By Pam Martens: April 3, 2013  The Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) has released new documents it obtained under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) filing with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The documents show that DHS, the sprawling Federal agency ostensibly created to combat terrorism after the September 11 attacks, routinely spies on peaceful First Amendment activities and required daily briefing on the extent of media attention being given to Occupy Wall Street activities.  Media coverage both inside and outside of New York City was of concern to DHS. On October 7, 2011, a special agent sent a memo to inquire about Kansas City, asking: “Has there been any media attention given to the Occupy KC protests?”  A DHS employee expressed concern in an October 27, 2011 memo that Federal Protective Service personnel, a division of DHS, may have been caught on camera, writing:  “Was there media … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: April 2, 2013  In addition to collecting her $250,000 for sitting on the Board of General Electric, former SEC Chair Mary Schapiro, who left the SEC post in December, will be hanging her shingle at Promontory Financial Group LLC as a managing director. The firm has not disclosed the amount of her compensation.  Promontory’s founder, Eugene Ludwig, was formerly the head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) from 1993 to 1998. The OCC is the primary regulator of national banks. Before becoming head of the OCC, Ludwig was a partner at the corporate law firm, Covington & Burling, the firm where former head of the criminal division of the Justice Department, Lanny  Breuer, returned earlier this year. The Justice Department has been heavily criticized for failing to prosecute Wall Street banks or their top executives.  The U.S. Attorney General, Eric Holder, also hails from … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: April 1, 2013 If you’re a citizen residing in the Southern District of New York, be aware that if you break the law you are likely to land in prison. On the other hand, if you’re a too big to jail Wall Street bank, chances are quite good that you’ll walk. In 2010, Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald sentenced former New York State Assemblyman Tony Seminerio to six years in prison for shaking down hospital officials in his district in a $1 million scheme to collect consulting fees for work his office should have provided at no charge. In 2011, Seminerio died in prison at age 75. This past Friday, heading into the Easter holiday weekend when the public’s focus is elsewhere, Judge Buchwald handed down 161 pages of a tortured decision that twisted both logic and law into a pretzel in order to arrive at the bizarre … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: March 28, 2013 (This column, with updates, runs periodically at Wall Street on Parade. Please consider emailing it to friends and family members.) Yesterday, while at the grocery store, I noticed a large, attractive display of unused hardcover books with a big sign reading: “3 for $10.” As I drew closer, my eye fell on All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis by Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera. I swooped up a copy even though I knew I already had one sitting in my bookcase at home. When I arrived home, I went to the bookcase and looked at the price I had paid when the book first case out in 2011. The price was $32.95. In my early years on Wall Street, when it actually functioned as an allocator of capital to worthy enterprises, we were trained to look for opportunity by … Continue reading →

Judith Mione (Left) Receives 1997 NOW “Woman of Courage Award.” Pam Martens, Editor of Wall Street On Parade, at Podium. March 27, 2013 The second annual event honoring Judy Mione, Wall Street veteran and activist for women’s equality in the male dominated field of securities trading, will be hosted by her daughter, Lynn Mione, on Thursday, April 18 in Merrick, Long Island, New York.  Judy Mione, who died in April 2011 following a long battle with cancer, was a lead plaintiff in the high profile Federal lawsuit against the New York Stock Exchange, National Association of Securities Dealers and the retail brokerage firm, Smith Barney. The suit, filed on May 20, 1996, dragged on for years including an appeal to the 2nd Circuit. The case forced out of the shadows Wall Street’s private justice system known as mandatory arbitration and its pivotal role in keeping Wall Street’s misdeeds hidden from public view … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: March 26, 2013 The only entity less deserving of an Investor Relations award is the magazine that just gave one to JPMorgan’s Chairman and CEO, Jamie Dimon, last Thursday evening. Six days before the awards event hosted by IR Magazine (that stands for Investor Relations Magazine but could also stand for Insane Rationale Magazine) which went unattended by Dimon (likely out of fear he might trip over the people rolling on the floor at his award) the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released a 307 page report and 98 exhibits proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that Dimon and his CFO at the time, Douglas Braunstein, either lied through their teeth to investors and investment analysts or were in the dark about what was going on within their own company when the Chief Investment Office churned $6.2 billion of bank deposits into pocket change. At … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: March 25, 2013  During the Great Depression, the President of the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt, was rapidly creating programs to address joblessness, poverty and the plight of the homeless. The First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, traveled tens of thousands of miles around the country, year after year, to check on those programs and report back to the public in a syndicated column she wrote six days a week titled “My Day.”  In the Great Recession, with 46.2 million Americans living in poverty, including one in every five children according to the U.S. Census Bureau, President Obama is spending his weekends in the Middle East or at a millionaire’s golf club while First Lady Michelle Obama adorns the current issue of Vogue wearing designer clothes costing more than it would take to feed a family of four for a year. This comes on the heels of the First … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: March 22, 2013  One year ago this week, Ina Drew, head of the Chief Investment Office at JPMorgan which oversaw the synthetic credit derivatives portfolio that eventually blew up $6.2 billion of depositors’ money, told her traders “phones down,” signaling that she was halting all trading in those instruments. What Drew should have much earlier told her traders was: “unplug algorithms; plug in brains.”  Despite a multitude of formulas for measuring risk, multiple layers of oversight management, 28 members of a risk management team with titles like Managing Director, Executive Director, and Vice President, it somehow didn’t occur to any of these folks that the number one criteria for a trading investment is that you need to be able to get out of it.  London Whale was the nickname given to the JPMorgan trader, Bruno Iksil, as a result of the outsized bets he was making on … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: March 21, 2013 Despite all the corporate media headlines that Mary Jo White would sail through her confirmation vote before the Senate Banking Committee on Tuesday, what actually happened stands in stark contrast to the prognostications. White was not approved for a full four-year term at the SEC. She was confirmed simply to finish out the remaining 14-month term of former SEC Chair Mary Schapiro’s term. President Obama sent the following nomination language to the Senate: “Mary Jo White, of New York, to be a Member of the Securities and Exchange Commission for the remainder of the term expiring June 5, 2014, vice Mary L. Schapiro, resigned. Mary Jo White, of New York, to be a Member of the Securities and Exchange Commission for a term expiring June 5, 2019.” But when the Senate Banking Committee met in Executive Session on Tuesday, March 19, 2013, there was no … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: March 20, 2013  Last Friday, Senator Carl Levin told the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations that JPMorgan “piled on risk, hid losses, disregarded risk limits, manipulated risk models, dodged oversight, and misinformed the public.” And here’s the punch line: that’s not even the worst of what JPMorgan did.  Each of the charges leveled by Levin occurred on a regular basis over the past decade at the largest Wall Street investment banks. What has elevated JPMorgan to the top of the Wall Street dung heap is that the long laundry list of violations cited by Levin occurred in the commercial bank, not the investment bank. JPMorgan was gambling with the insured deposits of its customers – not its own capital. Thus far, it has acknowledged $6.2 billion in trading losses using other people’s money.  Both Senator Levin, who chairs the Senate Subcommittee, and Senator John McCain, ranking minority … Continue reading →