By Pam Martens: February 11, 2014 Janet Yellen, the newly installed Chair of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, will face her first Congressional grilling as Fed Chair today before the House Financial Services Committee. That Committee is chaired by Jeb Hensarling, a staunch conservative, who has turned the web site for the Committee into a billboard for self promotion and the Koch Party platform for small government, deregulation, and partisan attacks. Below is the written testimony that Yellen will deliver this morning at 10:00 a.m. before the Committee. ————- Chair Janet L. Yellen, Semiannual Monetary Policy Report to the Congress Before the Committee on Financial Services, U.S. House of Representatives, Washington, D.C. February 11, 2014 Chairman Hensarling, Ranking Member Waters and other members of the Committee, I am pleased to present the Federal Reserve’s semiannual Monetary Policy Report to the Congress. In my remarks today, I will discuss the current … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: February 9, 2014 London Police have confirmed that an official investigation is underway into the death of a 39-year old JPMorgan Vice President whose body was found on the 9th floor rooftop of a JPMorgan building in Canary Wharf two weeks ago. The news reports at the time of the incident of Gabriel (Gabe) Magee’s “non suspicious” death by “suicide” resulting from his reported leap from the 33rd level rooftop of JPMorgan’s European headquarters building in London have turned out to be every bit as reliable as CEO Jamie Dimon’s initial response to press reports on the London Whale trading scandal in 2012 as a “tempest in a teapot.” An intense investigation is now underway into the details of exactly how Magee died and why his death was so quickly labeled “non suspicious.” An upcoming Coroner’s inquest will reveal the details of that investigation. It’s becoming clear … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: February 6, 2014 Some of the Republicans on the House Financial Services Committee sounded more like Wall Street lobbyists than legislators yesterday as they whined and moaned about the Volcker Rule, a provision of the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act; financial reform legislation that was enacted into law in 2010 by a duly held vote of their august body following the greatest financial collapse since the Great Depression. The Volcker Rule bans proprietary trading – trading for the house – unless it is a legitimate market making activity or a specifically aligned hedge. While Wall Street On Parade is no fan of the revolving door executives at some of the key regulators, it has to be said that the patience exhibited by the regulators yesterday to suffer fools on this Congressional panel was, at least, a testament to their professionalism when appearing before the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: February 5, 2014 Yesterday, Martin Wheatley, the Chief Executive of Britain’s top financial regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), testified before Parliament’s Treasury Select Committee that the public has valid reasons not to trust the way that rates are set in the foreign currency exchange markets “because of what they’ve seen and the stories that they’ve seen come out.” Global investigators have accumulated evidence that strongly suggests that traders at the too-big-to-fail banks have been rigging foreign exchange rates in much the same manner that they rigged the interest rate benchmark, Libor. Unfortunately for the public, Wheatley said it is likely that the investigation will drag into 2015, meaning the public will just have to go on not trusting a marketplace that trades $5.3 trillion a day. (Is this any way to run a global financial system or have we permanently entered the Alice in Wonderland world … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: February 4, 2014 From the very moment one starts a career as a rookie on Wall Street, you are taught the number one Golden Rule of investing by your elders: “Don’t fight the Fed.” If the Fed is hell bent on pumping liquidity into the markets, don’t fight the bull thesis. If the Fed is, for whatever reason, forced to drain that liquidity from the markets, head for the exits before you’re trampled by a stampeding herd. On September 13, 2012, the Fed’s Open Market Committee (FOMC) announced it would begin buying “agency mortgage-backed securities at a pace of $40 billion per month.” A mere three months later, it more than doubled the ante with this announcement on December 12: “To support a stronger economic recovery and to help ensure that inflation, over time, is at the rate most consistent with its dual mandate, the Committee will … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: February 3, 2014 In a span of four days last week, two current executives and one recently retired top ranking executive of major financial firms were found dead. Both media and police have been quick to label the deaths as likely suicides. Missing from the reports is the salient fact that all three of the financial firms the executives worked for are under investigation for potentially serious financial fraud. The deaths began on Sunday, January 26. London police reported that William Broeksmit, a top executive at Deutsche Bank who had retired in 2013, had been found hanged in his home in the South Kensington section of London. The day after Broeksmit was pronounced dead, Eric Ben-Artzi, a former risk analyst turned whistleblower at Deutsche Bank, was scheduled to speak at Auburn University in Alabama on his allegations that Deutsche had hid $12 billion in losses during the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: January 30, 2014 Yesterday, the White House transported a little cherry table with the Presidential seal for a signing event in West Mifflin, Pennsylvania. President Obama was visiting workers at a U.S. Steel Corporation manufacturing plant there and used the occasion to officially sign the order creating the new MyRA, a retirement account with low dollar minimums for participation. The Presidential Memorandum, surprisingly, was devoid of any salient details of how the MyRA would work and effectively gave the U.S. Treasury Secretary, Jack Lew, carte blanche to tailor the account as long as it complied with the following: “By December 31, 2014, you shall finalize the development of a new retirement savings security that can be made available through employers to their employees. This security shall be focused on reaching new and small-dollar savers and shall have low barriers to entry, including a low minimum opening amount.” … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: January 29, 2014 There’s only three ways to think about President Obama’s new plan for offering workers retirement accounts as he disclosed in his State of the Union speech last night. (1) President Obama and Treasury Secretary Jack Lew have decided to get into the financial services business as a front for Wall Street; (2) Wall Street has conned the President into bypassing Congress and launch its decades-long push to establish private accounts in the hope that these could eventually replace Social Security; (3) The reason we know so little about the details of this plan is that they’re not pretty. The new account is to be called MyRA and would be structured as a Roth IRA where contributions go in after-tax but earnings compound untaxed over time. But Roth IRAs already exist and can be opened at any number of banks and discount brokers (or Wall … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: January 28, 2014 Remember the line from the iconic movie, Dirty Dancing – “nobody puts baby in a corner”? That basically sums up the President’s game plan for 2014 that he will unveil tonight in his State of the Union address. The key elements of the plan have been leaking over the past two days. Yesterday at a White House press briefing, in answer to a question about the State of the Union speech, Press Secretary Jay Carney said: “I think restoring security and economic vitality to the middle class is a very ambitious goal.  Restoring opportunity for all and expanding opportunity for all, those are very ambitious goals.  And those are the goals the President has identified…mindful of Congress’s reluctance to be cooperative at times, the President is going to exercise his authority.  He’s going to use his pen and his phone…And it would be the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: January 27, 2014 Most Americans would be stunned to learn that companies based in China, a country associated with accounting secrecy, have gained a foothold to the tune of over a trillion dollars on U.S. stock exchanges. According to Thomson Reuters, the market value of Chinese companies currently listed on the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq Stock Market is more than $1.4 trillion. Last week, U.S. investors learned the hard way that when China sneezes, the U.S. may catch pneumonia. Growth in China is slowing and there are growing fears that its massive overinvestment in real estate and manufacturing plants in recent years has led to unsustainable levels of Chinese business and bank debt. Stock markets in countries which have been major beneficiaries of the China growth story plunged at the end of last week, including a two-day drop of almost 500 points in the U.S. … Continue reading →