Search Results for: goldman sachs

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 28, 2021 ~ Dark Pools owned by the biggest names on Wall Street – such as Goldman Sachs’ Sigma X2, JPMorgan Chase’s JPM-X, UBS’ UBSA, Morgan Stanley’s MSPL, and Credit Suisse’s Crossfinder — have been making tens of thousands of trades in the shares of GameStop on an ongoing weekly basis.  FINRA, Wall Street’s highly compromised self-regulator, reports the Dark Pool data on a stale basis, two to three weeks after the trading has occurred. It is then lumped together for the whole week, rendering it useless in terms of monitoring price manipulation. The chart above is taken from the latest available information from FINRA. (See our previous reporting on Dark Pools in Related Articles below.) It’s a fair guess that you haven’t heard a peep about Dark Pools on the evening news. The fact that you haven’t is a perfect commentary on … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 19, 2020 ~ It’s starting to feel like Goldman Sachs has an insatiable appetite for scandal. Thanks to Matt Taibbi, Goldman is already known around the world as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” Most recently, Goldman jammed its blood funnel into the 1MDB sovereign wealth fund of Malaysia, resulting in a criminal indictment by the Malaysian government followed by a settlement with Malaysia for $3.9 billion. In October criminal charges were brought in the same matter by the U.S. Department of Justice against Goldman, resulting in another $2.9 billion in fines by U.S. and foreign regulators. The heavily publicized 1MDB scandal has filled headlines for the past five years. The Justice Department just settled its 1MDB charges against Goldman four weeks ago. Now Goldman is already back … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 23, 2020 ~ If you needed further proof that crime pays on Wall Street, look at the chart above. Goldman Sachs and its Malaysian subsidiary were criminally charged yesterday by the Justice Department, they admit to the charges, and its stock closed up on the day by $2.49. The U.S. Department of Justice is being played like a fiddle at a tractor meet. Those big white shoe law firms that handle increasingly dirty cases against the mega banks on Wall Street have twice, in a period of just three weeks, managed to get the Justice Department to announce settlements of landmark criminal cases against two of the largest banks on Wall Street on the day of presidential debates when the public and the media are not paying attention to Wall Street. On September 29, the day of the first presidential debate between President … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 16, 2020 ~ On December 6 of last year, four reporters at Bloomberg News signaled that the U.S. Department of Justice was close to a settlement of its criminal investigation of Goldman Sachs in the 1MDB matter. The reporters wrote as follows: “The Justice Department and other federal agencies, in internal discussions held in recent weeks, have weighed seeking penalties between $1.5 billion and $2 billion, the people said. That’s less than what some analysts have signaled Goldman might have to pay. While a settlement could be announced as soon as next month, the terms could change before a deal is finalized…” The terms, indeed, seem to have changed. It’s now more than 9 months since that article was published and there hasn’t been a peep out of the Justice Department about criminal charges against Goldman Sachs. According to the Bloomberg report, Barr … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 6, 2020 ~ Three of the top men at the U.S. Department of Justice who have been involved in negotiations as to whether Goldman Sachs, for the first time in its history, will be charged with a criminal felony and hit with a multi-billion dollar fine, received large sums of money from the law firm, Kirkland & Ellis, before joining the Trump administration.  Kirkland & Ellis is the law firm defending Goldman Sachs in the criminal case. The top dog at the Justice Department, Attorney General William Barr, worked as “Of Counsel” to Kirkland & Ellis prior to joining the Justice Department. Barr’s financial disclosure form shows that Kirkland & Ellis paid him $1,188,257 and a $50,000 bonus for 2018. In addition to the money from Kirkland & Ellis, Barr made another $2.6 million in fees and from cashing out stock options for … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 20, 2020 ~ Shortly after 9 p.m. last evening, the U.S. Attorney General, William Barr, stunned prosecutors in the Southern District of New York with the announcement that their boss, Geoffrey Berman, was stepping down as U.S. Attorney in that District and would be replaced with the sitting Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Jay Clayton, who lacks even a shred of criminal prosecution experience. What Clayton does have is a lot of experience representing Wall Street’s largest banks, like Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase, both of whom are currently under intense criminal investigations by the Justice Department. Clayton was a former partner at Wall Street’s go-to law firm, Sullivan & Cromwell, which is currently representing Goldman in the criminal case and representing JPMorgan in various matters. The breaking news last night went downhill from there. Several hours after Barr’s announcement, Berman … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 28, 2020 ~ Going into Thursday morning, February 27, this was the situation on Wall Street: The stock market, as measured by the Dow Jones Industrial Average, had already lost a total of more than 2,000 points in the prior three days of trading; Stock futures were showing a big loss at the open of trading on Thursday; News reports had proliferated overnight of the coronavirus spreading around the globe as well as a case in California suggesting it was now loose in the community. For most folks, that would have been enough bad news to digest with their morning coffee. But it wasn’t for the folks at Goldman Sachs. At 8:12 a.m. yesterday morning, CNBC ran the above graphic and headline: “Goldman sees zero earnings growth for US companies this year because of coronavirus.” Bank of America also apparently felt it was … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 29, 2020 ~ Yesterday, the nonprofit Wall Street watchdog, Better Markets, released an in-depth and scathing analysis of the past 20 years at Goldman Sachs. A bold headline summed it up as follows: “$874 Billion in Bailouts, 36 Major Legal Actions, $9.8 Billion in Fines and Settlements with Billions More Coming.” One key takeaway from this crime spree, write the authors, is this: “Goldman Sachs has amassed a RAP sheet showing that the financial crash of 2008 did little if anything to slow the pace of illegal activity that was well underway in the years leading up to the crash. Goldman Sachs was heavily engaged in illegal activity before the crash; they reached new heights of lawlessness in connection with the crash; and they continued to violate the law in the post-crash era….” Senator Bernie Sanders has repeatedly stated that the business model … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 23, 2020 ~ The head of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas (Robert S. Kaplan), the head of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis (Neel Kashkari), the Secretary of the U.S. Treasury (Steve Mnuchin), the President of the European Central Bank (Mario Draghi) and the head of the Bank of England (Mark Carney) all have two things in common: they sit atop vast amounts of money and they are all alums of Goldman Sachs. In addition, the immediate past President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, William Dudley, which secretly sluiced over $29 trillion to bail out Wall Street banks during the financial crisis and has now opened its money spigot for trillions of dollars more, worked at Goldman Sachs for more than two decades, rising to the rank of partner and U.S. Chief Economist. Goldman Sachs has been variously depicted … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 26, 2019 ~ A week before Christmas when Americans were focused on either the impeachment proceedings or holiday preparations, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) quietly released its quarterly report on the trading and derivative activities of Wall Street’s casino banks. It contained a humdinger in, literally, red ink. The report showed that Goldman Sachs Bank USA, which is, insanely, a federally-insured bank backstopped by the U.S. taxpayer that is part of the Goldman trading colossus, had lost $1.24 billion trading interest rate derivatives during the third quarter of this year. According to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the bank only holds $149.8 billion in deposits while the OCC reports it has $49 trillion in notional derivatives (face amount). (See Table 7 in the Appendix at this link.) Profits in other derivative trading areas, like the $1.14 billion Goldman Sachs … Continue reading →