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Recent Posts
- Jamie Dimon’s Washington Post OpEd Gets Pummeled at Yahoo Finance
- In the Span of 72 Hours, Four People Tied to a Hewlett-Packard Criminal Case Died in Two Separate Events
- Crypto Took Down Another Federally-Insured Bank and Just Handed Its CEO a 24-Year Prison Sentence
- All the Devils from 2008 Are Back at the Megabanks: Leverage, Off-Balance-Sheet Debt, Over $192 Trillion in Derivatives, Shaky Capital Levels
- New Study Says the Fed Is Captured by Congress and White House — Not the Megabanks that Own the Fed Banks and Get Trillions in Bailouts
- Data from the Fed’s Emergency Funding Program Shows Spring 2023 Banking Crisis Was Far Deeper than Americans Were Told
- These FDIC-Insured Banks Have Lost 69 to 40 Percent of their Market Value Year-to-Date
- Exposure at Hedge Funds Has Skyrocketed to Over $28 Trillion; Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Are at Risk
- We Charted the Plunge and Rebound in the Nikkei Versus Nomura and Citigroup; the Correlation Is Frightening
- Former U.S. Labor Secretary Says Billionaires Have No Right to Exist Because their Wealth Comes from Five Illegal or Bad Practices
- Citigroup Is Having a Helluva Summer: A Protest on Thursday Will Turn Up the Heat
- Nikkei Has Biggest Drop in History: Here’s What’s Causing the Global Market Selloff
- JPMorgan Is Tapping Illiquid Assets in its Global Collateral Program; the New York Fed Is Paying for Its Services
- Bank Regulators Issue Warnings on Fintech and Banking as Disasters Pile Up
- Donald Trump Gives a Speech on Not Letting China Win the Crypto Race – Not Realizing China Banned Crypto Mining and Transactions Four Years Ago
- The New York Fed Has Contracted Out Key Functions to JPMorgan Chase; We Filed a FOIA and Got These Strange Invoices
- On the Eve of Netanyahu’s Address to Congress, Senator Bernie Sanders Delivers a Breathtaking Assessment of His War Crimes
- Trump’s Sit-Down with Netanyahu at Mar-a-Lago Will Cost U.S. Taxpayers Millions While Profiting Trump’s Business
- Protecting Trump and His Jet-Setting Adult Children During His Presidency Cost Taxpayers Over $1 Billion
- A Congressman and a Doctor Reported a Woman Being Shot at Trump Rally: She’s Vanished from Official Reports
- Jamie Dimon Goes Missing from Earnings Call, After Dumping $183 Million of His JPMorgan Chase Stock Earlier this Year
- U.S. Senate Candidate Backed by Hedge Fund Billionaires Was Sitting in Front Row at Trump Rally as the Sniper Fired into the Bleachers
- Project 2025: The Fossil Fuel and Banking Money Behind the Madness
- The Fund Created to Unwind a Failing Megabank Has a Problem: There’s No Money in It
- Joe Biden Versus the New York Times
- Grand Jury Transcript in Jeffrey Epstein Case Is Released, Raising Questions about Epstein’s Darkest Secrets Being Protected in JPMorgan Cases
- The Supreme Court Crowns a King, Immunizing Future Criminal Acts Under Project 2025 – a Right Wing Manifesto
- The Debate Disaster and the Supreme Court’s “Chevron” Repeal Have a Money Trail Leading to Charles Koch
- Congressman Andy Barr Stacks a Hearing on the Fed’s Stress Tests with Lobbyists for Megabanks
- The Fed Posts Historic Operating Losses As It Pays Out 5.40 Percent Interest to Banks
- Goldman Sachs’ Bank Derivatives Have Grown from $40 Trillion to $54 Trillion in Five Years; So How Did Its Credit Exposure Improve by 200 Percent?
- The Fed and FDIC Wake Up Suddenly to the Threat of Derivatives, Flunking the Four Largest Derivative Banks on their Wind-Down Plans
- Is the Stock Market Setting Investors Up for a Tech Bust Similar to the Dot.com Bust?
