Search Results for: rap sheet

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 28, 2016 Each quarter the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) releases a detailed report showing the exposure to derivatives at U.S. banks. The most recent report for the quarter ending June 30, 2016 indicates that U.S. bank holding companies have a total notional amount (face amount) of derivatives of $252.6 trillion. Of that total, just five Wall Street banks hold $230 trillion or 91 percent, underscoring how massively concentrated this high risk game has become. Those five banks are: Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs Group, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley. There are numerous U.S. units of foreign banks on the derivatives list of bank holding companies but one name is conspicuously missing: the German giant, Deutsche Bank. Without knowing how much potential exposure U.S. banks have to Deutsche Bank in the derivatives arena, the U.S. public is left completely … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 14, 2016 Two former Goldman Sachs bankers and the sitting President of the Wall Street firm are taking high positions in Donald Trump’s administration despite the egregious role that Goldman Sachs played in the 2008 financial collapse that cost millions of Americans their homes and their jobs. Steve Bannon, who at one time worked in Mergers and Acquisitions at Goldman, will be Trump’s Senior Counselor and Chief White House Strategist. Steve Mnuchin, who joined Goldman in 1985 and worked there for the next 17 years, has been nominated by Trump to serve as U.S. Treasury Secretary. That post also entitles Mnuchin to Chair the Financial Stability Oversight Council, a body that frequently meets in secret to deliberate if the U.S. could be looking at another 2008-style meltdown.  Yesterday, an article at Bloomberg News raised questions about Mnuchin’s qualifications to serve in one of … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 3, 2016 The gyrations in Deutsche Bank’s shares last week together with a June report from the International Monetary Fund indicating that the bank was “the most important net contributor to systemic risks” has cast a trading pall over all of the global banks. Against that backdrop, most Americans would be stunned to learn that the German Deutsche Bank, which perpetually finds itself on the wrong side of the law, was bailed out in five separate U.S. emergency lending operations during the 2007-2010 financial crisis, receiving more than twice the emergency financial assistance as that received by Lehman Brothers, the failed U.S. investment bank. According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), Deutsche Bank received cumulative loans totaling $77 billion under the Federal Reserve’s Primary Dealer Credit Facility (PDCF) and $277 billion in cumulative loans under the Term Securities Lending Facility (TSLF) for a total of $354 … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 30, 2016 One day after Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen failed to reassure the House Financial Services Committee that too-big-to-fail banks no longer pose a threat to the U.S. financial system, the stock market settled the debate. Germany’s largest bank had a dizzy spell and Wall Street banks swooned under a collective anxiety attack. The writing has been on the wall for a very long time that this scenario was going to eventually play out given the lack of serious reform of Wall Street. What was notable about yesterday’s market activity is that among the major Wall Street banks, Goldman Sachs fared worst, falling 2.75 percent, followed by Morgan Stanley which shed 2.30 percent and Citigroup, which lost 2.28 percent. All of the major Wall Street banks were dragged down by the 6.67 percent decline in the shares of Deutsche Bank by the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 16, 2016  The old adage that when one is already in a hole, one should stop digging, has apparently not found its way to the corner offices of Deutsche Bank. After a non-stop two years of scandals, the Bank has decided to take its shareholders on another heart-thumping cop car chase by publicly feuding with the U.S. Justice Department. After the Wall Street Journal reported in the wee hours this morning that the Justice Department was proposing a fine of $14 billion for Deutsche Bank’s involvement in tricking investors with toxic mortgage backed securities, the Bank had the temerity to tell Reuters that it was planning to “fight” the demand. This negotiating tactic sounds a little like something that might have been taught at the Trump Institute.  In just the past two years, Deutsche Bank, Germany’s largest bank with a large trading footprint … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 11, 2016 Today marks the 15th Anniversary of the tragic events of September 11, 2001 and yet the American public remains in the dark about critical details of hundreds of billions of dollars of financial dealings by the Federal Reserve in the days, weeks and months that followed 9/11. What has also been lost in the official 9/11 Commission Report, Congressional hearings and academic studies, is how Wall Street, on the day the planes slammed into the World Trade Towers, was on the cusp of being exposed by the New York State Attorney General, Eliot Spitzer, as the orchestrator of a fraud of unprecedented proportion against the investing public. That investigation was stalled for more than six months. It would have been politically incorrect to do perp walks outside Wall Street’s biggest investment banks as families mourned the loss of their loved ones; … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: September 8, 2016 This Sunday will mark the 15th anniversary of the 9/11 tragedy – one of those seminal events in human memory that is seared forever on the brain. Because of the emotional toll 9/11 took on the human psyche — watching U.S. commercial airline planes converted to killing machines on U.S. soil — America’s collective memory of exactly what happened on 9/11 has more to do with repetitive TV clips of the Twin Towers collapsing and a rush to war than specific details of the actions of those pulling the monetary levers on Wall Street. The day’s events were so bizarre and triggered such cognitive dissonance that millions of Americans did not realize for years that a third World Trade Center skyscraper had collapsed in lower Manhattan that day. World Trade Center Building 7, a 47-story skyscraper not hit by a plane, collapsed at 5:20 … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 18, 2016 Since the Wall Street crash in 2008 crippled the U.S. economy, Congress has played the role of a spectator at a big league baseball game – munching on popcorn and licking its greasy fingers soiled with corporate campaign loot – as the real players on the field, the Federal Reserve, controlled the action. The above chart shows the steady erosion of Capacity Utilization in the U.S. since Congress surrendered its job to the deeply conflicted Fed. The chart comes courtesy of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, which defines Total Industry Capacity Utilization this way: “the percentage of resources used by corporations and factories to produce goods in manufacturing, mining, and electric and gas utilities for all facilities located in the United States (excluding those in U.S. territories).” In November 2007, prior to the onset of the crash, Capacity Utilization … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 3, 2016 Deutsche Bank is starting to resemble the financial basket case that Citigroup became in 2008, leading to Citigroup’s partial ownership by the U.S. government for a time and the bank requiring the largest taxpayer bailout in U.S. financial history. Citigroup’s teetering condition and its interconnectedness to other mega banks played a critical role in the Wall Street crash and collapse of the U.S. economy. That Deutsche Bank (which is highly interconnected to other major Wall Street banks and locked and loaded with tens of trillions of dollars in derivatives) is now showing the same kind of stresses as Citigroup back in 2008, raises the obvious question about just how effectively the Obama administration has reined in systemic financial risk after six years of reassurances that Dodd-Frank financial reform was getting the job done. On this date a year ago, Deutsche Bank’s … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 17, 2016 The U.S. stock market was mired in red ink yesterday morning with every major Wall Street bank trading down on news that multiple polls in Britain were showing that a majority of citizens were in favor of the United Kingdom withdrawing from the European Union (EU). A referendum vote on the issue is to be held next Thursday. Then, at 12:17 p.m. New York time yesterday, Bloomberg News printed the following headline: “U.K. Lawmaker Jo Cox Is Murdered, Silencing Brexit Debate.” Cox was a Member of Parliament from the Labour Party who was an advocate for the U.K. remaining in the EU. Cox, a mother of two children, was shot and stabbed by a man said to be in favor of Brexit, the term for a British exit from the EU. On the news of her death, which fueled the market … Continue reading →