Search Results for: BlackRock

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 5, 2021 ~ The House Financial Services Committee has released its official Memorandum outlining the general topics it wants to cover in tomorrow’s hearing on the wild trading action in GameStop and other meme stocks in January that has raised serious questions about U.S. market integrity. The implosion of the Archegos Capital Management family office hedge fund in March, which has generated losses of more than $10 billion thus far at global systemically important banks, will likely be a key topic when the Senate Banking and House Financial Services Committees haul Wall Street bank CEOs to hearings on May 26 and 27, respectively. An insightful paragraph in the Memorandum for the House hearing tomorrow reads as follows: “Testimony given at the first two GameStop hearings raised concerns about the market dominance of some capital market participants, as well as correlated risks arising from the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 1, 2021 ~ Beginning on September 17, 2019 – months before there was any report of a COVID-19 case anywhere in the world – the Federal Reserve turned on its money spigot to the trading houses on Wall Street. By October 23, 2019 the Fed announced that it was upping these loans to $690 billion a week – again, months before any report of COVID-19 anywhere in the world. Earlier in October 2019, the Fed had also announced that it would be buying back $60 billion a month in Treasury bills. Within a span of six months, the Fed had pumped out a cumulative $9 trillion in loans to Wall Street’s trading houses, according to its own spread sheets, with no peep as to which Wall Street firms were getting the bulk of that money. It’s more than a year later and the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 1, 2021 ~ When it comes to the shares of GameStop, most of the mainstream media’s focus has been on the Reddit message board commentators who stood to make millions of dollars from boosting the stock price. It’s a good bet that the SEC, FBI, Financial Stability Oversight Council, Senate and House investigators are setting their sights on those who stood to make…not millions but billions. The overarching question will be: did any of the big players engage in a direct role on Reddit or incentivize the people posting on the Reddit message board, WallStreetBets, to hawk the shares of GameStop. It’s very clear from the volume of trading in GameStop that amateur traders are not the major movers of this stock. The stock has gone from trading less than 13 million shares a day in November to over 150 million shares per … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 30, 2021 ~ Yesterday evening, CNN’s Erin Burnett told millions of viewers that it was “amateur traders” who had taken on the powerful Wall Street hedge funds to pump up the share price of GameStop. The New York Post also called Keith Gill, the man who initiated the frenzy in GameStop shares, an “amateur investor.” This characterization of Gill fits with the broader mainstream media narrative that this is an exciting David versus Goliath story. Unfortunately, the facts keep getting in the way of that narrative. Wall Street On Parade has confirmed that Keith Patrick Gill, a man holding highly sophisticated licenses to trade and supervise others on Wall Street, is the same man using multiple identities to promote GameStop on social media platforms. Gill, and a member of his family, have confirmed to other media outlets that Gill used the identity of … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 29, 2020 ~ As Senator Bernie Sanders advocates for $2,000 pandemic relief checks for struggling Americans, Larry Summers is challenging the premise of $2,000 checks using ginned-up statistics that were dubiously published by Bloomberg News on Sunday. Larry Summers stepped into Robert Rubin’s post as Treasury Secretary under President Bill Clinton after Rubin left to make $15 million a year serving on Citigroup’s board. Citigroup was the Frankenbank that both Summers and Rubin made possible by advocating for the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act. That seminal piece of legislation from 1933 had successfully banned the combination of deposit-taking banks with Wall Street’s casino trading houses for 66 years until these two men and their ilk got Clinton to sign its repeal in 1999. At the November 12, 1999 signing ceremony for the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, the legislation that repealed the Glass-Steagall Act, Summers said … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 24, 2020 ~ Merry Christmas Eve 2020 and welcome to a rerun of the roaring 20s, complete with one-termer President Herbert Hoover in the White House, Wall Street running wild with unchecked corruption, and unprecedented income inequality. On Saturday, Bloomberg News attempted to outline the key components of markets gone bonkers “in this year of death, disease and economic calamity,” writing that the “Mania is laid bare in IPO surge, options boom and crypto fever.” In fairness, the nine reporters who worked on the story, none of whom received a byline but are noted at the bottom of the article, correctly compiled the observable earmarks of this bubble market. But they failed to dig into the dark underbelly of how we got here. Let’s start with the compromised Wall Street regulators in Washington. The Chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Jay Clayton, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 9, 2020 ~ The U.S. Senate Banking Committee, the House Financial Services Committee, and the U.S. mainstream business media now thoroughly qualify as the dumb tourists snapping photos of the raging bull statue on Wall Street as the Wall Street banks loot the country for the second time in a decade. Last Thursday the Financial Stability Oversight Council (pronounced F-SOC) released its 2020 Annual Report. Those tend to be tediously boring reports that tell one nothing meaningful about the true state of the Wall Street mega banks, so we just got around to perusing the document yesterday. Mixed in with the typical snooze-worthy minutiae was a bombshell that made us sit up straight in our chair. Those cumulative repo loans totaling more than $9 trillion to the trading houses on Wall Street that the Fed had been making from September 17 of 2019 … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 17, 2020 ~ Last Thursday, during the House Financial Services Committee hearing with federal regulators of banks, Congresswoman Katie Porter of California told the Vice Chairman for Supervision of the Federal Reserve, Randal Quarles, that the Fed has a “big problem.” Porter has a Harvard Law degree and was previously a law professor at the University of California Irvine School of Law. If Porter believes the Fed has a legal problem, it is highly likely it does. Here’s how the exchange between Porter and Quarles went: Porter: “The Fed is largely responsible for dispensing the $500 billion Congress provided as a bailout for corporate America – the biggest bailout in our country’s history, potentially. Using taxpayer dollars to buy bank debt was never part of that plan. In fact, the Federal Reserve stated explicitly in this document [holds up document] that it would … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 2, 2020 ~ The U.S. stock market, as measured by the Dow Jones Industrial Average, lost 1,833.97 points last week. The Dow was down every day except Thursday, when it eked out a gain of 139.16. The market was reacting to the following bad news: soaring cases of COVID-19 in the U.S.; a reemergence of the virus in Europe causing business shutdowns there; the failure of the U.S. Congress to pass a new stimulus bill; and a sharply lower price for West Texas Intermediate (WTI), domestic crude oil – which signals a further slowdown in economic activity. (At 7 a.m. this morning, WTI was down further, with a $34 handle.) The stock market’s losses would have likely been greater last week were it not for an intervention staged by the Federal Reserve at 11:00 a.m. on Friday. Here’s what happened and why Americans … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 27, 2020 ~ Congresswoman Katie Porter has never met an overpaid Wall Street billionaire that she couldn’t reduce to a flummoxed whimperer within a few minutes. (See video clip below of Porter and Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, during an April 10, 2019 House hearing.) Porter has had the Chairman of the so-called “independent” Federal Reserve in her radar since he appeared at a House Financial Services Committee hearing on February 11 of this year. At the hearing, Porter held up a photo of Fed Chair Jerome Powell in black tie outside the mansion of billionaire Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon. Porter said this: “Can you imagine how attending a lavish party at Jeff Bezos’ $23 million home, along with Jared and Ivanka and the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon, might give off the sense to the public that … Continue reading →