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Recent Posts
- Jamie Dimon’s Washington Post OpEd Gets Pummeled at Yahoo Finance
- In the Span of 72 Hours, Four People Tied to a Hewlett-Packard Criminal Case Died in Two Separate Events
- Crypto Took Down Another Federally-Insured Bank and Just Handed Its CEO a 24-Year Prison Sentence
- All the Devils from 2008 Are Back at the Megabanks: Leverage, Off-Balance-Sheet Debt, Over $192 Trillion in Derivatives, Shaky Capital Levels
- New Study Says the Fed Is Captured by Congress and White House — Not the Megabanks that Own the Fed Banks and Get Trillions in Bailouts
- Data from the Fed’s Emergency Funding Program Shows Spring 2023 Banking Crisis Was Far Deeper than Americans Were Told
- These FDIC-Insured Banks Have Lost 69 to 40 Percent of their Market Value Year-to-Date
- Exposure at Hedge Funds Has Skyrocketed to Over $28 Trillion; Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Are at Risk
- We Charted the Plunge and Rebound in the Nikkei Versus Nomura and Citigroup; the Correlation Is Frightening
- Former U.S. Labor Secretary Says Billionaires Have No Right to Exist Because their Wealth Comes from Five Illegal or Bad Practices
- Citigroup Is Having a Helluva Summer: A Protest on Thursday Will Turn Up the Heat
- Nikkei Has Biggest Drop in History: Here’s What’s Causing the Global Market Selloff
- JPMorgan Is Tapping Illiquid Assets in its Global Collateral Program; the New York Fed Is Paying for Its Services
- Bank Regulators Issue Warnings on Fintech and Banking as Disasters Pile Up
- Donald Trump Gives a Speech on Not Letting China Win the Crypto Race – Not Realizing China Banned Crypto Mining and Transactions Four Years Ago
- The New York Fed Has Contracted Out Key Functions to JPMorgan Chase; We Filed a FOIA and Got These Strange Invoices
- On the Eve of Netanyahu’s Address to Congress, Senator Bernie Sanders Delivers a Breathtaking Assessment of His War Crimes
- Trump’s Sit-Down with Netanyahu at Mar-a-Lago Will Cost U.S. Taxpayers Millions While Profiting Trump’s Business
- Protecting Trump and His Jet-Setting Adult Children During His Presidency Cost Taxpayers Over $1 Billion
- A Congressman and a Doctor Reported a Woman Being Shot at Trump Rally: She’s Vanished from Official Reports
- Jamie Dimon Goes Missing from Earnings Call, After Dumping $183 Million of His JPMorgan Chase Stock Earlier this Year
- U.S. Senate Candidate Backed by Hedge Fund Billionaires Was Sitting in Front Row at Trump Rally as the Sniper Fired into the Bleachers
- Project 2025: The Fossil Fuel and Banking Money Behind the Madness
- The Fund Created to Unwind a Failing Megabank Has a Problem: There’s No Money in It
- Joe Biden Versus the New York Times
- Grand Jury Transcript in Jeffrey Epstein Case Is Released, Raising Questions about Epstein’s Darkest Secrets Being Protected in JPMorgan Cases
- The Supreme Court Crowns a King, Immunizing Future Criminal Acts Under Project 2025 – a Right Wing Manifesto
- The Debate Disaster and the Supreme Court’s “Chevron” Repeal Have a Money Trail Leading to Charles Koch
- Congressman Andy Barr Stacks a Hearing on the Fed’s Stress Tests with Lobbyists for Megabanks
- The Fed Posts Historic Operating Losses As It Pays Out 5.40 Percent Interest to Banks
- Goldman Sachs’ Bank Derivatives Have Grown from $40 Trillion to $54 Trillion in Five Years; So How Did Its Credit Exposure Improve by 200 Percent?
- The Fed and FDIC Wake Up Suddenly to the Threat of Derivatives, Flunking the Four Largest Derivative Banks on their Wind-Down Plans
- Is the Stock Market Setting Investors Up for a Tech Bust Similar to the Dot.com Bust?
- Chase Bank Customers Are Reporting a Wave of Wire Fraud in their Accounts; the Bank Won’t Make Good on the Looted Funds
- The Senate Race in Ohio Is the Sickest in U.S. History in Terms of Billionaire Money from Outside the State
- Sullivan & Cromwell’s Legal Work for Sam Bankman-Fried’s Crypto House of Fraud Is Getting a Closer Look in Two Federal Court Cases
- Crypto Tries to Recreate the Koch Money Machine to Pack Congress with Shills
- French Fears Ignite Selloff in U.S. Megabanks and Foreign Peers
- Crypto Just Got Exponentially More Dangerous: Meet Fairshake
- Nvidia Hit a $3 Trillion Market Cap Last Week; Dark Pools Are Making Over 300,000 Trades in the Stock Weekly
- The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Is Making Enemies in All the Right Places
- A Former Exec at Citibank Raises Alarm Bells in Federal Court Over Failed Risk Controls Inside the Bank
- Charles Koch’s Money Is Being Used in Elections in Ways Only Orwell Could Have Imagined
- Freakonomics and Frankenbanks: JPMorgan Chase Sucked Up 18 Percent of All Profits of 4,568 FDIC-Insured Banks in the First Quarter
- Academic Study Provides Hard Numbers to the Sick, Revolving Door Culture at Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Citigroup
- $244 Billion of Treasury Debt to Hit the Market Today and Tomorrow as Interest Rates Spike on Ballooning Supply
- CFTC Fines J.P. Morgan Securities — a Fed Primary Dealer — $100 Million for Failing to Surveil Potential Spoofing and High Frequency Trading for Eight Years
- Another FDIC-Insured Bank Got in Bed with Fintech; It’s Now Got a Dumpster Fire and Desperate Pleas from Customers for their Money
- Citigroup Gets Fined $79 Million Two Years After It Caused a $300 Billion Flash Crash in European Stock Markets
- After Weeks of Howling by MAGA Republicans for the Chair of the FDIC “to Resign,” a Democrat Delivers the Decisive Stab in the Back
Search Results for: rap sheet
Importing Deflation Is Now the Major Fear Across U.S. Markets
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
China and Greece Wobble, Canada Dips Into Recession, Yellen Unfazed
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
Jamie Dimon’s Legacy: GAO — Americans Face Stark Retirement Prospects
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
Wall Street’s Wealth Transfer System Is Imperiling the U.S. Economy
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
U.S. Treasury Drops a Bombshell Yesterday: “Quicksilver Markets”
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
The Case Against New York as Home to Wall Street Regulation
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
Is a Strong Dollar Good or Bad for the U.S. Economy?
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
Fed President Drops a Bombshell Yesterday: Fed Removed QE3 Too Soon
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
The Perfect Storm for Wall Street Banks
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
New Plan to End Too Big to Fail Banks Previously Failed Spectacularly
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