By Pam Martens: July 16, 2014 Yesterday, Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen delivered her Semiannual Monetary Policy Report to the Senate Banking Committee. Yellen deftly maneuvered questions on slack in the job market, asset bubbles on Wall Street, and assorted digs at the explosion of the Fed’s balance sheet to over $4 trillion as a result of quantitative easing. When it finally came to the turn of the last Senator on the docket to quiz Yellen, Senator Elizabeth Warren, the Fed Chair gave her a big, warm smile at the beginning of the questioning, likely figuring she was about to steal home and get big kudos for her performance back at the Fed. Things didn’t go as planned. Senator Warren has apparently been looking at the bare bones 35-pages released to the public for the various “living wills” or wind-down plans if a systemically important (too-big-to-fail) bank gets into trouble … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: July 15, 2014  Yesterday, the U.S. Department of Justice announced its long anticipated $7 billion settlement with Wall Street mega bank, Citigroup, over its sale of toxic mortgage-backed bonds to investors, which included pensions, charities, cities, states, hospitals and FDIC-insured banks and others. The Justice Department informed us that it had collected “nearly 25 million documents” for this one investigation. The material facts the Department of Justice released to the public in its skimpy 9-page Statement of Facts (SOF) set a new low for bare bones disclosures. Instead of Appendix 1 being filled with incriminating emails or whistleblower letters proving Citigroup’s intent to defraud, it was instead a meaningless listing of deal names which tell the public absolutely nothing. Why would a serious law enforcement agency release such a worthless document to the public? To grasp exactly what is going on here, one need look no further … Continue reading →

By Russ Martens and Pam Martens: July 14, 2014 Since December of last year, JPMorgan Chase has been experiencing tragic, sudden deaths of workers on a scale which sets it alarmingly apart from other Wall Street mega banks. Adding to the concern generated by the deaths is the recent revelation that JPMorgan has an estimated $180 billion of life insurance in force on its current and former workers. Making worldwide news last week was the violent deaths of JPMorgan technology executive Julian Knott and his wife, Alita, ages 45 and 47, respectively, in Jefferson Township, New Jersey. However, two other recent, sudden deaths of technology workers at JPMorgan have gone unreported by the media. The bodies of the Knott couple, who have a teenage daughter and two teenage sons, were discovered by police on July 6, 2014 at approximately 1:12 a.m. According to a press release issued by the Morris … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: July 10, 2014 There’s no question that there’s a lot of sharks swimming about those dark pools being run by the mega Wall Street investment banks which are operating as privatized, unregulated stock exchanges operating in the dark. Any hopes that Wall Street’s captured regulators are going to harpoon those sharks anytime soon were dashed on July 1 when the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) announced a bizarre settlement with Goldman Sachs over misconduct by its dark pool, Sigma-X. The settlement popped up out of the blue three years after the alleged trading violations were documented by FINRA and the settlement was so devoid of facts as to create its own dark curtain around an already opaque arena. As is typical, FINRA made the sweeping claim in its press release that “In today’s highly automated trading environment, FINRA has no tolerance for firms that fail to have … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 9, 2014 Wall Street awoke to a big problem this morning. Their army of physicists designing artificial intelligence algorithms to skim money from millions of trades undertaken by the pensions and mutual funds owned by the average American may not be smart enough for a brand new form of competition. That brand new competition is a group of Senators whose brains are rapidly gathering asymmetric information on the dirty dealings of Wall Street by clustering key Wall Street executives and experts into hearing panels and then drilling down for how things are really operating today at the stock exchanges, in the dark pools, and in the “casinos” run by the high frequency traders. Equally important, by taking first-hand testimony at this series of hearings, the U.S. Senate is acknowledging two things: the Securities and Exchange Commission has dropped the ball and the Senate … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 8, 2014 Serious observers of Wall Street are increasingly asking this question: could a group of trading venues with giant pools of capital, operating in the dark, using high-speed algorithms and artificial intelligence that has a massive historical database and gets smarter with each micro-second trade — effectively own the stock market. Today, we take a look at the massive trading control exercised by just five Wall Street firms. JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup jointly control trillions of dollars in commercial bank deposits with thousands of branch bank buildings stretching across the United States scooping up the life savings of everyday Joes who have no clue these are also the Masters of the Universe on Wall Street. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley also own FDIC insured banks. Goldman Sachs Bank USA, as of March 31, 2014, has $104.7 billion in assets; … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: July 7, 2014 On June 2 of this year, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), a self-regulator of Wall Street’s broker-dealers, dropped a bombshell. For the first time, FINRA released trading data for Wall Street’s dark pools – unregistered stock exchanges that the SEC recklessly allows to trade stocks without making the bids and offers public, along with many other details. The bombshell, that mainstream business media has yet to comprehend, was that the same mega Wall Street banks whose share prices crashed in the 2008 financial crisis are today not only running dark pools for stock trading but they’re trading the stock of their own corporate parents – to the tune of tens of millions of shares a week. Those Wall Street banks include JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America Merrill Lynch and Citigroup. What could possibly go wrong in this arrangement? Two days after Franklin D. … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 3, 2014 Let us see if we have this straight: Facebook is a company that has been publicly traded for just slightly more than two years. It pays no dividend so its key attraction for its shareholders is that it knows how to run and grow its business. Its initial public offering launch was one of the biggest fiascos in modern finance. Its core asset from which its revenues flow is based on the loyalty and growth of its user base upon whom it decided to conduct secret psychological experiments  – and then publish the findings. But wait. It gets worse. Facebook’s secret human lab rat study on a self-described “massive” 689,003 of its users was published just last month in the Proceedings of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences under the title: “Experimental Evidence of Massive-Scale Emotional Contagion Through Social Networks.” The … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 2, 2014 In an interview with ABC’s Diane Sawyer on June 9, Hillary Clinton said that she and former President Bill Clinton were “dead broke” when they left the White House in January 2001. The remark was made in this context by the former first lady: “We came out of the White House not only dead broke, but in debt. We had no money when we got there, and we struggled to, you know, piece together the resources for mortgages, for houses, for Chelsea’s education. You know, it was not easy.” The remark is causing a storm of criticism, both for its lack of veracity and for its insensitivity to what actual financial struggle means in a nation with 46 million people living below the poverty level – including almost one in every five children. CounterPunch’s Jeffrey St. Clair has a particularly poignant … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: July 1, 2014 You know there is something different in the air when Rand Paul is railing against “fat cats” and a fat cat is worrying aloud about pitchforks in Politico Magazine.  It all harkens back to one of the greatest grassroots awareness campaigns in history, variously called Occupy Wall Street or “We Are the 99 Percent.” In a messy, tarp-filled outpost in Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan, the message of enforced inequality via the 99 percent brand was plastered across posters, hand-made t-shirts, street puppets, and even flashed onto skyscrapers in a creative blend of marketing savvy and social activism. From there, it tweeted around the world. This was creative destruction at its finest: calling out a failed system of crony capitalism that was only working for the 1 percent while creatively protesting for change in the streets – the only method left since the system … Continue reading →