By Pam Martens: May 6, 2013  U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, whose loan dealings with New York University and acceptance of $940,000 in bonus money from taxpayer bailout funds paid to the insolvent Citigroup in early 2009 rendered him a scandalous choice for the high treasury post in the Obama administration, is fully living up to his past reputation.  Last Thursday, May 2, the U.S. Treasury released its “Daily Treasury Guidance” which lets the public know what the U.S. Treasury Secretary will be doing each day on behalf of the taxpayer who is paying his salary and on whose behalf he is supposed to be working.  The guidance for last Thursday noted that Secretary Lew would be departing Washington for New York in the afternoon “where he will attend a roundtable with business leaders hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) to discuss the state of the U.S. and global economies. This … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: May 1, 2013  If you’ve spent any time at all on this web site, you know that a seven word poster – “It’s Not a Crisis, It’s a Scam” – neatly sums up what myself, Matt Taibbi, Paul Craig Roberts, Yves Smith, Ellen Brown, and Mike Krauss have devoted millions of words attempting to convey to the American public. Barry Ritholtz has also greatly advanced the topic as have many others. Despite the veracity of the poster, a number of protesters from among the May Day marchers in New York City today were cuffed and jailed by the NYPD as they marched behind the sign. The police will not, at this time, give the tally of arrests.   The same group of protesters, calling themselves the Anti-Capitalists, sang out as they marched: “One, two, three, four — I declare a class war; five, six, seven, eight — eat the rich and smash the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: April 30, 2013  Last week we reported on a PBS Frontline program showing that a 2 percent mutual fund management fee can gobble up two-thirds of your nest egg for retirement over a span of 50 years of saving. Now comes an equally ugly truth.  Since at least 1998 the U.S. Department of Labor, which oversees the nation’s 401(k) plans, has known that fee gouging was eroding the ability of workers to adequately build wealth for retirement in 401(k) plans. It took more than a decade for the Federal agency to pass a regulation mandating that 401(k) recipients receive fee disclosure in an annual mailing. Leading the charge against full disclosure was a coalition of trade associations dominated by Wall Street.  On April 13, 1998, the U.S. Department of Labor published a “Study of 401(k) Plan Fees and Expenses,” noting the following:  “Expenses of operating and maintaining … Continue reading →

 By Pam Martens: April 29, 2013 This Wednesday is May Day, the day that labor traditionally gives its state of the union address – not in the lobbyist filled chambers of Congress but in the homeless filled streets of the richest 1 percent on earth. Thanks to the Occupy Wall Street movement (that growing, ever-evolving movement that corporate media keeps telling us is dead) there will be coast to coast marches, rallies, protests and street theatre. Other countries will be participating as well. As with last year’s May Day rallies, the demands for change are broad-based, covering immigration, a living wage, the environment, Wall Street’s continuing unbridled greed, the corporate theft of elections, and the growing wealth and income gap in America and around the world. Below is a tiny sampling of activities planned in New York City and elsewhere: Occupy Wall Street in New York City: May Day Student Convergence: Students … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: April 26, 2013 There is one thing that sets apart all traders on Wall Street: those who sat behind computer terminals on Wall Street on October 19, 1987 and those who didn’t. On that day, a stock market bubble that had been building for years popped in one trading day, shaving 508 points off the Dow for a decline of 22 percent. On Wall Street they call this a “capitulation,” when market perception hits a wall of reality on high volume and big price declines. Big volume and big price declines occurred in the price of gold this month on April 12 and April 15, marking the biggest two day decline in gold in 30 years, but failing to erase enough of the price run up since 2007 to be considered the capitulation stage. During the two day span, gold lost $203 an ounce. Gold has made up some lost … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: April 25, 2013  If you work for 50 years and receive the typical long-term return of 7 percent on your 401(k) plan and your fees are 2 percent, almost two-thirds of your account will go to Wall Street. This was the bombshell dropped by Frontline’s Martin Smith in this Tuesday evening’s  PBS program, The Retirement Gamble.  This is not so much a gamble as a certainty: under a 2 percent 401(k) fee structure, almost two-thirds of your working life will go toward paying obscene compensation to Wall Street; a little over one-third will benefit your family – and that’s before paying taxes on withdrawals to Uncle Sam.  To put it another way – you work for Wall Street. You are their slave, their lackey and as long as their toadies dominate in Congress, nothing is going to change on the legislative front to stop the looting. Wall Street seized … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: April 24, 2013  We used to be a country with a rich heart. Now we’re the land of the heartless rich.  In one of the worst economic downturns since the Great Depression, the billionaire Koch brothers who habitually rail against government’s unfair burden on the wealthy, have almost doubled their net worth to a combined $68 billion. On March 10, 2010, Forbes listed the net worth of Charles and David Koch at $17.5 billion each. This year, Forbes says the Koch brothers are individually worth $34 billion.    During that same time period, some of the bleakest economic news has been reported for the rest of America. Just yesterday, the Pew Research Center released a study showing that between 2009 to 2011 the richest 7 percent of Americans increased their wealth by 28 percent while the remaining 93 percent of households lost 4 percent of their net worth. … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: April 23, 2013 Yesterday, Mary Jo White, the new Chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, announced that a law partner from the firm she just left, Debevoise & Plimpton LLP, would become the new Co-Director of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement – the unit that decides who gets prosecuted and who gets a pass. In making the announcement that Andrew Ceresney of Debevoise & Plimpton will share the post with the Acting Director, George Canellos, White called Ceresney a “former prosecutor.” That hardly does justice to the cozy ties between Ceresney and Wall Street. (Ceresney worked for the U.S. Attorney’s office in the Southern District of New York in a prior career but has been employed at Debevoise since 2003.) This time last year, Ceresney was basking in the glow of a herculean accomplishment for JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Bank of America and Ally. While … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: April 22, 2013 Corporate media is abuzz with the possibility that the Koch brothers will use their majority-control of Koch Industries to buy eight daily newspapers owned by the Tribune Company, including the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, the fourth and ninth largest dailies in the country, respectively. If the Kochs’ bid is successful, it will signal a plan by the Kochs to stop hiding behind front groups and the launch of a full-scale, open assault on reshaping the country to fit their agenda: deregulation, privatization, and dramatically shrinking the Federal government. Tribune also owns two of the largest dailies in the battleground state of Florida: the Orlando Sentinel and the Sun Sentinel out of Fort Lauderdale. Other dailies include The Baltimore Sun, Hartford Courant, The Morning Call and Daily Press.  According to the 2013 Forbes list of billionaires, both Charles and David Koch increased their wealth by … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: April 19, 2013  President Obama has promised Americans greater transparency in their government and a crackdown on wrongdoing on Wall Street. What Americans have received instead is a dark curtain drawn around how Federal banking regulators settle cases against Wall Street and zero criminal prosecutions by the U.S. Justice Department against any major Wall Street executive. Both of those realities share a common factor: the powerful Wall Street law firm, Covington & Burling.  On January 9 of this year, it was announced that Julie Williams, the Chief Counsel of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) who had stepped down the prior summer, was taking a job as a Managing Director at Promontory Financial Group. The OCC is the regulator of national banks which, along with the Federal Reserve Board, had announced two days prior that it was abruptly dropping its discredited Independent Foreclosure Review … Continue reading →