By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 12, 2024 ~ According to a report at the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Financial Research (OFR), the Gross Notional Exposure at hedge funds has skyrocketed by 24.5 percent in the span of one year: from $22.946 trillion on March 31, 2023 to $28.579 trillion on March 31, 2024. (Run your cursor along the top green line at this link to observe the stunning growth in hedge fund exposures despite the banking crisis in the spring of 2023 when the second, third and fourth largest banks blew up.) Gross Notional Exposure (GNE) is defined by OFR as “the sum of the absolute value of long and short exposures, including those on and off the balance sheet.” The OFR was created under the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation of 2010 to keep bank and market regulators informed of growing risks, in the hope of preventing another financial … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 8, 2024 ~ Remember the Repo Crisis in the fall of 2019 when the Federal Reserve had to jump in with both feet and make billions of dollars in revolving emergency loans each weekday to the megabanks on Wall Street? And remember when Wall Street On Parade was the only media outlet that named the banks that got the money and graphed the largest borrowers when the Fed released the granular loan data two years later? Well, guess what. Two of the financial firms that played a starring role in the repo crisis of 2019 appear to be part of the cast in the current trading debacle in Japan that’s spilling into global markets – if their share price performance is any indicator. The graph above shows that the Japanese financial firm, Nomura, and the giant U.S. megabank, Citigroup, are trading in eerie correlation … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 7, 2024 ~ Robert B. Reich, the former U.S. Labor Secretary under President Bill Clinton, a bestselling author and Professor Emeritus at UC Berkeley, penned an essay in May on why billionaires should not exist. Reich declares that there are only five ways someone can become a billionaire.  (Reich narrates his essay in the video below, complete with cool graphics.) Reich lists the following five methods of becoming a billionaire: (1) exploit a monopoly; (2) exploit inside information; (3) buy off politicians; (4) defraud investors; (5) get money from rich relatives. You are likely thinking that there is nothing wrong with inheriting wealth from a rich relative. But if the money is inherited from a billionaire relative, it means that he or she likely got that wealth through one of the first four methods. Thus, dirty money is simply moving from generation to generation. … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 6, 2024 ~ If you are sick of reading about Americans dying of heat stroke as summer temperatures in the U.S. continue to break records; as unprecedented flooding occurs from coast to coast; as wild fires destroy more homes and wildlife habitat; and, as the Republican candidate for President raises his fist at rallies and yells “Drill, baby, drill”; this Thursday presents an opportunity for you to take a stand. You can join with a 63-year old grandfather, John Mark Rozendaal, and fellow activists in front of Citigroup’s headquarters at 388 Greenwich Street in lower Manhattan at 11 a.m. this Thursday. The peaceful protesters, who have been targeting the bank all summer, will be calling continued attention to Citigroup’s outsized role in financing fossil fuel expansion and the deadly impact it is having across the globe. Rozendaal is an accomplished cellist who recently retired … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 5, 2024 ~ Japan’s Nikkei stock market index fell a stunning 4,451.28 points in overnight trading, marking the worst tumble in point terms in the entire history of the Nikkei. In percentage terms, that was a one-day trading loss of 12.4 percent. Dow futures took their cue from the selloff in overnight foreign markets and tumbled a breathtaking 1200 points by 8:26 a.m. in New York. When the market actually opened at 9:30 a.m. the Dow had shaved off 1,167 points in the opening five minutes. As of 9:40 a.m., the Nasdaq had lost 819.8 points or 4.89 percent. Japanese traders were spooked by the sharp selloffs in U.S. markets on Thursday and Friday of last week, which were ushered in by bad economic data as well as the potential for a broader war in the Middle East. On Thursday the Dow Jones Industrial … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 1, 2024 ~ On Monday, we wrote about the $2.3 trillion in agency mortgage-backed securities (MBS) that JPMorgan Chase is being paid to hold for the New York Fed as custodian and the multitude of related services for which it is billing the New York Fed on a monthly basis. Wall Street On Parade had filed a Freedom of Information Act request for JPMorgan’s invoices to the New York Fed for calendar year 2023. Instead of the 20 business days that a FOIA is supposed to take, we were stonewalled for three months and then received invoices with dollars amounts redacted. One fascinating bit of information we were able to glean from the invoices was that JPMorgan is billing the New York Fed for a service titled: “Tri-Party Collateral Management.” (Scroll toward the end of the invoices at this link.) We have been researching … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 31, 2024 ~ Last Thursday, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (the Fed), the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the federal supervisors of banks, issued 11 pages of warnings on what could go wrong when federally-insured banks get in bed with uninsured and untested financial technology companies. These financial technology companies are lovingly called Fintechs on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley where big money can be made by venture capitalists who bring the sexy-sounding Fintech startup as an IPO (Initial Public Offering) to investors on Wall Street. The Wall Street firm, in return, gets a nice payday in underwriting fees and a law firm also gets paid as counsel to the underwriters. Federal banking regulators have been in a frenzied scramble to deal with the growing fallout of disastrous marriages between … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 30, 2024 ~ Last Saturday, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump delivered a speech at the 2024 Bitcoin Conference in Nashville, Tennessee. Throughout the speech, Trump pushed the idea that the United States “cannot let China dominate” in the race to innovate with cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. At 46 minutes and 10 seconds (46:10) on this CSPAN video of the Trump speech, you can hear Trump say this to the audience: “America will become the world’s undisputed bitcoin mining powerhouse. You’ll be a bitcoin mining powerhouse. You will not have to move your family to China. We will not be moving to China. As we implement these reforms, Bitcoin and crypto will grow our economy, cement American financial dominance and strengthen our entire country, long into the future….” Trump, as well as his speechwriter, are apparently unaware that in September of 2021, ten Chinese agencies, including … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 29, 2024 ~ The New York Fed, which has bank examiners engaged in supervising JPMorgan Chase, has also repeatedly provided bailout funds to JPMorgan Chase; was supervising JPMorgan Chase when it lost $6.2 billion of deposits from its federally-insured bank by gambling in derivatives on its London trading desk; allowed JPMorgan Chase’s Chairman and CEO, Jamie Dimon, to previously sit on the New York Fed’s Board of Directors, even as he faced the $6.2 billion derivatives trading scandal; and the New York Fed has exclusively used JPMorgan Chase to hold, as custodian, more than $2.3 trillion of the Federal Reserve’s Mortgage-Backed Securities (MBS) for the past 15-1/2 years – despite JPMorgan Chase admitting to five felony counts brought by the criminal division of the U.S. Department of Justice during that time. If there was an admitted felon in your neighborhood, would that be your … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 25, 2024 ~ Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan to pull off a public relations coup to build support for his war in Gaza has backfired badly. On the evening before Netanyahu was set to address a joint session of Congress yesterday afternoon, one of the most respected members of the U.S. Senate, independent Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, took to the Senate floor to deliver a scathing breakdown of Netanyahu’s war crimes against the people of Gaza. Senator Sanders is Jewish, making his assessment of Netanyahu’s atrocities all the more poignant. A transcript, verified by us, of Senator Sanders’ full remarks is provided below as well as a video of his full remarks. Sanders also broke some major news in his remarks on Tuesday, stating this: “Just today, Madam President, I’m happy to say that seven major trade unions here in the United … Continue reading →