By Pam Martens: March 18, 2014 In case you haven’t figured it out yet, there is a right way and a wrong way to help yourself to other people’s money on Wall Street. The right way propels you into the one percent replete with mansions and yachts, your name memorialized on buildings, a golden parachute, an office and car for life fronted by defrauded shareholders and regular invitations to appear on CNBC and lecture others on how to structure the financial system. Then there’s the wrong way – as Gary Foster found out the hard way in June 2012 when he was sentenced to eight years in the slammer for embezzling more than $22 million from Citigroup and compounding his lack of etiquette in the most unforgiveable fashion – he wired the funds to Citigroup’s arch rival, JPMorgan Chase. Foster broke multiple etiquette rules for stealing money on Wall Street. … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: March 17, 2014 Stanley Fischer did not get a proper vetting at his Senate Banking confirmation hearing last Thursday to serve as Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. Of the 22-member Senate Banking Committee, only five Senators, outside of the Chair and Ranking Member, showed up to question Fischer. Questions should have focused on Fischer’s ties to Citigroup, the serially corrupt mega bank which collapsed into the arms of taxpayers in 2008, requiring a bailout of $45 billion in equity infusions, $300 billion in asset guarantees to stop a run on the bank, and over $2 trillion in below market rate loans from the Federal Reserve to prop it up. Of the five regular Committee members questioning Fischer, all Democrats, only one, Senator Elizabeth Warren, brought up his ties to Citigroup and the bank’s insidious relationship with government and regulators. We’ll get to that … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: March 13, 2014 The warning signs are piling up that the U.S. economy is stalling and the feeble measures of the President to address this economic slowdown with executive signings are too little too late. Congress needs to put partisan bickering aside and open its eyes to an onslaught of data pointing to an economy hitting a brick wall. For five years now, the executive branch and Congress have been living under the Wall Street-imposed delusion that flooding the big banks with liquidity (bailouts and years of quantitative easing) would promote job growth in the private sector and restore good jobs to the middle class. What it restored instead were rising bonuses for a limited, elite set of the financial sector who have used that flood of cash to make highly leveraged, high risk wagers in trading venues around the world while exacerbating income inequality in the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: March 12, 2014 Mark Carney, the head of the Bank of England, and other officials from the BOE were put through a five hour marathon of questioning yesterday by Parliament’s Treasury Select Committee covering everything from how long the BOE plans to continue Quantitative Easing (QE), to the potential for Scotland to vote for its independence, to what it knew and when it knew it about the rigging of the Foreign Exchange market by colluding global banks. The bombshell of the day, however, did not occur during the session on the Foreign Exchange scandal, which is stacking up to be a more serious matter than the rigging of the Libor interest rate benchmark which occurred under the nose of the Bank of England and the British Bankers Association. (London now seems to be in competition with itself for the prize of the century for overseeing the rigging … Continue reading →

By Russ Martens and Pam Martens: March 11, 2014 Questions continue to mount over why a rash of suspicious deaths among executives in the financial services industry are occurring now when the worst of the crisis, layoffs, bankruptcies and bailouts occurred over five years ago – or at least Federal officials keep assuring us that the worst is over. The underlying concern is that we still cannot get a clear assessment of global financial risks because of what we can’t see: the interconnectedness of global banking; offshore banking; off balance sheet vehicles; and regulatory arbitrage where U.S. financial institutions move high risk operations to foreign locales with light-touch regulators. It now emerges that there are significant financial ties between JPMorgan Chase, which experienced three suspicious deaths of employees in their 30s in January and February of this year, and two Swiss insurers where a suspicious executive death occurred in August … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 10, 2014 It’s been over five years since the collapse of iconic Wall Street firms such as Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers; the insolvency and bailout of AIG and Citigroup; the receivership of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; the shotgun marriage of Bank of America and Merrill Lynch. After a 5-year delay, the Federal Reserve has released the full transcripts of its meetings in 2007 and 2008 – the two key years of the crisis. But for unexplained reasons, the Fed Chairman, Ben Bernanke continues to redact 84 meetings from his appointment calendar that occurred between January 1, 2007 and the pivotal collapse of Bear Stearns on the weekend of March 15-16, 2008. At first blush, one might think that Bernanke is attempting to protect the image of the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors as independent of any political influence … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: March 6, 2014 Under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, publicly traded companies like Citigroup must certify in their filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission that they have adequate internal controls over their financial reporting. Notwithstanding Citgroup’s regular certifications to the SEC that its controls are adequate, we’ve been reading for years now how it claims to be a “victim” of fraud or the “victim” of a wayward employee’s misdeeds. The latest victimhood to hit Citigroup involves a Mexican oil services firm called Oceanografia. Citigroup’s Mexican banking unit, Banamex, lent $585 million to Oceanografia on the basis of accounts receivables it was to collect on contracts. Citigroup now says it has discovered it is a victim of fraud in that only $185 million of those accounts receivables actually exist at Oceanografia. Despite all those assurances that it has proper controls for its financial reporting, it had to file revisions … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 5, 2014 Based on the appointment calendars of Former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request filed by Wall Street On Parade, and the newly released Fed transcripts and documents from the financial crisis era, we are able to reconstruct the August 2007 panic that gripped the Fed Chairman, notwithstanding the dozens of headlines now proclaiming the Fed remained in the dark about the seriousness of the crisis. It started with a call to Bernanke from Citigroup’s Robert Rubin at 5 p.m. on August 8, 2007. By the next morning, it appeared that the Fed Chairman had gone into a high state of alert. At 11:00 a.m. the next morning (August 9, 2007) Bernanke met with Lewis Ranieri, the granddaddy of mortgage backed securities and a pioneer in the securitization market. Fed Governor Randall Kroszner and Sandy Braunstein, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: March 4, 2014 Last evening, the U.S. Senate Banking Committee made the unexpected announcement that it was postponing the confirmation hearing of Stanley Fischer to serve as Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. Two other Fed nominees were to be vetted today. The hearing had been scheduled for 10 a.m. this morning in the Dirksen Senate Office Building. No reason was given for the postponement. There are surely some veteran lawyers at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) hoping the nomination of Fischer has been scuttled. The thought that Stanley Fischer, a former Vice Chairman of the serially corrupt Citigroup, could become Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve, a regulator of mega banks like Citigroup, is not a source of comfort. Fischer was nominated for the post by President Obama, whose devotion to failing up on Wall Street regularly sets new heights. As if … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 3, 2014 In the past three months, at least eight JPMorgan Chase employees, aged 22 to 39, have passed away, including the three highly publicized, suspicious deaths of Gabriel Magee, Ryan Crane and a young man the media is now calling Dennis Li. The eight deaths are likely a small fraction of the actual number of JPMorgan employees in this age cohort who died during December 2013 and January and February of this year. Wall Street On Parade was able to locate this small sampling from online funeral home notices in the U.S., thus the sampling does not include deaths where a notice was not posted online or deaths in the 59 foreign countries where JPMorgan Chase has employees, other than the death of Magee and Li which occurred in London and Hong Kong, respectively. As detailed with names, ages and job titles … Continue reading →