Search Results for: citadel

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 11, 2021 ~ Welcome to the casino where the house always wins. One day after the U.S. Senate Banking Committee held a wide-ranging hearing on the price manipulation that is occurring in the shares of GameStop and other meme stocks, the high frequency traders and hedge funds and Dark Pools that are making a killing on this manipulation poked their fingers directly in the eyes of Senate lawmakers. They put on a wild trading show yesterday that basically said, “catch us if you can.” GameStop is not some penny stock operating out of a boiler room in some grimy backwater of Wall Street. GameStop is a New York Stock Exchange listed stock. It has a market capitalization of $18.48 billion. But the brazen manipulation of its stock, as both the House Financial Services Committee and Senate Banking Committee conduct investigative hearings into who’s behind … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 10, 2021 ~ Yesterday’s Senate Banking Committee hearing to assess if the wild trading in meme stocks like GameStop and others requires new regulations on Wall Street turned into an overall assessment that Wall Street’s capital allocation system is broken and the main function of Wall Street today is a wealth transfer system for the rich. The Chair of the Committee, Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH) summed it up as follows: (Read his full, enlightening remarks here.) “We’ve seen Wall Street treat the markets as a game for decades – a game they always win, at the expense of pretty much everyone else. Wall Street has never been friendly to the little guy. Surely this time is no different. Yes, some regular people have had success. But fundamentally, the system is set up to funnel more wealth to the already-wealthy. Just like in Las Vegas, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 22, 2021 ~ Better Markets and Public Citizen, two of the most informed Wall Street watchdogs, provided written testimony for last Thursday’s hearing before the House Financial Services Committee on the structure of Wall Street. And, to put it mildly, their assessment of the state of affairs on Wall Street does not align with what hedge fund titan Ken Griffin of Citadel told lawmakers at the same hearing. Griffin testified, under oath mind you, that: “The U.S. capital markets are the envy of the world. Our nation’s ability to allocate capital to its best and highest use cr­­­­­eates jobs, drives innovation and fuels our economy.” In reality, foreign regulators have repeatedly filed enforcement actions against the largest banks on Wall Street for engaging in fraud and rigging markets. As for allocating capital “to its best and highest use,” Better Markets describes the prospects … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 19, 2021 ~ The most striking revelations in yesterday’s House Financial Services Committee hearing on the wild trading action in New York Stock Exchange-listed shares of GameStop came when Congresswoman Cindy Axne of Iowa questioned Vlad Tenev, the CEO of Robinhood, the trading app being increasingly used by young people to trade stocks and options on their mobile phones. GameStop is the brick-and-mortar video game retailer whose stock soared from $18.84 on December 31 of last year to an intraday high of $483 on January 28 – an unprecedented run of 2,465 percent in four weeks by a struggling retail outlet. Following the spectacular run, GameStop’s share price then quickly plunged back to earth, making its stock chart look like something you would see from a boiler room operation rather than a New York Stock Exchange-listed stock. GameStop’s closing price yesterday was $40.69. … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 17, 2021 ~ In a period of four weeks in January, shares of New York Stock Exchange listed GameStop soared more than 2400 percent from its closing price on December 31, 2020 before plunging back to earth. The episode has focused much needed attention on the corrupt underbelly and rigged structure of trading on Wall Street. When the House Financial Services Committee sent out its press release for tomorrow’s hearing to take testimony from the people involved in the wild trading action of GameStop, it included just five witnesses: Keith Gill, a licensed broker who was employed at a broker-dealer at the same time he was hawking the shares of GameStop on Reddit and YouTube; Ken Griffin, the CEO of Citadel LLC, which has a related firm paying nine online brokers for order flow, thus enabling it to get an early peek at … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 8, 2021 ~ There’s an important debate going on about whether the Reddit message board known as WallStreetBets fanned the short squeeze that inflated GameStop from an $18.84 stock on December 31 of last year to a $483 stock intraday on January 28 – a breathtaking run of 2,465 percent in four weeks. Last week GameStop came plunging back to earth, closing the week at $63.77. Similar short squeezes are causing other targeted stocks to whipsaw in wild trading action. The House Financial Services Committee will hold a hearing on the matter on February 18 and multiple investigations are underway by both federal and state authorities. At this time one year ago, the Reddit WallStreetBets’ message board had 900,000 users — not a particularly big number for a group that started in 2012. This morning, as a result of all the publicity, the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 5, 2021 ~ Remember that LifeLock tv commercial where masked bank robbers storm into a bank, smashing things with a baseball bat and screaming, “on the floor.” As the customers hit the floor, a security guard is still standing looking calmly at the robbers with his hands at his side. A woman looks up from the floor at the guard and whispers to him: “Do something.” His reply: “Oh, I’m not a security guard, I’m a security monitor. I only notify people if there’s a robbery.” After a few seconds of observing the scene around him, he looks back down at the woman and says: “There’s a robbery.” The commercial ends with the voice over: “Why monitor a problem if you don’t fix it?” This commercial perfectly reflects the attitude of the Securities and Exchange Commission under the past two SEC Chairs, Mary … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 18, 2020 ~ As most folks know, the fate of the Biden administration, the fate of the nation, and the future of millions of Americans about to become homeless through foreclosures, evictions and their businesses shuttering as a result of the pandemic – thus creating lots of distressed real estate debt for hedge funds and Wall Street speculators to scoop up on the cheap – hangs on the outcome of two U.S. Senate races in Georgia slated for January 5. Those January runoff elections in Georgia resulted from the outcome of the November 3 election when incumbent Republican Senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler (who was appointed to her Senate seat by Georgia Governor Ben Kemp) failed to get more than 50 percent of the vote. The two candidates are now facing tight races against their Democratic challengers in Georgia. Perdue is facing … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 13, 2020 ~ It has been the contention of Wall Street On Parade for more than a decade that today’s so-called “universal banks,” also variously known as megabanks or Global Systemically Important Banks (G-SIBs), are a banking model from hell that was thoroughly discredited in the tens of thousands of transcripts and documents released by the U.S. Senate following its multi-year investigation of that structure in the early 1930s. Now the seminal book proving that theory has just been published. Written by Arthur E. Wilmarth, Jr. and titled Taming the Megabanks: Why We Need a New Glass-Steagall Act, the book brilliantly takes the reader through a riveting guided tour covering the past century and the resurrection of this same disastrous U.S. banking model in 1999. Oxford University Press is the publisher of Wilmarth’s book. We can envision it becoming one of the most … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 2, 2020 ~  Members Exchange (MEMX), a brand new stock exchange, has announced that it will begin live trading of select stocks for the first time on September 21 with a full phase-in on September 29. Criminal histories are, apparently, no barrier to running a stock exchange in the United States to the deeply conflicted way of thinking of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which issued its approval to operate the exchange on May 5. Investors in the new stock exchange are some of the most serially-charged Wall Street banks, including JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, and UBS, along with the hedge fund, Citadel Securities. BlackRock, which is up to its neck in the Federal Reserve’s deeply conflicted bailout programs, is also an investor, as is the high-frequency trading firm, Virtu Financial, and others. JPMorgan Chase has been criminally investigated by the U.S. Department … Continue reading →