- Chase Bank Customers Are Reporting a Wave of Wire Fraud in their Accounts; the Bank Won’t Make Good on the Looted Funds
- The Senate Race in Ohio Is the Sickest in U.S. History in Terms of Billionaire Money from Outside the State
- Sullivan & Cromwell’s Legal Work for Sam Bankman-Fried’s Crypto House of Fraud Is Getting a Closer Look in Two Federal Court Cases
- Crypto Tries to Recreate the Koch Money Machine to Pack Congress with Shills
- French Fears Ignite Selloff in U.S. Megabanks and Foreign Peers
- Crypto Just Got Exponentially More Dangerous: Meet Fairshake
- Nvidia Hit a $3 Trillion Market Cap Last Week; Dark Pools Are Making Over 300,000 Trades in the Stock Weekly
- The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Is Making Enemies in All the Right Places
- A Former Exec at Citibank Raises Alarm Bells in Federal Court Over Failed Risk Controls Inside the Bank
- Charles Koch’s Money Is Being Used in Elections in Ways Only Orwell Could Have Imagined
- Freakonomics and Frankenbanks: JPMorgan Chase Sucked Up 18 Percent of All Profits of 4,568 FDIC-Insured Banks in the First Quarter
- Academic Study Provides Hard Numbers to the Sick, Revolving Door Culture at Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Citigroup
- $244 Billion of Treasury Debt to Hit the Market Today and Tomorrow as Interest Rates Spike on Ballooning Supply
- CFTC Fines J.P. Morgan Securities — a Fed Primary Dealer — $100 Million for Failing to Surveil Potential Spoofing and High Frequency Trading for Eight Years
- Another FDIC-Insured Bank Got in Bed with Fintech; It’s Now Got a Dumpster Fire and Desperate Pleas from Customers for their Money
- Citigroup Gets Fined $79 Million Two Years After It Caused a $300 Billion Flash Crash in European Stock Markets
- After Weeks of Howling by MAGA Republicans for the Chair of the FDIC “to Resign,” a Democrat Delivers the Decisive Stab in the Back
Search Results for: koch
Ayn Rand: The Tea Party’s Miscast Matriarch
By Pam Martens: February 27, 2012 Gary Weiss, long time Wall Street reporter and author, has written a new book, due out this week from St. Martin’s Press, on the rising influence of Ayn Rand in modern politics. Titled Ayn Rand Nation: The Hidden Struggle for America’s Soul, the book removes the propaganda mask that has been so adroitly affixed to Alan Greenspan’s page-boy coiffed goddess of laissez-faire capitalism and the Tea Party’s mother ship. While lecturing others for most of her life on the meaning of morality, Rand had extramarital sex for more than a decade with a younger man who worked for her. His wife was among her inner circle of friends and Rand herself was married. A believer in acquiescence to selfish desires, Rand published a 1964 collection of essays with Nathaniel Branden titled The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism. Adding particular poignancy to … Continue reading
Is the Cato Institute for Real? Follow the Republican Money
By Pam Martens: March 12, 2012 Public relations experts understand one thing about a messy legal battle: the side that triumphs in public perception from the outset can leverage the momentum. Right now, that momentum is clearly with the Cato Institute in its court fight to prevent the oil billionaires, Charles and David Koch, from gaining majority control of the libertarian think tank through a shareholder lawsuit. Yes, I said “shareholder.” This nonprofit, subsidized by taxpayers, is currently 50 percent owned by the Koch brothers and if they win in court, they will become majority owners as a result of a tricked up contract and the death of a 25 percent owner last October. The Cato Institute, in a week’s time, has transformed its image from a pro deregulation, pro Social Security privatization, anti Federal school lunch, anti minimum wage, anti collective bargaining think tank taking tens of millions from … Continue reading
Ayn Rand: Is This To Be the Heartless Face of America?
