Search Results for: rap sheet

By Pam Martens: August 28, 2013  One day after terrorists set off a bomb at the Boston Marathon leaving a tragic trail of senseless human suffering, the U.S. House of Representatives held a scheduled hearing to debate another form of terrorism – the kind of economic terrorism that gripped the United States from 2008 to 2010 and lingers today in the form of 46 million Americans living in poverty, mass underemployment, stagnating wages, a shaky housing market, tepid GDP growth and ballooning national debt. The House was debating the “grave threat” to the Nation posed by the too-big-to-fail banks. You likely didn’t hear about the hearing because the media was focused on the Boston Marathon and its more easily understood, visually shocking form of terrorism.  On April 16, 2013, members of the House Oversight and Investigation Subcommittee of the Financial Services Committee wanted to learn more about two words, “grave … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: August 13, 2013  Qu’est-ce que c’est? Frenchmen?  In the quintessentially American male testosterone epicenter known as Wall Street, Frenchmen are dropping like flies. Not so much the American CEOs in Wall Street’s corner offices. The only handcuffs these guys are seeing are the golden ones.  Fabrice Tourre, the 34-year old Goldman Sachs salesman from an elite educational background in France, was found guilty of six counts of securities fraud in a Manhattan jury trial that ended 12 days ago. The case was a civil suit brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission. One of those counts was for “aiding and abetting” Goldman Sachs in the fraud. Goldman Sachs did not stand trial, in the technical sense although it certainly has in the court of public opinion, because it settled its charges with a payment of $550 million. Not only did the corporation not stand trial, but neither … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: January 3, 2013  In April 2011, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the top regulator of national banks in the U.S., signed consent orders with 14 of the largest banks and mortgage servicers requiring that they hire “independent” consultants to review 2009 and 2010 foreclosure actions to determine financial injury to borrowers and provide financial compensation for that injury.  Borrowers that suffered injuries were to receive financial awards up to a maximum of $125,000 under these consent orders.  Now, out of the blue, major business media are reporting that this legally adopted plan has been scrapped and a quick fix will soon be announced to fine the whole lot of banks a cumulative $10 billion and call it quits on the investigation.  The first detail you need to know by way of background is that during the relevant foreclosure period of 2009 and 2010, a former bank lobbyist, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: December 5, 2012 On Monday, the SEC announced it was going to study decimalization — that’s the pricing of stocks in pennies instead of using the historic practice of pricing stocks in fractions.  What the SEC really means is that it is going to study the death of IPOs on U.S. stock exchanges, how that is contributing to the death of jobs in the economy, and how all of that may rest at the doorstep of high frequency traders who remain in business only because of the pricing of stocks in pennies.  If stocks were priced in fractions, it would be far too expensive for high frequency traders to exist.  There are two words to explain this sudden exuberance by outgoing SEC Chair Mary Schapiro.  Those two words are: Grant Thornton.  The big accounting firm has been making waves with a comprehensive study on the sickly listing … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: November 29, 2012 It took the New York Times 12 years to admit it was dead wrong to run editorials urging the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, the depression-era investor protection legislation that prevented Wall Street from collapsing the financial system for 75 years. (It took just 9 years from the date of repeal in 1999 for Wall Street to thoroughly corrupt the system, wreck the economy and collapse century old Wall Street firms.) One would have expected the New York Times to have acquired a little humility from its prior ill-informed meddling with Wall Street regulation. Nothing doing. The Times, together with Bloomberg News and the Wall Street Journal have all magically decided to push Sallie Krawcheck out in front as the leading contender to become the permanent new Chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, despite Krawcheck’s lack of a securities law degree (or any other … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: October 22, 2012  On April 5, 2010, Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi famously depicted Goldman Sachs as a “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”  But if last week’s performance by its human relations department is any guide, the great vampire squid is flailing around in quicksand. No one in the legal or HR department at Goldman Sachs has apparently ever heard the phrase, if you’re in a hole, stop digging.  With Goldman whistleblower Greg Smith’s book, Why I Left Goldman Sachs, set to launch today and his highly anticipated appearance last night on CBS News’ 60-Minutes (typically watched by 13 million viewers), one would have expected Goldman to hire a sophisticated crisis management firm imbued with some tiny inkling of just how repugnant it and its colleagues on Wall Street are to the average … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: September 28, 2012  U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner is now three for three in the book world: the quintessential poster boy for regulatory capture who ended up as Citigroup’s bitch.  In Ron Suskind’s  Confidence Men, Geithner ignores a directive from the President of the United States to wind down Citigroup.  In Neil Barofsky’s Bailout, Geithner is the evil genius using the Home Affordable  Modification Program (HAMP) to “foam the runways” for the banks, slowing down the foreclosure stream so the banks could stay afloat, with no genuine goal to help struggling families stay in their homes.  Now Sheila Bair, the ultimate insider as former head of the FDIC during the crisis, has completed the microscopic job on Geithner in Bull by the Horns. The image that emerges is a two-headed monster: a regulator functioning as a Citigroup messenger boy and an insanely mismanaged bank that was somehow able … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: July 25, 2012  It was revolting enough that Sandy Weill was appointed to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences after blazing a trail of poverty across America with his warped and idiotic vision of financial supermarkets.  (As if serious investors stroll into a brokerage firm, load up their shopping cart and breeze through the express check out.)  As Robert Scheer said in April at The Nation: “How evil is this? At a time when two-thirds of US homeowners are drowning in mortgage debt and the American dream has crashed for tens of millions more, Sanford Weill, the banker most responsible for the nation’s economic collapse, has been elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.”  But to hear Weill this morning on CNBC channeling Gandhi was too much for anyone who had a front row seat at his house of horrors and watched him suck $785 … Continue reading →