Search Results for: rap sheet

By Pam Martens: April 1, 2019 ~  The most recent 10Ks (annual reports) filed by the largest Wall Street banks covering their financial condition as of December 31, 2018, provide the strongest argument thus far for Congress to enact legislation to separate the Federally insured, deposit-taking commercial banks from the trading casinos on Wall Street. In other words, Congress needs to restore the Glass-Steagall Act, which kept the U.S. financial system safe for 66 years until its repeal in 1999. If the average American knew that the very same banks that blew up the U.S. economy, devastated the housing market, crashed the stock market, threw millions of Americans out of work just a decade ago were warning in their own 10K legal filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission that the same thing could happen again at any moment, there would be mobs with pitchforks in the street. But because corporate … Continue reading →

  By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 4, 2018 ~ Yesterday’s Treasury market was a mess. So was the front page of the New York Times, which featured a montage of tax records evidencing tax scams by the Trump family. We think there’s a connection. The New York Times’ 14,000 word expose and exhibits effectively render Trump a lame-duck president. That means that the country is left with the unprecedented national debt created under his big tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy along with a billionaire Emperor devoid of either clothes or the aura of a self-man man. The outlook for mounting U.S. debt pushing up Treasury yields comes at the same time that the Federal Reserve is scaling back its crisis-era purchases of Treasuries and as the European Central Bank begins this month to halve its bond purchases. The Federal Reserve, using a previously released schedule, began … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 10, 2018 ~ There seems to be a growing amount of concern these days about another epic financial crash on Wall Street. That, in itself, is a concern. After all, we’ve had only two great crashes in the past 89 years: one from 1929 to 1933 and one from 2008 to 2009. Why is another crash on the tip of so many tongues today? Last week JPMorgan Chase released a lengthy research report in which its analyst Marko Kolanovic suggested that in the event of another major Wall Street crisis, the Fed should not only have its emergency powers restored to buy up toxic debt with abandon from Wall Street but that the Fed might also have to buy up stocks – an unprecedented action for the U.S. central bank – or at least unprecedented as far as the public knows. The outrage … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 13, 2018 ~ On Friday the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed with a loss of 196 points as contagion jitters from Turkey’s worsening situation rattled markets. Among the big Wall Street banks, these were the biggest losers: Citigroup, down 2.39 percent; Morgan Stanley, down 2.12 percent; Goldman Sachs, down 1.78 percent; Bank of America, down 1.30 percent; and JPMorgan Chase closed off by 0.98 percent. Deutsche Bank, the big German lender whose U.S. subsidiary has a big footprint on Wall Street, lost 4.68 percent. Deutsche Bank has now lost 41 percent of its market value since February. But the selloff didn’t stop there. Two big U.S. life insurers also tumbled on Friday. MetLife lost 3.19 percent while Prudential Financial was off by 2.97 percent. What do Wall Street banks and U.S. life insurers have to do with a selloff in Turkey’s currency? Not … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 30, 2018 ~  Big Wall Street bank stocks outpaced the decline in the markets yesterday by a big margin. That’s a serious problem but here’s a bigger problem: if you get your information from mainstream media, you have no idea this happened or what it portends for the U.S. economy. Corporate media (a/k/a “mainstream” media) is obsessed with ratings, clickbait and celebrities behaving badly – which goes a long way in explaining why the U.S. has a billionaire celebrity in the oval office who publicly talks about television ratings when he greets hostages released by North Korea. It’s also now clear why so many members of Congress claimed that nobody could have seen the 2008 financial crisis coming: mainstream media simply refused to heed and report on the many warnings. The same thing happened yesterday. The Standard and Poor’s 500 Index fell by … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 16, 2018 ~  On November 9 of last year, a mere six months ago, we asked the question: “Does Jerome Powell Hear the Alarm Bells from Flattening Yield Curve?” Jerome Powell is, of course, the new Chairman of the Federal Reserve — the U.S. central bank and the body in which the United States has entrusted its monetary policy, for better or worse. We wrote at the time: “As of 7:48 a.m. this morning, the spread between the 10-year Treasury Note (yielding 2.33 percent) and 30-year Treasury Bond (yielding 2.81 percent) is even smaller, at a meager 48 basis points or less than half of one percent. “It is a serious commentary on the bizarre financial times in which we live that a fixed income investor would be rewarded with less than half a percent of additional income to add 20 years of … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 27, 2018 ~  It’s increasingly looking like President Trump vetted his tax cut plan about as thoroughly as he vetted his cabinets picks. That is likely to have a serious negative impact on U.S. economic growth, the housing market and consumer spending. Yesterday Trump’s pick to head the Veterans Affairs Administration withdrew his name from consideration after allegations of drinking on the job and wrecking a government car while drunk surfaced in statements made by two dozen of his current and former colleagues. Later in the day, Trump’s Senate-confirmed head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, was being grilled at two separate House hearings on his wasteful spending of taxpayer dollars for first class travel to Italy and Morocco, a $43,000 soundproof phone booth for his office despite the agency already having secure facilities, and for accepting a dramatically below-market rate of $50 … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 25, 2018 ~  Wall Street knows something that the rest of us don’t. Based on past experience, when Wall Street keeps secrets it never works out well for the rest of us. We’re thinking about the time Wall Street banks colluded on rigging prices on the Nasdaq market; or the time they rigged their research departments and told us to buy stocks that they were secretly callings dogs and crap; or the time they got S&P and Moody’s to give them triple-A ratings on subprime pools of debt while keeping it a secret that they had internal reports showing the loans didn’t meet their origination standards — and then they went out and secretly shorted that debt while continuing to sell it to their customers as a good investment. Yesterday, something decidedly weird happened as U.S. stock markets were being pummeled. Three of … Continue reading →