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Recent Posts
- Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” Is a Grotesque Giveaway to Fossil Fuel Billionaires While Adding $3.3 Trillion to Nation’s Debt
- Senator Chris Murphy Charges that Trump “Has Opened a Channel for Bribery”
- Congressman Casten: Trump’s Assault on the Rule of Law Is Causing Capital Flight Out of U.S. by Foreign Investors
- Trump’s Approval Rating Drops to 80-Year Low; IMF Says U.S. Tariffs Now Exceed the Highs During the Great Depression
- Nasdaq Has Lost More than 3,000 Points Since Trump’s First Full Day in Office in 2025; the Pain Has Barely Begun
- The Bond Crisis Last Week Was a Global No-Confidence Vote in U. S. President Donald Trump
- Trump’s Tariff Plan Guts $5 Trillion in Stock Value in Two Days; Senator Warren Calls for Emergency Action Before Markets Open on Monday
- Trump’s Attacks on Big Law, Universities, and the Media Have a Common Goal: Silence Dissent Against Authoritarian Rule
- Trump Administration Gives All Clear to Laundering Money through Shell Companies and Bribing Foreign Officials
- Four Megabanks on Wall Street Hold $3.2 Trillion in Uninsured Deposits – Which May Explain Senator Schumer’s Pivot to the GOP to Stop a Government Shutdown
- Here’s What Came Crashing Down Yesterday for Trump’s “Genius” Guy, Elon Musk: Tesla Stock, Access to Twitter (X), His Years of Secret Calls with Putin
- After Banning the Associated Press, Trump Is Now Targeting Specific Journalists That He Wants to See Fired
- Closely Watched Atlanta Fed Model Predicts Negative U.S. Growth in First Quarter
- Trump’s Gangster Diplomacy Makes Front Page Headlines Around the Globe
- Who Benefits Alongside Elon Musk If He Succeeds in Killing the CFPB: the Megabanks on Wall Street that Underwrite His Tesla Stock Offerings
- In Trump 1.0, the State Department Used Taxpayer Money to Publish a Book Elevating Elon Musk to a Superhero; It Was Funded by USAID, the Agency Musk Wants to Quickly Shut Down
- News Host Joy Reid Raises Threat of Trump Selling U.S. to Putin; Ten Days Later Her Show Is Cancelled
- Elon Musk’s DOGE Appears to Be Violating a Court Order; It Has Taken Down Hundreds of YouTube Videos that Educate Americans on How to Avoid Being Swindled
- Barron’s Releases Audio of Jamie Dimon Cursing Out His Workers at a Town Hall, as Dimon Plans to Dump Another One Million JPM Shares
- There’s One Federal Investigative Agency that Neither Trump nor Elon Musk Can Touch: It Just Opened an Investigation into DOGE
- Elon Musk’s Companies Were Under Investigation by Five Inspectors General When the Trump Administration Fired Them and Made Musk the Investigator
- Donald Trump Gives the Greenlight to Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase to Return to Bribing Foreign Officials
- After Tech Geeks Built a Back Door to Loot Billions from FTX, Republicans Refuse to Investigate What Elon Musk’s Tech-Squad Did Inside the U.S. Treasury’s Payment System
- Former Prosecutor, Now U.S. Senator, Informs Tesla That CEO Musk May Be Violating Federal Law and to “Preserve All Records”
- Trump’s Hedge Fund Guy Is Now Overseeing the U.S. Treasury, IRS, OCC, U.S. Mint, FinCEN, F-SOC, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
- As Elon Musk Begins Shutting Down Payments to Federal Contractors, a Strange Money Trail Emerges to His Operatives Inside the U.S. Treasury’s Payment System
- JPMorgan Chase Charged by Yet Another Internal Whistleblower with Cooking the Books
- We Asked Google’s AI Search Model, Gemini, Questions About the Fed and Wall Street Megabanks: It Got the Answers Dead Wrong
- With Trump and Melania’s Crypto Coins Likely to Raise Legal Challenges, Why Didn’t Trump Fire the SEC’s Inspector General in His Purge of IGs?
- Fossil Fuel Industry Could End Up Paying Tens of Billions for LA Wildfires and Deceiving the Public on Climate Change for Decades
- It’s Being Called the Biggest Grift by a President in U.S. History: Trump and First Lady Launch their Own Crypto Coins
- Trump Plans to Install a Fracking CEO to Head the Energy Department and Declare a National Emergency on Energy to Gain Vast Powers
- Fossil Fuel Money Played a Role in the Los Angeles Fires and the Push to Install Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense
- When It Comes to Wealth Retention in Retirement, Concrete May Be the New Gold
- Wall Street Watchdog Warns “Clock Is Ticking on a Coming Catastrophic Financial Crash”
- Wall Street Is Sending the Same Message to Americans on Fossil Fuel Financing that It Sent on Cigarettes: Drop Dead
- In a Six-Week Span, this Dark Pool with a Curious Past Traded 3.7 Billion Shares
- Wall Street’s Lobby Firm Hired Eugene Scalia of Gibson Dunn to Sue the Fed for Jamie Dimon
- Postmaster General Louis DeJoy Made $561,051 in Compensation in 2024, as Mail Costs Spiked and Delivery Deteriorated
- Fed Chair Jay Powell Sends a Bold Message to Trump and Tanks the Dow by 1123 Points
- The Head of Fixed Income at T. Rowe Price Makes the Scary Case for the 10-Year Treasury to Spike to 6 Percent
- $663 Billion in Cash Assets Have Gone Poof at the Largest U.S. Banks
- Donald Trump to Ring Bell at New York Stock Exchange Today as Hit List Posters Appear in Manhattan Targeting Wall Street CEOs
- Trump Has a Slush Fund to Prop Up the Dollar – Will He Use It to Prop Up Bitcoin Instead?
- A CEO Assassination; a Billionaire Heiress/NYPD Commissioner; a Secret Wall Street Spy Center – Here’s How They’re Connected
- Despite More than 1600 Tech Scientists Signing a Letter Calling Crypto a Sham, Trump Names a Crypto Cheerleader for SEC Chair
- The Fed Rings a Warning Bell: Hedge Funds and Life Insurers Are Reporting Historic Leverage
- Trump’s Nominee for FBI Director, Kash Patel, Has Businesses Financially Intertwined with Trump
- Donald Trump Is at Risk of Getting Named in a Fossil Fuels Conspiracy Lawsuit
- Trump Is Having Difficulty Getting a Lawyer to Accept the Nomination for SEC Chair: Here’s Why
Search Results for: Federal Reserve
Wall Street Watchdog Assails Fed’s Stress Tests of Mega Banks as “Toothless” – Provides a Wakeup Call to Biden Administration

