By Pam Martens: August 8, 2012 It’s becoming a tragic fact of life in America – the more the 99 percent sacrifice and bail out Wall Street’s misdeeds, the more the taxpayer is sucker punched.  The New York Fed and the U.S. Treasury Department’s anti-taxpayer maneuvers that benefited billionaires Sandy Weill and a Saudi Prince in the bailout of Citigroup  are prime examples.  Weill is the man credited with the repeal of the depression-era investor protection legislation known as the Glass-Steagall Act.  He effectively put a gun to the head of legislators to repeal the law by preemptively merging Travelers Group insurance, the Salomon Brothers investment bank, Smith Barney brokerage firm, with the commercial banking operations of Citicorp.  Under the Glass-Steagall Act and the Bank Holding Company Act of 1956, FDIC insured banks could not merge with insurance companies or securities firms, in order to prevent the type of systemic … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: August 7, 2012  (Part One.  Part Two will run tomorrow.)  When the U.S. taxpayer bailed out Citigroup and its two billionaire shareholders (Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal and Sandy Weill, the company’s former Chairman and CEO), the public was unaware of just how financially corrupted the firm had become.  We have those perpetually  invisible hands of lawyers at the SEC and Citigroup to thank for that.  In this December 14, 2007 letter, Gary Crittenden, CFO of Citigroup at the time, responds to questions of serious financial irregularities posed by Kevin Vaughn, Branch Chief at the time of the SEC.  Pages 22 through 32 of this correspondence have been completely redacted.  They are still redacted after the U.S. taxpayer pumped $45 billion into the firm, over $300 billion in loan guarantees, and over $2 trillion in absurdly low cost loans from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: August 6, 2012  When WorldCom filed for bankruptcy in July 2002 as a result of a massive accounting fraud, it led to over 12,000 WorldCom employees losing their jobs, their 401(k)s, their medical insurance, and much of the severance they were owed.  Some of the employees set up a fund to help each other save their homes or pay critical bills.  Even members of Congress were sympathetic to the plight of the workers and contributed to the fund the tens of thousands of dollars that WorldCom had given in political donations.  But billionaire Scrooge, Sanford (Sandy) Weill, who was Chairman and CEO of Citigroup – the firm that was charged with aiding and abetting the fraud and paid a total of $3.05 billion to settle with regulators and defrauded shareholders, has quietly raked in $2,048,226 between 2006 and 2010 from a fund meant for victims of the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: August 4, 2012 (This article has been updated from one that originally ran at CounterPunch.org. We plan to continue to update it and run it periodically here at Wall Street On Parade. Please consider emailing it to friends and family members who have given up hope on creating change.) A study conducted by Edward N. Wolff for the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College in March 2010 made the following findings: The richest 1 percent received over one-third of the total gain in marketable wealth over the period from 1983 to 2007. The next 4 percent also received about a third of the total gain and the next 15 percent about a fifth, so that the top quintile collectively accounted for 89 percent of the total growth in wealth, while the bottom 80 percent accounted for 11 percent. Debt was the most evenly distributed component of household … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: August 3, 2012 As if we needed more evidence – the Second Circuit Appellate Court handed down a decision yesterday strongly suggesting that if you stick with the Wall Street traders’ code and steal for the house, you’re good to go.  But take money from the house and all manner of deceit will be leveraged against you to convict.  The Wall Street Code is inviolate; the order of things must be maintained at all cost. Six Wall Street men have lost seven years of their life, their careers, underwent two jury trials which took a devastating emotional toll on themselves and their families, were convicted and sentenced – while two SEC lawyers and two Assistant U.S. Attorneys sat on deposition transcripts that could have cleared the defendants of the central charge in the case. Who else let this travesty of justice play out: the General Counsel’s office … Continue reading →

  By Pam Martens: August 2, 2012 Read our take on the wild west world of stock markets and yesterday’s market action.

By Pam Martens: August 1, 2012  Back on July 3, Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone wondered aloud on his blog: “Why is Nobody Freaking Out About the Libor Banking Scandal?”  Now we have at least a partial answer: two heavily viewed network evening news programs have yet to discover the largest banking scandal in history.  In a blog post at Media Matters for America, Ben Dimiero and Rob Savillo reported the following yesterday:  “Despite the enormous implications of the scandal, ABC’s World News and NBC’s Nightly News both ignored the story in the 16 days after news of the Barclays fine broke, as we documented earlier this month. In the 16 days following the period of our original study, the LIBOR blackout has continued on ABC and NBC’s flagship evening news programs. Those programs have gone more than a month without mentioning the controversy.”  What could possibly explain not one, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: July 31, 2012 They’re everywhere – on 60 Minutes, peeping out of the display window at Barnes and Noble, going out on internet news feeds.  I’m talking about insiders who want to fill in the cracks and voids of Wall Street’s criminal wealth transfer system that has had an iron grip around our country’s throat since at least 1996. Neil Barofsky, the former Special Inspector General of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (SIG-TARP), has penned a humdinger.  Titled Bailout: An Inside Account of How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street, it confirms what we’ve suspected since U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner appointed Mark Patterson, a Goldman Sachs lobbyist, to be his Chief of Staff – that the U.S. Treasury Department has become Wall Street West. Barofsky was minding his own business dealing with drug cartels and mortgage fraud (a cakewalk compared to Wall Street) as an Assistant … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: July 30, 2012  The word paywall is typically used to describe web sites which make you pay to gain access.  But viewed with the added perspective of the image below, that’s what representative government in the U.S. has become – a paywall to access.  The following chart is provided through the courtesy of the Center for Responsive Politics. The Center calls it the list of Goldman Sachs heavy hitters from 1989 to 2012 — those employees of Goldman Sachs making the largest political contributions.  (It should be noted that not all individuals listed on the chart continue to work for Goldman Sachs.)  The first entry on the list is Todd J. Christie – brother to the current Governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie, who said last week he plans to run for President in 2016.  Todd J. Christie is the former CEO of Spear, Leeds &  Kellogg, the New … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: July 28, 2012 It has only taken twelve years of unending Wall Street scandals and scoundrels, the greatest financial collapse since the Great Depression, a wrecked national economy, 46 million fellow Americans living below the poverty level — including one in every five children — but, finally, the pigs are flying over Wall Street.  Yes, the unthinkable has happened.  The New York Times has admitted it was wrong about repealing the Glass-Steagall Act while Sandy Weill calls for taking a wrecking ball to the big banks. In an editorial published in the print edition of the New York Times yesterday, “The Big Banker’s Change of Heart,” the paper of record at last fessed up to its role in America’s nightmare decade. The editorial page editors wrote: “While we are on this subject, add The New York Times editorial page to the list of the converted. We forcefully advocated the repeal of … Continue reading →