By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 6, 2015 The Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation was signed into law five years ago to address the Wall Street abuses that led to the greatest financial crash since the Great Depression in 2008 and 2009. One of the requirements of that law was for the Securities and Exchange Commission to implement a rule making corporations publicly disclose the ratio of their CEO’s pay to the median worker’s pay. Yesterday, after being publicly humiliated over not putting the law into force, the SEC finally adopted the rule. But it won’t go into effect until corporations complete their 2017 fiscal year, meaning it will be stalled for almost another three years. Back on June 2, Senator Elizabeth Warren sent a scathing letter to SEC Chair Mary Jo White, berating her on a laundry list of broken promises. Warren told White: “You have now been SEC … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 5, 2015 Citigroup, the bank that played a central role in bringing America to its knees in 2008; received the largest taxpayer bailout in the history of finance to resuscitate its insolvent carcass; pleaded guilty to a felony count of rigging foreign currency trading in May and was put on a three year probation – is now under a string of criminal and civil investigations. On August 3, Citigroup filed its quarterly report (10Q) with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Instead of reporting a pristine slate free of transgressions as one would expect from a felon on probation, Citigroup reported that it had settled allegations of money laundering with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Commissioner of the California Department of Business Oversight involving its Banamex USA unit. The bank was, as typical, able to pay a penalty of $140 million … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 4, 2015 The Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation just celebrated its fifth anniversary on July 21 and the gaping holes it left in the promise to protect our Nation from another systemic financial crash are becoming clearer every day. No other agency has done more to highlight these growing risks than the Office of Financial Research (OFR), created under Dodd-Frank as a unit of the U.S. Treasury. In its most recent report, it provides the stunning news that private hedge funds in the U.S. now control one-third of all assets under management in the financial services industry – a stunning $4.1 trillion when leverage is included. In February of this year, OFR released a jaw-dropping report showing dangerous levels of systemic and interconnected risk among some of the same Wall Street players that held pivotal roles in the crash of 2008. The report found … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 3, 2015 William D. Cohan has joined Paul Krugman and Andrew Ross Sorkin at the New York Times in pushing the patently false narrative that the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999 had next to nothing to do with the epic Wall Street collapse of 2008 and the greatest economic calamity since the Great Depression. (See related articles on Krugman and Sorkin below.) The New York Times has already admitted on its editorial page that it was dead wrong to have pushed for the repeal of Glass-Steagall but now it’s dirtying its hands again by publishing all of these false narratives about what actually happened. In a July 30 column, Cohan ridicules Senators Elizabeth Warren and John McCain over their introduction of legislation to restore the Glass-Steagall Act to separate insured deposit banks from their gambling casino cousins, Wall Street investment banks. … Continue reading →

  By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 31, 2015  The commodities slump has accelerated this past month with gold now trading at five-year lows and the U.S. crude benchmark, West Texas Intermediate (WTI), down 19 percent in just the past month, 49 percent on the year, and 57 percent in the past two years. In early morning trade, WTI is at $47.82 versus $110 two years ago. Minutes of the Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee meeting on December 16 and 17 reveal that the Fed was expecting an upturn in oil prices this year, writing: “…inflation was projected to reach the Committee’s objective over time, with longer-run inflation expectations assumed to remain stable, prices of energy and non-oil imports forecast to begin rising next year, and slack in labor and product markets anticipated to diminish slowly.” CNN Money is reporting this morning that major iron ore or metals exporting … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 29, 2015 Your humble editor and publisher of Wall Street On Parade might have had a little something to do with a growing mutiny in Congress. Back on November 4, 2012 and again on July 25, 2013, we blew the whistle on an obscene, secret entitlement program between the Fed and the too-big-to-fail banks: a century old program where every year, boom or bust, despite the overall level of interest rates in the markets, the Fed pays out a risk-free, guaranteed 6 percent dividend to its member banks. (All Fed member banks get the dividend but the lion’s share goes to the biggest Wall Street banks because their capital dwarfs all other banks.) Now, after more than a hundred years, there’s a plan in Congress to shrink that payout to 1.5 percent and fix our crumbling roads with the savings. Only banks with … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 28, 2015 According to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, “China was the United States’ 3rd largest goods export market in 2013.” That’s the latest year that data is available. The total of U.S. exports to China in 2013 reached $122.1 billion, a 10.4 percent increase over 2012. The top categories of goods that we export to China are: agricultural products, $25.9 billion; aircraft, $12.6 billion; machinery, $12.2 billion; electrical machinery, $11.4 billion; and vehicles, $10.3 billion. According to a March report from FactSet, “companies in the S&P 500 in aggregate generate about 10 percent of sales from the Asia Pacific region, most of which comes from China and Japan.” On Monday, China’s Shanghai Composite Index fell 8.48 percent (it was off another 1.7 percent at the close on Tuesday, closing at 3,663). From a June 12 high of 5,166, the Shanghai … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 27, 2015 Despite unprecedented efforts by the Chinese government to stem the rout in the Chinese stock market that had shaved as much as $4 trillion from share prices before the government’s interventions this month and last, the Shanghai Composite closed down 8.48 percent today at 3,725.558. The overnight rout has raised speculation in some quarters as to whether we are going to see another “glitch” on the New York Stock Exchange today similar to that of July 8 in the midst of another Chinese stock market tumble. As we reported at the time: “Yesterday, beginning at 11:32 a.m. and for the next three hours and forty minutes, the iconic New York Stock Exchange shuttered trading in all of its listed securities. The Exchange said it had experienced an internal glitch. “Unknown to most Americans, some of those shuttered stocks on the New … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 23, 2015  From the looks of JPMorgan’s share price, one would think the financial world is bathing in a sea of tranquility rather than experiencing crashing commodity prices, tremors in the Eurozone, Canada acknowledging two quarters of contraction, ruptures in China’s stock markets, and energy and mining junk bonds losing 20 to 30 percent in a month. JPMorgan’s share price hit an all-time closing high of $70.08 yesterday. The scary thing is, JPMorgan’s stock had a run from $32 to $42 just one month before Lehman Brothers blew up in 2008, marking the beginning of the biggest financial crash since the Great Depression; and there had been a year of financial warnings prior to that. (So much for global bank share prices being a bellwether on global financial stability.) Once the 2008 crash was clearly underway, JPMorgan shareholders saw 70 percent of their … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 22, 2015 We truly pity the earnest stockbroker today. Imagine trying to have a sensible conversation with your client about what’s going on in world markets when almost nothing makes sense anymore. It is an inherent underpinning of “free markets” that they must remain open for trading during regular market hours unless there is a catastrophic event like war or a terrorist attack. Even after the Tuesday, September 11, 2001 event when planes flew into two World Trade Center towers, leaving much of lower Manhattan covered in rubble and a jungle of tangled, destroyed electronic cables, the New York Stock Exchange reopened the following Monday. But here we are with no war (other than a war of words) and no terrorist attack and yet Greece’s stock market has been closed for more than three weeks. China is officially reporting that it is experiencing … Continue reading →