By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 30, 2014 A man with a long history of keeping big bank secrets safe from the public’s prying eyes has denied the appeal filed by Wall Street On Parade to obtain specifics about the worker deaths upon which JPMorgan Chase pockets the life insurance money each year. According to its financial filings, as of December 31, 2013, JPMorgan held $17.9 billion in Bank-Owned Life Insurance (BOLI) assets, a dark corner of the insurance market that allows banks to take out life insurance policies on their workers, secretly pocket the death benefits, and receive generous tax perks subsidized by the U.S. taxpayer. According to experts, JPMorgan could potentially hold upwards of $179 billion of life insurance in force on its current and former workers, based on the size of its BOLI assets. The man who denied Wall Street On Parade’s appeal is Daniel P. … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 26, 2014 Yesterday, New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman filed a civil fraud complaint against the global bank, Barclays, for what can best be summed up as fostering an internal culture that rewards serial lying to customers and enforces the culture of lies by firing or intimidating employees who refuse to go along. The lawsuit was framed around well documented allegations that Barclays is running a dark pool that allows, encourages, and facilitates high frequency traders to front run the orders of slower market participants like pensions and mutual funds; but the critical takeaway from the complaint goes to the very heart of global banking. The complaint is the clearest proof yet that the insidiously corrupt culture of global banking has not been reformed but has instead metastasized throughout each operating unit of the unmanageable behemoths. To fully grasp this reality, it … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 25, 2014 The tabloids in London are having a field day today with headlines calling Bank of England Governor, Mark Carney, an “unreliable boyfriend” – a remark made yesterday by MP Pat McFadden during a hearing of the Treasury Select Committee of Parliament over the mixed signals Carney is sending the market about the timing of interest rate hikes by the BOE. (Carney, a Canadian and former head of the Bank of Canada, where he masterfully steered the Canadian economy through the financial crisis, might be forgiven for alternately thinking he’s on a bad blind date in his current assignment.) Carney suffered a withering grilling yesterday over a speech he delivered on June 12 in which he said “There’s already great speculation about the exact timing of the first rate hike and this decision is becoming more balanced. It could happen sooner than … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: June 24, 2014 It’s gotten to the point that to maintain an account on Wall Street you have to surrender to a no-law zone. Wall Street is the only industry in America that can force its customers’ claims into its own private justice system, effectively closing the nation’s courts to its customers, while imposing a system where case law and legal precedent can be ignored and the public and press are barred from observing the proceedings. Under that shield from the courts and the full measure of the law, Wall Street rules itself much of the time. Just yesterday it was reported that after Wall Street firms pummeled their self-regulator with angry letters, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) withdrew a proposed rule that would force brokerage firms to tell customers what financial incentives they had paid a broker to switch firms. Often those incentives require reaching … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: June 23, 2014 Two Senate subcommittees held critically important hearings last week so Senators could gauge first hand the level of corruption and self-dealing on Wall Street and 72 percent of the members of those committees failed to show up. Missing in action were Senators Chuck Schumer, Bob Corker, Dick Shelby, David Vitter, Tom Coburn, Tammy Baldwin, and Rand Paul, among many others. Failure to show up for committee or subcommittee hearings has been tolerated far too long in the U.S. Senate as we reported two years ago when not one member of an 18-member subcommittee, other than the chairman, showed up for a hearing on the failing initial public offering process on Wall Street. It is understandable that Gallup’s new poll last week showed that confidence in Congress has just hit an all-time, historic low of 7 percent. So while the Senate debated why the American … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 19, 2014 Outside of the Washington Times, there was a virtual corporate media blackout on the high frequency trading hearing held yesterday by the Senate Banking Subcommittee on Securities, Insurance and Investment – which came one day after Senator Carl Levin’s hearing on the same topic. The media blackout did a deep disservice to the brilliant perspectives brought to the table by Senators Elizabeth Warren and Mark Warner and two witnesses who deal every day of their lives with the corrupted and disfigured trading venues the SEC has allowed to evolve in what used to be the most trusted stock market in the world. On the Senate’s witness panel were Jeffrey Solomon, CEO of Cowen and Company, an investment bank with roots dating to 1918 and Andrew Brooks, Head of U.S. Equity Trading for T. Rowe Price (who has been a trader for … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 18, 2014 In 2008, the sprawling global bank, Citigroup, created under the controversial repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, blew itself up with toxic debt hidden in the dark in the Cayman Islands in an exotic framework called Structured Investment Vehicles or SIVs. The unwilling taxpayer was forced into servitude to bail out this hubris that had occurred at the hands of captured regulators, infusing $45 billion in equity, over $300 billion in asset guarantees, and $2.5 trillion in below-market loans. At the time of its implosion, Citigroup had over 2,000 subsidiaries, affiliates or joint ventures, many of which operated in the dark in foreign locales. Flash forward to today: in March, the Federal Reserve said Citigroup had flunked its stress test and the Fed prevented it from boosting its dividend. (The so-called stress test is how the Fed measures a mega bank’s ability … Continue reading →

Senator Carl Levin opened today’s hearing on high frequency trading before the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations with this opening statement: ————- Senator Carl Levin: Opening Remarks, June 17, 2014 Conflicts of Interest, Investor Loss of Confidence, and High Speed Trading In U.S. Stock Markets Most Americans’ image of the U.S. stock market is shaped by a single room: the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange, where traders await a ceremonial bell to kick off the day’s activity, then trade shares worth millions on scraps of paper. In reality, most shares are traded not on a floor in Manhattan, but in racks of computer servers in New Jersey. Trades happen not at the speed of a human scribbling on paper, but in the milliseconds it takes for an order to travel through fiber-optic cables. And increasingly, the money made on stock markets comes not from thoroughly assessing … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: June 16, 2014  After Senator Carl Levin and members of the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations give their opening remarks tomorrow, the next thing you will hear are these words or something akin to them:  “Rule number 6 of the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations requires that all witnesses appearing before the Subcommittee testify under oath.” You might think that would be the rule at every Senate hearing involving Wall Street’s serial malfeasants, but, shockingly, it’s not. When the men on Panel Two finally take their places, there could be some sweating going on when those right hands are raised. This isn’t just any ole subcommittee; it’s the subcommittee that issued a 2013 scathing 307-page report on JPMorgan’s ethical and legal lapses in the London Whale derivatives trading scandal along with 98 exhibits including deeply incriminating emails. Equally sweat-producing, the subcommittee uses its subpoena power … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 12, 2014 Eric Cantor’s campaign may have eaten its way through $168,000 of steak dinners but big players on Wall Street are eating crow. Between 2000 and 2007, Goldman Sachs’ Chairman and CEO, Lloyd Blankfein, personally stuffed $73,500 into the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee to help elect Democrats to Federal office. But by 2012, Blankfein had decided that “Every Republican is Crucial” and gave just defeated Virginia Republican and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s leadership PAC by the same name $5,000 in 2012 and another $5,000 in 2013. In addition, Blankfein gave the Cantor Victory Fund $10,200 on December 6, 2013 according to receipts at the Federal Election Commission. In the 2013-2014 election cycle, Goldman Sachs’ employees and/or their family members gave a total of $88,500 to Cantor’s leadership PAC – which sluices money to Republican candidates around the country – and another … Continue reading →