By Pam Martens: September 7, 2022 On Thursday evening, September 1, President Joe Biden addressed the nation from Philadelphia, the second location of the U.S. Capitol in its early years. During his remarks, Biden spoke these words: “Too much of what’s happening in our country today is not normal. Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic. “Now, I want to be very clear — very clear up front: Not every Republican, not even the majority of Republicans, are MAGA Republicans. Not every Republican embraces their extreme ideology. I know because I’ve been able to work with these mainstream Republicans. “But there is no question that the Republican Party today is dominated, driven, and intimidated by Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans, and that is a threat to this country.” The two most important words in this excerpt from Biden’s remarks are the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 6, 2022 On August 11, the Attorney General of the U.S. Department of Justice, Merrick Garland, told the American people at a press conference that: “Faithful adherence to the rule of law is the bedrock principle of the Justice Department and of our democracy. Upholding the rule of law means applying the rule of law evenly, without fear or favor.” That was certainly not true of Eric Holder’s Justice Department under President Obama, nor was it true of William Barr’s Justice Department under President Trump. In fact, just the opposite was true. Under Holder, the Justice Department functioned as a coverup and white-washing mechanism for a crime syndicate of powerful players on Wall Street. (See here and here.) Under Barr, the Justice Department took a machete to the rule of law and sculpted an art form out of doling out favorable treatment to criminal … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: September 1, 2022 ~ The above photo was released on Wednesday evening as part of the Justice Department’s court response to Donald Trump’s motion to have a Special Master appointed to review documents seized by the FBI in a raid of his 114-room resort hotel, Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, Florida on August 8. Included in the items seized by the government were highly classified documents marked Top Secret/SCI – meaning they were Sensitive Compartmented Information that should have been maintained in a government approved SCIF – Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility. The FBI’s raid of Mar-a-Lago on August 8 followed months of stonewalling by Trump to return government records he had illegally retained after leaving the White House. The records were first demanded by the National Archives. When the National Archives finally received 15 boxes from Trump of improperly taken documents in January, it discovered highly classified material in … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 30, 2022 ~ According to NBC News and confirmed by Reuters, Donald Trump has located a new lawyer that is willing to step into the Palm Beach, Florida court case involving the U.S. Justice Department’s raid at Trump’s beach resort/hotel/event-venue and private residence known simply as Mar-a-Lago. (For background, see our previous report: Mar-a-Lago: Thousands of People of Questionable Character Have Visited this Resort/Hotel in the 18 Months That Trump Stashed Top Secret Documents There.) According to NBC News, the new lawyer, Chris Kise, worked for the law firm Foley & Lardner right up until NBC News reported that Kise had taken the job representing Trump. NBC News reports that the bio for Kise then suddenly disappeared from Foley & Lardner’s website. (We can go a step further than that: the law firm also scrubbed past articles it had published on its website … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 30, 2022 ~ According to YCharts (give the chart time to load) since January 1, 2017 through December 31, 2021 – a span of five years – JPMorgan Chase has spent a total of $84.312 billion buying back its own stock. In eight of those quarters, it spent more than $5 billion buying back its own shares. In the three quarters when JPMorgan Chase was on a secret feeding tube from the Fed via the Fed’s emergency repo loans and other emergency programs, the bank bought back the most stock in its history according to YCharts: $6.949 billion for the quarter ending September 30, 2019; $6.751 billion for the quarter ending December 31, 2019; and $6.517 billion for the quarter ending March 31, 2020. Now, the unthinkable has happened. The Fed has actually put JPMorgan Chase on a leash. As a result, the bank … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 29, 2022 ~ Tomorrow, Simon & Schuster will release a new book by Jamie Fiore Higgins, a woman who worked her entire Wall Street career at one firm. Over the span of just under 18 years, beginning on September 2, 1998 and ending officially on May 31, 2016 according to BrokerCheck, Fiore Higgins achieved a level of financial success rarely attained by a woman on Wall Street. She was fresh out of college, at age 22, when this journey began. She was a seven-figure Managing Director at the quintessential good ole boys club on Wall Street when it ended. Now, six years after she resigned her post (possibly heretofore restrained by the customary non-disparagement agreement one is asked to sign when leaving a Wall Street investment bank) Fiore Higgins is spilling the beans on what she saw and heard and experienced at Goldman Sachs. … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 26, 2022 ~ The New York Times dropped a political bombshell on Monday. The public interest website, ProPublica, built further on the story that afternoon. And, as luck would have it, Wall Street On Parade finds itself in the unique position of filling in missing pieces of the story thanks to an investigative report we published in 2010. The gist of the story is this: a sketchy billionaire named Barre Seid decided last year to donate his electronics manufacturing company, Tripp Lite, to a nonprofit tied to the radical right called Marble Freedom Trust. After the transfer of ownership to the nonprofit, Tripp Lite was then sold to the Dublin, Ireland based power management company, Eaton, thus avoiding capital gains taxes on the sale. This handed the nonprofit a cool $1.65 billion in tax free money from the sale of the business. In other … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 23, 2022 ~ Caitlin Long is the founder and CEO of a crypto startup called Custodia Bank, previously known as Avanti Financial Group. Custodia is allowed to call itself a “bank” – despite the fact that it does not have FDIC insurance on deposits – because of a 2019 law in Wyoming that allows Custodia to operate as a Special Purpose Depository Institution (SPDI). The lack of federal insurance on bank deposits and Wall Street’s wild speculations are what led to thousands of banks going belly up following the 1929 stock market crash. Wyoming has become to crypto what the state of Delaware is to corporate secrecy – a very friendly venue. Since 2018, Wyoming has passed a flurry of laws to effectively roll out the red carpet to crypto startups and their army of lobbyists. The University of Wyoming even offers a Minor … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 22, 2022 ~ Last week the Federal Reserve announced that it was banning Ronald D. Paul for life from the banking industry. Paul is the former Chairman and CEO of EagleBank, a small bank operating 20 offices in Maryland, Washington, D.C. and Virginia. The Fed also announced it was fining EagleBank $9.5 million for violating the Board’s “insider lending regulation,” over EagleBank extending “credit totaling nearly $100 million to entities that Paul owned or controlled, including certain family trusts, without making appropriate disclosures….” This is just one more case of the Federal Reserve going after the little fish while taking a hands-off approach to the killer whales – the megabanks on Wall Street. For more than a decade, JPMorgan Chase has been asserting in its proxy statement that its entire Board of Directors, other than Jamie Dimon, consists of independent directors. In its most … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 18, 2022 ~ The narrative that the FBI took the unprecedented step of raiding former President Donald Trump’s “home” on August 8 has misdirected the media debate that should be happening right now. The majority of Americans hear the word “home” and think of a private residence where one family resides. But the property raided on August 8 by the FBI was Mar-a-Lago – which has as much resemblance to a private residence as Palm Beach International Airport has to a private airplane hangar. Yes, it’s true that there are private quarters located at Mar-a-Lago for Trump and his family. But it’s also true that this is a 114-room oceanfront resort and hotel that sells memberships, rents hotel rooms and suites, and holds a multitude of events. The official website for Mar-a-Lago explains its event offerings as follows: “Important occasions call for settings that … Continue reading →