Search Results for: rap sheet

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 21, 2015 U.S. stocks felt their worst selloff in 18 months on Thursday with the Dow Jones Industrial Average losing 358 points and the S&P 500 index shaving off 43.88 points. Of particular concern, the S&P has now broken through its 200-day moving average which suggests to market technicians that more pain is ahead. The stock plunge set off a flight to safety with money flowing into the 10-year U.S. Treasury note, driving down the yield. This morning, the U.S. 10-year paper is sporting a yield of 2.06 percent. Despite persistent talk of a rate hike coming out of the Federal Reserve, the yield on the 10-year has been declining for months, not rising – suggesting that the markets believe the Fed is reading the wrong tea leaves. On the heels of the sea of red in U.S. markets yesterday, China’s stock markets … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 16, 2015  Protesters were throwing fire bombs in the streets of Athens last evening over harsh new austerity measures being imposed on Greece, where banks and the stock market remain shuttered. One third of the stocks on the Chinese stock market remain suspended from trading in an effort to avert a crash. Bloomberg Business is reporting that institutional investors are holding the highest levels of cash since shortly after the Lehman Brothers collapse in 2008. And just yesterday, America’s largest export market, Canada, slashed interest rates as its central bank announced its economy had contracted in the first two quarters of this year. The global landscape is beginning to look like the inevitable dystopian reality of a world ruled by the 1 percent. Against this backdrop, Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen, with her incessant chatter about raising interest rates before the year is … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 3, 2015  The General Accountability Office (GAO) released a sobering study yesterday that looks at how much 55-64 year olds have been able to set aside for retirement. The short answer is: excruciatingly too little. Why that is happening can best be summed up by a headline out this morning at Bloomberg News: Jamie Dimon Becomes Billionaire Ushering in Era of the Megabank. The GAO study found the following: Approximately 55 percent of households age 55-64 in America have less than $25,000 in retirement savings, including 41 percent who have zero. Most of the households in this age group have some other resources or benefits from a Defined Benefit plan, but 27 percent of this age group have neither retirement savings nor a Defined Benefit plan. For the 59 percent of households age 55-64 with some retirement savings, the GAO study estimates that … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: April 13, 2015 For nine years now we have written about Wall Street’s institutionalized system of transferring wealth from decent, hardworking Americans to the denizens of Wall Street and those it selectively chooses to favor in the one percent class. The methods of wealth transfer are as diverse as they are diabolical, thus even well intentioned members of Congress cannot stem the havoc on the financial well being of the average American and the overall economy. One facet that all of these wealth transfer systems have in common is that they all masquerade under a benign sounding name. The 401(k) plan is viewed by most Americans as a way to save for retirement. That’s a good thing – right? It is not a good thing when two-thirds of your savings over a working lifetime end up in Wall Street’s pocket, as carefully demonstrated by Frontline and math-checked … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: March 18, 2015 Yesterday, an agency of the Federal government, the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Financial Research (OFR), released a study warning that by three separate measures the U.S. stock market is approaching dangerous “two-sigma thresholds” which can lead to “quicksilver markets.” Translation: we could be heading for a big crash. A two-sigma threshold is when market valuation metrics move at least two standard deviations above the historical mean. The study notes that “valuations approached or surpassed two-sigma in each major stock market bubble of the past century.” Think 1929, 2000 and 2007. A quicksilver market, as defined by the study, is when stable markets turn on a dime and “change rapidly and unpredictably.” The study was authored by Theodore (Ted) Berg and notes that it may not necessarily reflect the official position or policy of the OFR or Treasury. Berg is a Chartered Financial Analyst with … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 16, 2015 There is now a movement in Congress to strip the Federal Reserve Bank of New York of its regulatory oversight of the biggest Wall Street banks. The movement has roots among both Democrats and Republicans who are fed up with the continuing unbridled abuses of the public trust by the unruly hooligans on Wall Street and their timid regulator, the New York Fed. The push for change is critically important for a number of reasons. Major among them is the perception that New York and its politicians are more concerned about what’s in the best interests of New York residents and less about what’s best for the country as a whole. Two trillion dollar too-big-to-fail banks may pose a systemic risk for the nation but they’re a handy source of quick, mega loans for the hedge funds and real estate interests … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 12, 2015 The “thriving” U.S. economy as reported in a Bloomberg News headline this morning – a characterization which supports the U.S. central bank’s position and little else – was further undermined by the 8:30 a.m. release of retail sales for January, which dramatically undercut analysts’ estimates and came in at a decline of 0.8 percent. January’s drop followed a negative 0.9 percent reading in December. Consumer spending represents roughly 70 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth in the U.S. If the consumer is retrenching, despite all the prognostications for all that extra money sluicing through their bank accounts from cheaper gas at the pump and lower heating fuel bills, the economy can hardly said to be “thriving.” The troublesome headline at Bloomberg News this morning was this: “Who’s Afraid of the Rising Dollar? Not the Thriving U.S. Economy.” The article, by … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 4, 2015 The monetary policy arm of the U.S. central bank, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), is getting hammered this week. On Monday, two researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco chastised the FOMC for effectively wearing rose-colored glasses since 2007 and getting the rate of economic growth mostly dead wrong. (More on that later in this article.) Yesterday, in a speech before the Minnesota Bankers Association, Narayana Kocherlakota, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis said that if one applied a corporate performance measurement to the FOMC’s dual job assignment from Congress of promoting price stability and maximum employment, then the FOMC has “underperformed in the past three years” on both measures. The reason the FOMC has underperformed according to Kocherlakota is that it did not provide adequate stimulus. The Fed President told the audience: “What concrete actions … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 14, 2015 JPMorgan Chase reported 2014 fourth quarter earnings this morning, missing analyst estimates. Analysts had expected $1.31 per share while the actual number came in at $1.19. Listening to the conference call this morning, there was the impression that the $1.19 would have been worse had the bank not released loan loss reserves in a number of business areas. Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, was back to characterizing the bank’s P&L as the “fortress balance sheet.” The London Whale credit derivatives traders almost blew up the fortress in 2012 and the markets are becoming skeptical as to just how much visibility there is on energy and emerging market loans souring on the books of the mega Wall Street banks. In early December, Oppenheimer analyst Chris Kotowski noted in a report that plunging oil prices could be the greatest threat to the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: November 11, 2014 Apparently, not one of the global regulators pushing the latest plan to prevent another taxpayer bailout of the over-leveraged, globe-trotting banking behemoths that crashed the financial system in 2008 ever worked a day on Wall Street or sat behind a trading terminal during the crisis. If one had, he would have exposed this plan immediately as an exercise in illusory thinking – effectively, the same framework on which global banking currently exists. Yesterday, the Financial Stability Board, established in 2009 to coordinate financial regulatory proposals on behalf of the Group of 20 major economies (G-20), released a proposal that is being promoted as a means of ending taxpayer bailouts of too-big-to-fail banks. These 30 banks are known as G-SIBs, or Global Systemically Important Banks. But the proposal does nothing to address the “systemic” danger of these banks, thus the proposal is nothing more than … Continue reading →