By Pam Martens: July 25, 2012  It was revolting enough that Sandy Weill was appointed to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences after blazing a trail of poverty across America with his warped and idiotic vision of financial supermarkets.  (As if serious investors stroll into a brokerage firm, load up their shopping cart and breeze through the express check out.)  As Robert Scheer said in April at The Nation: “How evil is this? At a time when two-thirds of US homeowners are drowning in mortgage debt and the American dream has crashed for tens of millions more, Sanford Weill, the banker most responsible for the nation’s economic collapse, has been elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.”  But to hear Weill this morning on CNBC channeling Gandhi was too much for anyone who had a front row seat at his house of horrors and watched him suck $785 … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: July 25, 2012 Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s statement to Congress last week that the process for setting Libor is “structurally flawed” may live in infamy as the understatement of this financial era.  According to documents available on the British Bankers Association’s web site, just 90 days before Barclays was charged with rigging Libor and fined $453 million by U.S. and U.K. regulators, it had been appointed to a steering committee to oversee the integrity of Libor. LIBOR, the London Interbank Offered Rate, is the benchmark interest rate set each business day, in 10 currencies and 15 maturities. It is supposed to represent the actual rate at which banks are borrowing from each other.  The rate is used as an index to set approximately $10 trillion in consumer loans, including adjustable rate mortgages, credit card debt and student loans in the U.S.  It also impacts the rate … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: July 24, 2012 Neil Fabricant, president emeritus of the George Washington University Graduate School of Political Management and lifetime New Yorker, has penned a take-your-breath-away expose on the heretofore inscrutable Mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg. Mike! Wall Street’s Mayor is sharp, witty, and pulls no punches when it comes to the billionaire 1 percenter out to portray himself as the man of the people, while growing his estimated $3 billion personal wealth to $22 billion while in office.  (Exactly how does one do that?  It sure didn’t work out that way for Jon Corzine, former Senator and Governor from New Jersey.  If global businesses could run themselves, wouldn’t we all have one?)    Fabricant puts the pieces of the gambit together for you – from the Mayor’s early days at Wall Street investment bank, Salomon Brothers – made variously famous for its Big Swinging Dicks in Michael Lewis’ Liar’s … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: July 23, 2012 Alexander Cockburn, the outspoken columnist who died on Saturday, penned his last column for The Nation on July 11, just ten days before his death.  His final column out of a lifetime of covering politics and world news predicted the collapse of Wall Street. Alexander Cockburn had kept it a secret from all but his closest friends and family, but he knew he was dying.  He likely suspected this column would be his last. And what he chose to write about was the systemic corruption of the global banking cartel.  Perhaps we should listen carefully: “People calling for banking reform on either side of the Atlantic are underestimating the problems of enforcement.  A writer on the financial news blog Zero Hedge recently remarked that ‘the Libor scandal seems to be waking people up to manipulation and fraud by the big banks.’  Of course, there are … Continue reading →

 By Pam Martens: July 21, 2012 Alexander Cockburn succumbed to a battle with cancer on the early morning of July 21, 2012.  The news came to me in an anonymous tweet posted to a listserv.   I imagined Alex stomping about the fluffy clouds inside the pearly gates and cursing that a life dedicated to the written word was, at death, announced by a 160 character electronic blip.  Alex was The Nation’s “Beat the Devil” columnist for 28 years and co-edited the internationally popular political journal CounterPunch with his cherished friend, Jeffrey St. Clair.  I never met or even spoke with Alex Cockburn but for five years we exchanged emails about the articles I was writing for CounterPunch.  Alex may have been radical in his writing, but as an editor of the work of others, he was thoughtful, respectful, and appeared to view each written word as a jewel to be polished … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: July 20, 2012 Tomorrow will mark the second anniversary of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.  It is appropriate that the public has learned recently through the Libor scandal that Wall Street is far from reformed and that no consumer in America is protected from the continued pillaging of Wall Street. One man who has done his very best to escape his rightful place among the cast of Wall Street enablers who provided the deregulatory foundation for a serial crime spree by Wall Street is Arthur Levitt, the longest serving Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission from 1993 to 2001. Levitt and his mighty crew of public relations handlers have pulled out all stops to rewrite history.  Levitt’s current page at the SEC’s web site contains this rollicking piece of fantasy: “Investor protection was Chairman Levitt’s top priority. Throughout his tenure at the … Continue reading →

This Saturday, July 21, 2012, we will provide an in-depth review of why Wall Street can’t be reformed in its current structure.  We will also suggest a simple solution for Congress.  

By Pam Martens: July 18, 2012 With so much press attention going to the transatlantic finger pointing by Washington and London, it’s easy to lose sight of the depth of the Libor scandal and what it means to the pocketbooks of average workaday folks here in the U.S. and around the globe.  It’s also easy to overlook that we’re also talking about what the public has long suspected: that proprietary trading, where big banks and Wall Street firms trade for the house, is corrupt to its core.  Libor is an interest rate index that impacts the family budget in significant ways.  It controls  approximately $10 trillion in consumer loans around the globe, including adjustable rate mortgages, credit cards and student loans here in the U.S. According to emails obtained by prosecutors, in some cases prior to 2007, Libor was rigged higher, which would have caused higher interest rates on consumer loans tied to Libor.  … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: July 17, 2012 The U.S. Department of Justice has a thing about the big corporate law firm, Covington and Burling.  The U.S. Attorney General, his assistant, and the assistant to his assistant, all came from that firm.  And Citigroup has decided that’s the firm for it as it winds its way through the Libor matter. On Citigroup’s earnings call yesterday, it effectively told analysts that they should not infer that all banks on the Libor rate setting panel will be tarred with the same brush. That’s true.  Some banks were in much better financial shape going into the 2008 crisis and would have had less reason to fudge their costs to borrow.  Unfortunately, despite CEO Vikram Pandit’s efforts to wipe analysts long term memory banks clean, Citigroup was not one of the banks that had no motive to fudge its numbers.  The popular retail brokerage, the Charles … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: July 14, 2012 Let me see if I have this straight: 12 outraged Senators are demanding “prompt and thorough investigations” into the rigging of a global interest rate benchmark, Libor, and they want U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to oversee the investigations — despite the fact that Geithner has been keeping the rigging under wraps for the past four years. Five of the Senators who signed the letter sit on the powerful Senate Banking committee which has an abundance of knowledge about Wall Street’s ongoing cartels.  (See letter below.)  U.S. Treasury Secretary Geithner was the President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York when Barclays, the first bank to be charged with rigging Libor, made at least 12 contacts with the New York Fed to blow the whistle on itself and other banks during 2007 and 2008.  Geithner has conceded that he was aware of the allegations in 2008 and relayed recommendations to Mervyn King, Governor of the … Continue reading →