By Pam Martens: October 28, 2014 Yesterday the Wall Street Journal gave prominence to the following headline on page one of its newspaper with the story jumping to page A2: “Bad Market Timing Fueled Wealth Gap.” Through the use of the word “fueled” in that headline, the reader is conditioned to believe that market timing is a significant cause of wealth inequality in the United States – a completely bogus idea for which there exists mountains of research to the contrary. The online version of the article includes a video interview with the author, Josh Zumbrun, and this caption appears under the video: “Millions of Americans bought high and sold low, which caused them to unknowingly widen economic inequality. WSJ’s Josh Zumbrun explains on MoneyBeat with Paul Vigna.” The crux of this thesis is built in the first three paragraphs of the article as follows: “Millions of Americans inadvertently made … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 27, 2014  The contrast between Wall Street’s continuity government in Washington under another Clinton in the White House and the charismatic populist voice of Senator Elizabeth Warren as she stumps for Democrats in the midterms, is awakening millions of Americans to the idea that there may be choices after all in the 2016 presidential election. Columnist Eugene Robinson said it best last Monday in the Washington Post, writing that Senator Warren’s “swing through Colorado, Minnesota and Iowa to rally the faithful displayed something no other potential contender for the 2016 presidential nomination, including Hillary Clinton, seems able to present: a message.” What Robinson really means is “a message of hope” – that Wall Street’s wealth transfer system, institutionalized under a protection racket by members of Congress who keep their seats using Wall Street’s campaign dough, could come under serious challenge with Warren in … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 23, 2014 What the New York Fed attempted to pull off this past Monday with its full-day conference for the execs of wayward Wall Street banks was a public relations stunt to switch the national debate from its culture to Wall Street’s culture. Styled as a “Workshop on Reforming Culture and Behavior in the Financial Services Industry,” the event came less than a month after ProPublica and public radio’s “This American Life” released internal tape recordings made by a former New York Fed bank examiner, Carmen Segarra, revealing a regulator with no bark or bite. ProPublica’s Jake Bernstein wrote that the tapes and a confidential report by an outside consultant demonstrated the New York Fed’s “history of deference to banks.” But there is far more to this story. Wall Street banking executives, who elect two-thirds of the Board of Directors of the New … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 22, 2014  Yesterday the Inspector General of the Federal Reserve System released a highly abbreviated report on the New York Fed’s supervision of JPMorgan’s Chief Investment Office (CIO) that spawned the $6.2 billion in exotic derivative losses in 2012 – using hundreds of billions of dollars in FDIC insured deposits to make those wild bets. The debacle became known as the London Whale since the outsized trades were conducted in London. The four page summary report that was sanitized for the public includes two bombshells for those who took the time to read the report carefully. First, the Inspector General specifically notes that “we selected July 2004 through April 2012 as the time period for our evaluation. July 2004 marked JPMC’s merger with Bank One Corporation (Bank One), and JPMC created the CIO in 2005.” What is the relevance of that nugget? We … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 21, 2014 In 30 years of observing Wall Street, we can’t remember a headline like the one that appeared yesterday at Reuters: “IBM to Pay GlobalFoundries $1.5 Billion to Take Chip Unit.” When one can’t even give a business away that includes thousands of patents, IBM engineers and two operating factories, times are tough. The market thought so also; by the closing bell yesterday, IBM’s stock was down $12.95, or 7 percent, to $169.10. The acquirer of the IBM semiconductor business, GlobalFoundries, is headquartered in Silicon Valley. Its parent is Advanced Technology Investment Company (ATIC), which is owned by the Abu Dhabi government’s investment arm, Mubadala Development Company. In May, ATIC announced it was changing its name to Mubadala Technology. Abu Dhabi likely drove a very hard bargain with IBM in this deal because it has good reason to question promises made by American … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 20, 2014  It took 200 years of hard data in a bestselling book by Thomas Piketty, awesome graphs and charts in Robert Reich’s documentary, “Inequality for All,” and years of scolding from Wall Street on Parade, but Fed Chair Janet Yellen has finally, and correctly, arrived at the idea that the nation’s economic ills are deeply rooted in the fact that U.S. “income and wealth inequality are near their highest levels in the past hundred years.” That was the message Yellen delivered on Friday in a speech at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, replete with stomach-churning figures from the Fed. Make no mistake about it, coming at the end of a week that saw dramatic up and down spikes in the stock market – Yellen was sending a pivotal message to the Wall Street wealth hoarders – your billionaire standing could be … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 16, 2014 If you happened to be sitting behind a trading screen on Wall Street in late August and September 1998, you’ve likely been having some déjà vu over the past seven trading sessions. Intraday rallies continue to fail; there is a thundering stampede into Treasuries; rumors are buzzing about hedge funds in trouble; waves of selling pressure suggest wholesale dumping to meet margin calls. If you needed any more evidence that there is some serious stuff going on behind the scenes on Wall Street, you got it in yesterday’s stock market open. Within minutes the Dow Jones Industrial Average had plunged 370 points in a panic selling spree as buyers went on strike. The Dow was down as much as 458 points in early afternoon before trimming its loses before the final bell to close at a minus 173 points. It’s all … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 15, 2014  New York City has 8.4 million people living in its boroughs. But when it comes to defending those charged with financial crimes, it’s a very small, clubby world of people who are either related to each other or have worked together in the past. And this clubby group has one more thing in common: most of its members seem to be lavishing huge campaign contributions on U.S. Senator Charles (Chuck) Schumer of New York – a man who is in a position to recommend Federal Judge appointments and the Justice Department’s U.S. Attorney who will prosecute the financial crimes – or not. These are the findings in a new on-line book, JPMadoff: The Unholy Alliance Between America’s Biggest Bank and America’s Biggest Crook, being offered free as a chapter a month by attorneys Helen Davis Chaitman and Lance Gotthoffer. (Chaitman is … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 14, 2014 Yes, there is a wall of worry that the stock market is no longer climbing but is now descending. The greatest worry, that makes all others pale in comparison, is that the U.S. central bank, the Federal Reserve, has nothing left in its monetary arsenal but one bullet – Fed-Speak, otherwise known as spin. After three bond buying programs known as Quantitative Easing (QE) flooded Wall Street with bountiful amounts of play money while failing to significantly lift wages or economic growth, the U.S. central bank now has a balance sheet that has quadrupled since the 2008 crisis to $4.4 trillion. That it would be allowed to engage in QE4 in the next crisis is highly doubtful since QEs have proven to be financial bubble makers, income inequality makers and of little help to the average citizen. Equally problematic, the Fed … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 13, 2014 It was only a matter of time until the evidence became irrefutable that the only way out of a global deflation on the order of the Great Depression was to address the fact that 571 U.S. billionaires simply don’t have enough hours in the day to spend adequate money to buy enough goods that would require the restocking of shelves, create new factory orders and thereby ramp up job hiring to keep a nation of 317 million people afloat. A nation where the top 10 percent reaps more than 50 percent of the income is doomed to end up in the quicksand of deflation, dragging down the rich along with everyone else. The Federal Reserve’s timidity to address this reality since the crisis of 2008, as the national debt ballooned and its own balance sheet quadrupled, has now put it in … Continue reading →