By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 6, 2014 Getting what should already be public domain information from Wall Street’s regulators using the public records law known as the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) has become next to impossible; and it’s fueling contempt for the Obama administration. Yesterday, a new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found that a majority of Americans, 54 percent, now believe the President is unable to “lead the country and get the job done.” That poll follows another one from NBC and the Wall Street Journal that was released on September 13 of last year which found that only 14 percent of Americans held a favorable view of Wall Street. Another Gallup poll released in May found that stock ownership among U.S. adults is at a 16-year low, reflecting a growing distrust of a level playing field on Wall Street after bestselling author of “Flash Boys,” Michael … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: August 5, 2014 For years now, Paul Krugman, the esteemed Professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton University, has been using his columns at the New York Times to defend President Obama on multiple fronts. Until yesterday’s column, Krugman, who is typically spot on in the arena of monetary and economic issues, could be forgiven for his self-imposed myopia of a President who ran not once, but twice, on a populist message and then enabled the greatest wealth inequality in our nation’s history through his obsequious servility to Wall Street. Krugman cannot be forgiven for his latest missive, however. There is simply too much at stake for our nation to allow Krugman’s misguided musings to stand. Krugman starts off with the subtitle “Dodd-Frank Financial Reform Is Working” and ends with this stunning pronouncement: “For all its limitations, financial reform is a success story.” Judging by the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: August 4, 2014 It’s so crazy that one’s first instinct is that it must be a spoof web site. It reads: “A Citibank International Personal Bank FX Leveraged Loan Account can help you maximize the most of what you have. It allows you to borrow up to 5 times your deposit balance to trade in foreign currencies, so you may increase your potential investment power.” (The italics on deposit balance are ours.) It turns out that this is a real Citibank offering, a real Citibank web site, and there is a similar deal being offered in Hong Kong by Citibank – one of Wall Street’s largest banks – a bank that appears hell bent on setting a Guinness World Record for the most screw ups in one decade. Putting aside the fact that Citigroup, parent of Citibank, is under investigation for potentially helping to rig foreign currency … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: July 31, 2014  Senator Sherrod Brown, Chairman of the Senate Banking Subcommittee on Financial Institutions and Consumer Protection, will take testimony at 2 p.m. today on market subsidies enjoyed by implied future government bailouts of the too-big-to-fail status of Wall Street’s bloated and serially malfeasant banks. The hearing is set to coincide with a new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO). An early peek at written testimony by three separate professors set to testify guarantees a belated July 4 fireworks display — one that is not likely to enjoy a welcome reception within the Wall Street corridors of power. Expect the phone lines of lobbyists and congressional campaign managers to be lighting up all over the nation’s capitol this afternoon. Edward J. Kane, Professor of Finance at Boston College will get things off to a rousing start by telling the Subcommittee that any suggestion that the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 30, 2014  As Wall Street On Parade reported last week, Jeffrey Kleintop, Chief Market Strategist for LPL Financial, reports that corporations are now the single largest buying source for U.S. stocks – authorizing buybacks of their own stocks to the tune of $754.8 billion in 2013 alone. And it’s a long-term trend. According to Birinyi Associates, for calendar years 2006 through 2013, corporations authorized $4.14 trillion in buybacks of their own publicly traded stock in the U.S. — raising the question, just what kind of a bull market is this? JPMorgan Chase, the largest U.S. bank by assets, has turned share buybacks into an art form, buying back a whopping $17,945,000,000 of shares from 2010 through 2013. In just the calendar year of 2011, JPMorgan spent a stunning $8,827,000,000 on stock buybacks. According to JPMorgan’s most recent quarterly report filed with the Securities … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 29, 2014 In 2012, Wall Street Journal reporter, Scott Patterson, released his 354-page prescient overview of U.S. market structure titled, Dark Pools: High Speed Traders, A.I. Bandits, and the Threat to the Global Financial System. (For those whose computer prowess is limited to turning on a laptop, like millions of fellow Americans, “A.I.” means artificial intelligence – machines teaching themselves to think like humans, but faster.) Patterson comes to an epiphany on page 339 of his book, writing in the notes section: “The title of this book doesn’t entirely refer to what is technically known in the financial industry as a ‘dark pool.’ Narrowly defined, dark pool refers to a trading venue that masks buy and sell orders from the public market. Rather, I argue in this book that the entire United States stock market has become one vast dark pool. Orders are … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 28, 2014 Wash sales – one of the most virulent forms of stock manipulation that bankrupted banks and corporate conglomerates in the Great Depression and intensified the stock market crash of 1929 to 1932 – has reached scandalous proportions in today’s markets. The response from regulators? Gut the rules that make it a crime. On March 18 of last year, Bart Chilton, then a Commissioner at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), stunned CNBC viewers with the announcement that wash sales were rampant in the futures markets. Speaking to Squawk Box host, Joe Kernen, Chilton stated: “Well these wash sales, Joe, people know they’re illegal; they’re not allowed. A wash sale is when somebody trades with themselves. But what we’ve discovered is that they are going on at this large, voluminous level. I mean, to me, a shocking level. And they’re impacting what … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: July 24, 2014 Since March 30 of this year when bestselling author, Michael Lewis, appeared on 60 Minutes to explain the findings of his latest book, Flash Boys, as “stock market’s rigged,” America has been learning some very uncomfortable truths about the tilted playing field against the public stock investor. Throughout this time, no one has been more adamant than Terrence (Terry) Duffy, the Executive Chairman and President of the CME Group, which operates the largest futures exchange in the world in Chicago, that the charges made by Lewis about the stock market have nothing to do with his market. The futures markets are pristine, according to testimony Duffy gave before the U.S. Senate Agriculture Committee on May 13. On Tuesday of this week, Duffy’s credibility and the honesty of the futures exchanges he runs came into serious question when lawyers for three traders filed a Second Amended … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 23, 2014 Anshu Jain, Co-CEO of Deutsche Bank, was not having a good day yesterday. First the oath-taking, subpoena-issuing Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released a detailed email to him from William Broeksmit, the 58-year old former Deutsche risk executive alleged to have hanged himself in his London home on January 26. By the end of the day, someone had leaked to the Wall Street Journal a deeply critical letter of Deutsche Bank from the New York Fed which said that “The size and breadth of errors strongly suggest that the firm’s entire U.S. regulatory reporting structure requires wide-ranging remedial action.” What the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations was taking testimony on yesterday, however, was far from an “error” committed by Deutsche Bank. Both Deutsche Bank and Barclays were shown, through emails, marketing materials and witness testimony, to have set up elaborate … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: July 22, 2014 Only one word comes to mind to describe the testimony taking place before the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations this morning: Machiavellian. The criminal minds on Wall Street have twisted banking and securities laws into such a pretzel of hubris that neither Congress, Federal Regulators or even the General Accountability Office can say with any confidence if the U.S. financial system is an over-leveraged house of cards. They just don’t know. According to a copious report released last evening, here’s what hedge funds have been doing for more than a decade with the intimate involvement of global banks: the hedge fund makes a deposit of cash into an account at the bank which has been established so that the hedge fund can engage in high frequency trading of stocks. The account is not in the hedge fund’s name but in the bank’s name. … Continue reading →