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 2, 2021 ~ Dennis Kelleher, the co-founder, President and CEO of the nonpartisan Wall Street watchdog, Better Markets, has issued a scathing rebuke of the Federal Reserve’s so-called “stress tests” of the mega banks on Wall Street, calling them “toothless.” Kelleher’s criticisms revolve around two key points. The Fed is preordaining the outcome of the tests by (1) pumping up the banks’ capital with financial handouts prior to the tests and (2) by removing key aspects of the stress tests that would negatively impact the outcome. Kelleher writes that the Fed’s “unprecedented” support to financial markets and the economy since last March was $4 trillion and “has materially helped to bolster bank balance sheets and capital levels.” But Kelleher is overlooking the more than $9 trillion in cumulative repo loans that the Fed showered on the trading units of these mega Wall Street banks, at … Continue reading
JPMorgan Chase Has Exited 15.7 Million Square Feet of U.S. Office Space Since the Crash of 2008 But Somehow Managed to Grow its Assets by 62.9 Percent

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 28, 2021 ~ Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, has found a new magic hat trick: how to shrink and grow at the same time. Between March 31, 2009 and December 31, 2020, the assets at JPMorgan Chase’s bank holding company grew by an astonishing $1.3 trillion or 62.9 percent according to data archived at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC). That stands in striking contrast to the next largest bank holding company in the U.S., Bank of America, whose assets grew by just $496.2 billion or 21 percent over the same period. The first thought that might come to your mind is that perhaps this staggering growth in assets came as a result of the Federal Reserve allowing JPMorgan Chase to purchase Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual during the 2008 Wall Street crash. That can’t be the reason, … Continue reading
Fed Chair Powell Misleads House Hearing on Wall Street’s Bailout Programs

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 23, 2021 ~ Yesterday the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis convened a hearing at 2 p.m. to receive testimony from Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell. The title of the hearing was “Lessons Learned: The Federal Reserve’s Response to the Coronavirus Pandemic.” During Powell’s opening statement, he said this: “Our emergency lending tools require the approval of the Treasury and are available only in unusual and exigent circumstances, such as those brought on by the crisis. Many of these programs were supported by funding from the CARES Act. Those facilities provided essential support through a very difficult year and are now closed.” It’s factually incorrect for the Fed Chairman to say that it can only make emergency loans with the approval of the Treasury. Months before there was any case of COVID-19 anywhere in the world the Fed was making hundreds of billions … Continue reading
Experts Have Been Warning for Months of an Unprecedented Stock Market Bubble Set to Explode

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 21, 2021 ~ One thing is for sure. When the current stock market bubble does eventually crash, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell is not going to be able to sit before Congress and tell lawmakers that nobody could have seen it coming. Wall Street veterans have gone on record repeatedly in recent months to warn of a coming crash. Last week Michael Burry, who heads the hedge fund Scion Asset Management and was immortalized in “The Big Short” movie for making a fortune shorting subprime debt before it collapsed in the 2008 crash, took to Twitter with the latest of these warnings. (The Tweets were subsequently deleted after they were heavily publicized in the business media and retweeted.) On Tuesday, Burry Tweeted this: “People always ask me what is going on in the markets. It is simple. Greatest Speculative Bubble of All Time in … Continue reading
JPMorgan, Citigroup and BofA Ruled Not “Fit” to Participate in Huge European Bond Offering Because of Past Crimes

