By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 21, 2022 ~ Goodbye Liz Truss. We hardly knew ye. Yesterday, Liz Truss announced she would resign as Prime Minister of the U.K. after just 44 days in office. That’s a new one for the record books in the U.K. In her brief span in office, Truss had managed to create a financial crisis in the sovereign debt market, force a bailout by the Bank of England, trigger alarm bells about the safety of pension plans in the U.K., and fire her Finance Minister.  All of these events are interconnected. Here’s the short version: On September 23 Truss’ Finance Minister (the Chancellor of the Exchequer) Kwasi Kwarteng announced big tax cuts which had to be funded through higher government borrowing because the Truss government had no clear plan for how to pay for them. This was interpreted by debt markets to mean bigger deficits, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 20, 2022 ~ Congressman Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), the former House Majority Leader, is counting the days until he might be able to return to that post if Republicans win back the House of Representatives in the November 8 election. But on Tuesday, McCarthy made himself public enemy number one to upwards of 75 percent of Americans when he told Punchbowl News that if he’s in charge there will be a rethinking of U.S. financial support for Ukraine. In the interview, McCarthy said this: “I think people are gonna be sitting in a recession and they’re not going to write a blank check to Ukraine. They just won’t do it. … It’s not a free blank check. And then there’s the things [the Biden administration] is not doing domestically. Not doing the border and people begin to weigh that. Ukraine is important, but at the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 19, 2022 ~ Today, we will be asking the Senate Banking Committee, its Chair, Senator Sherrod Brown, and one of its most knowledgeable members, Senator Elizabeth Warren, to call an emergency hearing and subpoena the testimony of two brilliant researchers for the Office of Financial Research. Those researchers are Andrew Ellul and Dasol Kim. The men have done nothing wrong. In fact, they have done something courageous. They have effectively blown the whistle on how global Wall Street banks have, once again, endangered the stability of the U.S. financial system through their opaque and dangerous use of over-the-counter derivatives. Unfortunately, because of the legions of lobbyists employed by Wall Street that shape and corrupt the rules of federal bank regulators, these men are prevented from revealing the names of the most dangerous banks and their most dangerous counterparties because that information is considered restricted … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 18, 2022 ~ Credit Suisse presents a cautionary tale about creating so much innovation in the realm of credit derivatives that one gets named “Credit Derivatives House of the Year.” That award might sound like a good thing to traders who make their living cooking up and trading exotic derivatives but it might sound like a very bad thing to pension funds and mutual funds who own big chunks of the stock and bonds of that bank and remember how credit derivatives blew up much of Wall Street in 2008. On September 28, Risk.net named Credit Suisse the “Credit Derivatives House of the Year.” Three businesses days later, Credit Suisse saw its own Credit Default Swaps blow out to more than 300 basis points and some of its own bonds trade at 63 cents on the dollar. Simultaneously, its shares traded at an intraday … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 17, 2022 ~ It was one year ago that Wall Street On Parade raised a multitude of red flags about Raphael Bostic, the President of the Atlanta Fed. We have published the entirety of that article below so that our readers can see just how long it took both Bostic and the Atlanta Fed to come clean with the American people about his trading on Wall Street. On Friday, Bostic released a seven-page statement in which he owned up to the following: failing to list a multitude of trades that were conducted on his behalf by trading firms on Wall Street over a period of five years; failing to properly report income on his assets on his financial disclosure forms; trading during blackout periods when trading was barred by the Federal Reserve; providing inaccurate values on his financial disclosure forms. The upshot was that … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 13, 2022 ~ When something happens for the first time in history at federally-insured banks, Congress and federal regulators need to pull their heads out of the sand and pay attention. We’re talking about the fact that in the second quarter of this year, trading revenues at federally-insured commercial banks eclipsed the trading revenues at bank holding companies – which typically include subsidiaries where traders actually have licenses to trade. This latest data on what is happening inside the nation’s largest federally-insured banks comes from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), see pages 2 and 3 here. The federally-insured banks generated a total of $10.3 billion in trading revenue in the second quarter versus $10.2 billion for the bank holding companies, or 101 percent of the bank holding company revenues. That’s never happened before according to the data provided by the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 12, 2022 ~ The last thing that a stockbroker on Wall Street wants to have on his BrokerCheck record is a “Disclosure” item. BrokerCheck is the database maintained by Wall Street’s self-regulator, FINRA, which allows the public to peruse the past history of someone they might be considering doing investment business with on Wall Street. A “Disclosure” item means that a complaint has been brought against you and it describes the nature of the complaint and the status. In our more than three decades of using BrokerCheck, we have never seen a broker still employed with any major Wall Street firm who has listed even one criminal charge, let alone four – until we looked up the BrokerCheck Record for the Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon. Under his individual record, Dimon has listed two pending civil cases, four criminal cases, and … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 11, 2022 ~ Wall Street veteran Nomi Prins’ new book is being released today with a title that should give every member of the Senate Banking and House Financial Services Committees pause: Permanent Distortion: How the Financial Markets Abandoned the Real Economy Forever. The book does what neither of these Committees has done for the American people. It explains how the financial crash of 2008 unleashed an unbridled and unaccountable Fed as Wall Street’s permanent sugar daddy, distorting market functioning with its perpetual money spigot to the point that markets no longer function as a pricing mechanism or efficient allocator of capital but more along the lines of a Ponzi scheme for the rich. Prins writes: “Once central banks unleashed monetary policy to accommodate mega-banks, subsidize Wall Street financiers, and bolster global markets, the very idea of free and open markets and laissez-faire investing … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 10, 2022 ~ At Fed Chairman Jerome Powell’s last press conference on September 21 he said that there is “good reason to think that this will continue to be a reasonably strong economy.” Unfortunately, the U.S. can’t have a strong economy without strong banks willing and able to lend. And there are serious storm fronts in that area that the Fed Chair and mainstream media are choosing to ignore. Last week multiple news outlets raised the question as to whether the troubles at Credit Suisse signaled another “Lehman moment.” (See here, here, and here, for example.) A “Lehman moment” refers to the former 158-year old Wall Street investment bank, Lehman Brothers, collapsing into bankruptcy on September 15, 2008 during a widening financial crisis on Wall Street. Because Lehman was the only major Wall Street firm that the Fed allowed to collapse into bankruptcy (rather … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 7, 2022 ~ Nomura Holdings is tiny compared to the mega banks on Wall Street. According to its website, it had just $384 billion in assets as of March 31, 2021. On the same date, JPMorgan Chase had $3.2 trillion in assets. But for reasons that neither the Federal Reserve nor Congress have yet to explain, a unit of Nomura was allowed to borrow trillions of dollars in emergency repo loans from the Fed beginning on September 17, 2019 – months before there was any COVID crisis anywhere in the world. The chart above shows that in the last three months of 2019, Nomura borrowed $3.7 trillion cumulatively under the Fed’s emergency repo loan program, topping the amount borrowed by JPMorgan Chase by $1.11 trillion. The loan amounts come directly from the emergency repo loan data being released quarterly by the New York Fed, … Continue reading →