By Pam Martens: February 27, 2012 Tomorrow, St. Martin’s Press releases the new book by Wall Street writer, Gary Weiss: Ayn Rand Nation: The Hidden Struggle for America’s Soul. This book is critical to understanding the dangerous nexus of corporate financing of radical capitalism (deregulation and privatization) and nonprofit front groups. It’s not an exaggeration to say that the fate of this country hangs in the balance. Consider this excerpt from the book, quoting Yaron Brook, the head of the corporate financed Ayn Rand Institute. (The Associate General Counsel of Goldman, Sachs & Co., Arline Mann, co-chairs the Institute.) “I think in fifteen years, Ayn Rand will be everywhere…She’ll be taught, her standards, in many universities. She’ll be in a significant proportion of high school English classes. Her ideas will be debated on television, in classrooms, and in the public forums. It will be hard to escape, not so much … Continue reading
Taming the Wall Street Beast
By Pam Martens Until Occupy Wall Street gained a national stage, dialogue on the economic crisis had focused on symptoms: bailouts, corruption on Wall Street, collapse in housing prices, intractable unemployment, too-big-to-fail or manage financial institutions. The disease itself, debilitating wealth concentration, took a backseat in the national dialogue. Those who attempted to address the subject were regularly met with screams of being a Socialist. An insidious process of being socialized to silence prevailed. By moving that topic to the forefront, Occupy Wall Street has opened the mouths and the minds of a Nation. The people who were screaming “Socialist” the loudest weren’t the super rich who control the wealth; they’re part of a labyrinthine network of hired hands who function as high pitch bodyguards for the wealth hoarders. The actual super rich are the folks who appear on the Forbes list of the wealthiest Americans; people like Charles and David Koch, each worth $25 billion, who create multi layers of front groups, … Continue reading
The Hidden Cost of Free Market Newsmen
By Pam Martens: September 12, 2011 When Larry Kudlow of CNBC, WABC Radio and National Review speaks, who’s really talking? Is it Kudlow or is it the $332,500 he has pocketed from the Koch-funded Mercatus Center. While Kudlow did previously acknowledge accepting $50,000 from Enron after he wrote an article about the company and failed to disclose it, he has not disclosed the Mercatus money to readers of his columns, blog or to viewers of his programs as he openly pitches the Mercatus/Koch agenda. When John Stossel gives us his free market shtick on his weekly program on the Fox Business Network, who’s putting the words in his mouth? Is Stossel a muckracker or a buckracker in the debt of a web of shadowy right wing nonprofits that manage his name and message? How about Stephen Moore, member of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board and a frequent opinion writer on … Continue reading
Supreme Seduction: Bringing Low the High Court
By Pam Martens: October 3, 2011 For the past three years the U.S. has been served up a heaping dose of free market creative destruction that is the sine qua non of legions of corporate funded front groups. First Wall Street, then housing, now the nation’s highest court has been brought low by its force. As it turns out, creative destruction is 90 percent corruption and 10 percent creative. The Citizens United case, decided by the U.S. Supreme Court on January 21, 2010, opened the spigots to unlimited corporate money in elections and put free speech for inanimate, unfeeling corporations on equal footing with free speech for humans with a brain and a heart. But it didn’t pass the smell test from day one; four of the nine Justices on the court said so in a scathing dissent that raised the issue of unprincipled behavior on the part of the … Continue reading
Investigations
In-depth research on public interest topics frequently ignored by corporate media. (For most recent reports, scroll to the end.) Maria Bartiromo and the Co-Branding of CNBC and Citigroup: February 2, 2007 The cozy nexus between CNBC and Citigroup, the company on which it is supposed to be providing objective reporting. Madoff and the SEC’s Revolving Door: August 31, 2009 …the background of the member of the team heading up the Inspector General’s Office of Investigations, J. David Fielder, should have sounded alarm bells to Congressional investigators. Wall Street Titans Use Aliases to Foreclose on Families: October 5, 2009 A federal agency tasked with expanding the American dream of home ownership and affordable housing free from discrimination to people of modest means has been quietly moving a chunk of that role to Wall Street since 2002. In a stealth partial privatization, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) farmed out … Continue reading
A Secret Oil Gusher Inside Citigroup
By Pam Martens: June 21, 2008 If you want to flush out market manipulation, don’t turn to the sleuths in Congress. They’ve been probing trading of the oil markets for two years and completely missed a company at the center of the action. During that period, a barrel of crude oil has risen from $50 to $140, leaving a wide swatch of Americans facing a choice this coming winter of buying food or paying their heating bill. The company that Congress overlooked should have been an easy suspect. It launched the oil trading career of the infamous fugitive, Marc Rich, pardoned by President Clinton in the final hours of his presidency. It was at one time the largest oil and metals trader in the world. In the late 90s it bought up 129 million ounces of silver for legendary investor Warren Buffet’s company, Berkshire Hathaway, in London’s unregulated over-the-counter market. … Continue reading