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 18, 2021 ~ How embarrassing it must be for Jerome Powell, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, that three of the largest banks in the U.S. that are supervised by the Fed, have been deemed not trustworthy enough by the European Commission that they were banned from participating in this week’s historic European Union bond offering. It is also egg on the face of the U.S. Department of Justice, which has been handing out deferred prosecution agreements to these same banks for felony counts like it’s a meter maid doling out parking tickets. JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and Bank of America were banned along with seven non-U.S. banks from participating in this week’s European Union bond offering. The syndicated offering is part of what will grow over the next five years to be a $969 billion COVID-19 recovery fund for the European Union, part of the plan … Continue reading
Analyst Mike Mayo’s “Dose of Heaven” Prediction Turns to Hell for the Banks on Thursday

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 17, 2021 ~ Wells Fargo bank analyst Mike Mayo appeared on CNBC this morning to paint a rosy picture for how banks would be treating the Fed’s less than dovish statement yesterday. Mayo said this about the banks: “Back in the 70s or even 1994 the inflation caused unrealized securities losses, derivatives losses, asset/liabilities mismatches. So too much inflation is hell for banks. But we think what’s happening now is a dose of heaven. And so higher rates sooner can allow banks to finally earn more money on all those deposits that they’ve gathered. And so this means that assets reprice faster than their liabilities.” What actually priced much faster than either assets or liabilities were the share prices of the mega banks on Wall Street. The cheery words had barely left Mayo’s tongue before the biggest banks on Wall Street went into a … Continue reading
Justice Department’s Investigation of Dodgy Archegos-Style Accounts at the Wall Street Mega Banks Is Likely the Cause of Plunge in Trading Revenues

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 17, 2021 ~ On May 26 Bloomberg News reported that the U.S. Department of Justice had opened an investigation into Archegos Capital Management and its bank lenders. Archegos is the family office hedge fund that had blown up in late March, causing a total of more than $10 billion in losses to mega banks including Credit Suisse, UBS, Morgan Stanley and others. Archegos had obtained leverage of as much as 85 percent on its heavily-concentrated stock trades from some of its banks, in brazen violation of the Federal Reserve’s Regulation T which sets margin for stock trading at a maximum of 50 percent on opening trades. In addition, the banks were holding the stocks in their own names (while shifting losses and gains to Archegos under a derivatives contract called a swap) thus denying the public the knowledge of the true owners of these … Continue reading
It’s Now Official: The Financial House that Jamie Dimon Built Is the Riskiest Bank in the United States

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 16, 2021 ~ Corporate media outlets like Bloomberg News, the CBS news program 60 Minutes, and CNBC have been seduced into obsequious behavior when it comes to Jamie Dimon, the Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, despite the fact that Dimon has presided over the most unparalleled crime spree in the history of U.S. banking. Between 2014 and September of last year, JPMorgan Chase has been charged with five criminal felony counts by the U.S. Department of Justice. The bank admitted to all five counts. (See the bank’s detailed rap sheet here.) Despite this crime spree and endless probation periods followed by more crime, Dimon has further seduced federal bank regulators into allowing his unrepentant behemoth to become the most systemically risky bank in America. That assessment is not our opinion. It is the assessment of the federal government based on hard data. The … Continue reading
Bezos Has Dumped Over $16.6 Billion of Amazon Stock Over the Last 17 Months – That’s More than He Sold Over the Prior Decade. Should Shareholders Worry?

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 15, 2021 ~ Jeff Bezos, the founder and man at the helm of Amazon for the past 27 years, announced last month that he will be stepping down as CEO on July 5. Fifteen days later, according to Bezos, he and his brother Mark will take off on the first crewed space flight from his rocket company, Blue Origin. (Another seat on the flight has been auctioned online for $28 million. The winner has not yet been named.) Following on the heels of Bezos’ 2019 announcement of his divorce to his wife of a quarter of a century, MacKenzie Bezos, and tabloid headlines over his accusations of attempted extortion and blackmail by the National Inquirer over Bezos salacious texts to his girlfriend, shareholders were likely becoming eager for Bezos to hop aboard that spacecraft. What shareholders were apparently not thinking about was what was going … Continue reading
Senator Elizabeth Warren Has One Word for Cryptocurrencies: “Lousy”

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 11, 2021 ~ Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts chairs the Senate Banking Committee’s Subcommittee on Economic Policy. On Wednesday the Subcommittee held a hearing on a topic that is becoming ever more timely with each new Bitcoin extortion attack on an essential U.S. business. The hearing was titled: “Building A Stronger Financial System: Opportunities of a Central Bank Digital Currency.” To set the stage for the need for a regulated alternative to the crime network now trafficking in cryptocurrencies, Warren explained all the ways that cryptocurrencies are simply “lousy” for any socially-redeeming purpose. Warren stated: “Cryptocurrencies have turned out to be a fourth-rate alternative to real currency. First, cryptocurrencies are a lousy way to buy and sell things. Unlike the dollar, their value fluctuates wildly depending on the whims of speculative day traders. You know, in just the last two months, the value of … Continue reading