre-determined exit price that is lower than the current market to “stop” further losses. Once the target price of the stop-loss order is reached, the order automatically becomes a market order and is executed at where the market happens to be. In properly functioning, orderly markets, this would typically mean the stop-loss order would be executed at, or close to, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 9, 2015  Yesterday, in a stunning decision packed with Orwellian reverse speak, Judge Victor Marrero of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York (where cases against Wall Street firms are thrown out like penny candy by a carnival barker) dismissed claims against Goldman Sachs in a case so fraught with the appearance of corruption that it had commanded an investigation by the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Plaintiffs in the case were investors in Hudson Mezzanine Funding 2006-1 and 2006-2, synthetic bets on toxic mortgages which Goldman sold to investors while making multi-billion-dollar bets for its own firm that the deals would fail. In writing his decision to dismiss the claims by plaintiffs, the Judge actually acknowledged that employees of Goldman Sachs had called what they were selling to their customers “crap” and “junk” in internal emails that … Continue reading →