By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 19, 2023 ~ For more than two decades, we have been reading about former employees of Goldman Sachs who have fled jobs there over a toxic, soul-crushing work culture. The pace of these stories has been picking up steam, rather than declining. Shareholders of Goldman Sachs should be asking themselves, is this good for the future of the company over the long haul and the price of its stock. Here’s a small sampling of some of the complaints from 2004 to the present: In 2004, Nomi Prins, now a well-known author and a former Managing Director at Goldman Sachs, wrote the following in her book, Other People’s Money: The Corporate Mugging of America: “When I left Wall Street, at the height of a wave of scandals uncovering scores of massively destructive deceptions, my choice was based on a very personal sense of right and wrong…So, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 18, 2023 ~ The “Deep State” is increasingly feeling like the “Deep Banking State.” Try to get any meaningful information to unravel the corrupt and dangerous interconnections between global banking behemoths today and some government or other entity has slapped a padlock on the information. The latest example is the Swiss Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry that is delving into the collapse in March of the second largest global bank in Switzerland – Credit Suisse. The Commission has announced that it plans to lock away the details of its findings for 50 years. (UBS, the largest global bank in Switzerland, bought the crumbling remains of Credit Suisse earlier this year.) Reuters reported that the Swiss Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry is also requiring that “All persons participating in the meetings and the questioning are subject to the duty of secrecy, not only the members of … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 17, 2023 ~ In August 2007, Slate writer Emily Yoffe exploded a powder keg of parental anger when she shared her experience shopping with her 11-year-old daughter for back-to-school clothing in a store called Limited Too. The store, part of a large retail chain, marketed itself as an apparel haven for Tweens – girls ages 7 to 14. What Yoffe found inside the store was deeply disturbing: “a line of padded, underwire push-up bras for girls with nothing of their own to pad or push up…scanty panties…pairs with rhinestone hearts or printed with cheeky sayings such as ‘Buy It Now! Tell Dad Later!’ ” Limited Too is no longer in business but we did a check at the Internet Archives’ Wayback Machine to get a first-hand look at what Limited Too was peddling on its website in those early years. We found really sick stuff … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 14, 2023 ~ Unless you have been living off the grid for the past month, chances are you have seen a barrage of headlines blaring that the largest bank in the United States, JPMorgan Chase, agreed to settle a class action lawsuit for $290 million that was filed by sexual assault victims of Jeffrey Epstein, some when they were as young as 14 years old. The bank’s involvement stemmed from it providing the hard cash to Epstein from his accounts at the bank to pay off his victims and accomplices (in violation of money laundering rules) while he reciprocated by referring clients and profitable deals to the bank. It now turns out that the case is not actually “settled.” JPMorgan Chase and its 1,000-attorney law firm that is representing it in the matter, WilmerHale, have quietly filed a petition to appeal the decision rendered … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 13, 2023 ~ Senator Elizabeth Warren is the Chair of the Senate Banking Committee’s Subcommittee on Economic Policy. She is also the most knowledgeable member of Congress when it comes to the mega banks on Wall Street and the most willing to hold them accountable. (See related articles below.) Yesterday, Warren’s Subcommittee held a hearing on “Bank Mergers and the Economic Impacts of Consolidation.” The urgency of this hearing was heightened by the fact that almost two years after President Joe Biden signed an Executive Order urging members of his administration to take a more aggressive investigation into the harmful impacts of consolidation and monopoly power before approving more mergers in a number of industries, including banking, bank regulators signed off on one of the most egregious mergers of this century. Senator Warren explained it this way: “When First Republic Bank collapsed in April, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 11, 2023 ~ The polling organization, Gallup, conducted a survey between June 1-22 to update its annual poll that measures the confidence that Americans have in key U.S. institutions. Banks, as might be expected, continued their downward trend, registering an abysmal 26 percent of Americans who have “a great deal” or “fair amount” of confidence in the banks. That confidence ranking stood at 27 percent last year and at 33 percent in 2021. It is actually somewhat baffling that confidence in banks only dropped by one percentage point from last year, given that the second, third and fourth largest bank failures in U.S. history occurred in the first half of this year. Measured against a longer time horizon, confidence in U.S. banks looks far worse. In 1979, the Gallup poll showed 60 percent of Americans had confidence in the banks. In the years prior … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 10, 2023 ~ For months now, the largest federally-insured bank in the United States, JPMorgan Chase, represented by WilmerHale, a law firm with more than 1,000 attorneys, has been attempting to bamboozle the American people with the narrative that it engaged in no wrongdoing when it provided millions of dollars in cold, hard cash to child sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein for more than a decade  – without following the legal mandate of reporting this suspicious account activity to law enforcement. Internal emails produced in discovery in two lawsuits against the bank in federal court in Manhattan show that the bank was well aware that Epstein was a known sexual predator of children as it doled out all of this cash – at times reaching $40,000 to $80,000 per month. The legal narrative that the WilmerHale attorneys crafted for the public and the media is this: … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 6, 2023 ~ You may recall reading a burst of headlines during the banking crisis in March of this year about depositors fleeing small banks for the perceived comfort of the largest banks. Unfortunately, those headlines were never put in context or updated to reflect a broader picture. In fact, using deposit data that is updated weekly from the Federal Reserve’s own H.8 releases, it becomes crystal clear that the large banks are bleeding deposits at the fastest pace in 40 years. As the Federal Reserve data in the chart above indicates, deposits at the largest 25 commercial banks in the U.S. peaked at $11,679,758,700,000 on April 13, 2022. The most recent H.8 release shows that the deposits of the 25 largest banks as of June 21 stood at $10,758,977,000,000. That’s a percentage decline of 7.88 percent or $920,781,700. The Fed’s H.8 data defines … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 5, 2023 ~ The top chart above shows one of the most erratic eras in Federal Reserve policy-making history. In the 70s and early 80s, the Fed would slam on the brakes to bring down inflation by raising its benchmark rate (known as the Fed Funds rate), then slam its foot on the gas to revive the economy by cutting the Fed Funds rate. But because the Fed stopped raising rates too soon each time, it had to then raise rates to an ever staggering level to curb runaway inflation, eventually reaching over 20 percent in 1981. Today, the Fed is woefully mindful of these mistakes. It is hoping to signal that it is planning higher interest rates for longer and follow through on that signal without killing the economy, and the markets, and the banks, and consumer confidence in the process. The Fed … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 3, 2023 ~ According to S&P Dow Jones Indices, component companies of the Standard & Poor’s 500 spent $922.7 billion in 2022 buying back their own stock. That was $41 billion more than the S&P 500 companies spent in 2021, which came in at a lofty $881.7 billion. One of the companies leading the stock buyback parade is Apple. Of the $922.7 billion spent on stock buybacks in 2022 by all companies in the S&P 500, Apple represented 10 percent of that spending with $90.2 billion in buybacks of its own stock. On Friday, June 30, 2023, Apple, the iPhone manufacturer, closed the trading day in New York with a market value (market capitalization) of just over $3 trillion, an historic record. Apple’s $3 trillion market value is eight times that of the second largest mobile phone manufacturer, Samsung. We decided to dig into … Continue reading →