By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 29, 2024 ~ Last week the Wall Street Journal reported that Elon Musk, the CEO and largest shareholder of the private space exploration and satellite company, SpaceX, has been communicating with Russian President Vladimir Putin for two years. Putin is on a U.S. sanctions list for his invasions of Ukraine. The head of NASA, former U.S. Senator Bill Nelson, quickly asked for an investigation into the matter. NASA has awarded billions of dollars in government contracts to SpaceX, investing alongside some dubious venture capital firms whose typical motives are to get rich quick in a hot Initial Public Offering (IPO) when the company goes public on a stock exchange. SpaceX has also been awarded billions of dollars in government contracts from the U.S. Department of Defense, including classified contracts for spy satellites. Musk has stated publicly this month that he holds a Top Secret security clearance … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 28, 2024 ~ American taxpayers are footing the bill for 17 U.S. intelligence agencies. Those agencies allowed Donald Trump to become Commander in Chief in 2017, despite multiple women charging him with sexual assaults, his six business bankruptcies and a long history of inflating his wealth to defraud banks. These same 17 intelligence agencies then sat back for four years and allowed Donald Trump to receive Top Secret intelligence briefings and purloin dozens of boxes of classified government documents as he angrily left office after a failed insurrection at the Capitol building. Now, yet another billionaire, Elon Musk, has shown these intelligence agencies to have little bark and no bite when it comes to confronting powerful, ultra wealthy men. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Elon Musk, who as CEO of SpaceX holds a Top Secret government security clearance and is launching spy … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 24, 2024 ~ The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) typically receives high praise from Wall Street On Parade for leveling the playing field between the pillagers on Wall Street and the hardworking poor and middle class of America. But yesterday’s announcement of the CFPB’s settlement with Goldman Sachs and Apple over some of the most abusive conduct we have observed against consumers in decades left us with the impression that Goldman Sachs’ lawyers had browbeat the CFPB into a watered-down deal. The enforcement action by the CFPB pertained to years of abuses by both Apple and Goldman Sachs involving the Apple Credit Card. Under the CFPB’s settlement, Goldman Sachs will pay $19.8 million in redress to victims and a $45 million civil money penalty, bringing Goldman’s total settlement to $64.8 million. Apple will pay a $25 million civil money penalty for a combined $89.8 million … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 22, 2024 ~ Four researchers at the University of Westminster School of Finance and Accounting in London have taken a hard look at the much-touted Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation in the U.S. that was signed into law by President Barack Obama in 2010. The voluminous 848-page bill followed the greatest financial crash in the U.S. since the Great Depression. Unfortunately, it was big on word count and short on iron-clad reforms, leaving the implementation of final rules to be negotiated by revolving-door regulators and an army of Wall Street lobbyists and lawyers. (For how that has played out over the ensuing 14 years, see here, here, here and here.) The authors of the study are Dr. Julie Ayton; Professor Abdelhafid Benamraoui; Dr. Huyen (Trang) Ngo; and Dr. Stefan van Dellen. They define the purpose of the study as follows: “The research paper tests two critical … Continue reading →

Commentary Next to Arrows Has Been Added by Wall Street On Parade. By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 21, 2024 ~ According to its own FRED data, the last time the central bank of the United States – the Federal Reserve – operated in the green was September 14, 2022, more than two years ago. Since then, it has been consistently losing over $1 billion a week with its cumulative operating losses now topping $204 billion as of the last reporting by the Fed on October 16, 2024. Operating losses of this magnitude are unprecedented at the of Fed, which was created in 1913. If a publicly-traded company had been bleeding operating losses of more than $1 billion a week for more than two years, there would very likely be a change of leadership at the top. But Fed Chair Jerome Powell is no ordinary mortal. He survived the worst trading … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 17, 2024 ~ The risk of Big Tech firms like Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, Meta (Facebook), and Microsoft getting an entrée into the federally-insured banking system by being allowed to buy or create a federally-insured industrial bank has raised alarm bells among three nonprofit watchdogs and the law professor who, literally, wrote the book on the mushrooming systemic risks in the U.S. banking system. Arthur E. Wilmarth, Jr., Professor Emeritus of Law at George Washington University Law School, joined with the Consumer Federation of America, Americans for Financial Reform Education Fund, and the Center for Responsible Lending, to file an 18-page letter last Friday with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). (For background on Wilmarth’s seminal book, see our report: Everything this Book Predicted on Wall Street Megabanks Ruling their Regulators Is Now Unfolding.) Friday’s letter was in response to the FDIC’s proposal to … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 15, 2024 ~ On Sunday, the Washington Post reported that it had obtained an email penned by a Forest Service official who was assisting in Hurricane Helene recovery response operations in Western North Carolina indicating that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) “had advised agencies on the ground to relocate workers, noting that U.S. military personnel ‘had come across…trucks of armed militia saying they were out hunting FEMA.’ ” While the report of trucks of armed militia has yet to be confirmed, a North Carolina man armed with a handgun and AR-style rifle was arrested on Saturday after allegedly stating that he was going to “go mess up some FEMA personnel,” according to Captain Jamie Keever of the Rutherford County, North Carolina Sheriff’s Office. The arrested man, 44-year old William Jacob Parsons, has been released on bail. That decision will, no doubt, raise anxiety … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 14, 2024 ~ For years now, we have observed the digital front page of Bloomberg News treating JPMorgan Chase’s Chairman and CEO, Jamie Dimon, as the wise, venerable statesman of Wall Street. (See here, here, and here for a quick background.) That reverential treatment has continued as the bank Dimon is charged with overseeing has admitted to the following: laundering money for the largest Ponzi scheme mastermind in history, Bernie Madoff; rigging foreign exchange markets; rigging trading in U.S. Treasury securities and the precious metals markets; using depositors’ money from its federally-insured bank to trade derivatives in London and lose at least $6.2 billion of its depositors’ money; bribing Chinese officials with jobs for their relatives in order to get business deals in China. Even worse, throughout much of last year, the Attorney General of the U.S. Virgin Islands built a comprehensive case in federal court … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 11, 2024 ~ The size, wind speed intensity, and devastating water impacts of hurricanes originating from the record hot waters of the Gulf of Mexico have sent a wake up call to local and state officials up and down the East Coast of the United States as well as to federal government officials engaged in disaster relief. Hurricane Helene made landfall on Thursday night, September 26, as a Category 4 hurricane near Perry, Florida. It then proceeded to unleash its wrath northward, plowing through Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Tennessee. Decimated areas in Western North Carolina – cities and towns such as Asheville, Chimney Rock, Lake Lure, Fairview, Black Mountain and Swannanoa – are 485 miles north of where Hurricane Helene made landfall in Florida. Unprecedented levels of rainfall from Hurricane Helene turned Western North Carolina rivers into raging torrents of water that … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 7, 2024 ~ On September 24, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) released its Quarterly Report on Bank Trading and Derivatives Activities for the second quarter of this year. The OCC is the federal regulator of banks that operate across state lines, which are known as “national banks.” The shorthand for this report should be the “Casino Report.” Increasingly, the report showcases how much dangerous trading activity the brokerage firms on Wall Street have been able to muscle into their federally-insured banking units where the deposits of millions of average Americans reside. Since the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999 under the Bill Clinton administration, Wall Street trading firms have been allowed to combine with federally-insured banks – creating an endless series of crises and bailouts. No bank has been able to blur the lines between a trading casino and … Continue reading →