Search Results for: bank collusion

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 4, 2017 On November 8, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chairman, Jay Clayton, delivered a speech at the Practising Law Institute’s 49th Annual Institute on Securities Regulation. His focus was transparency on Wall Street and he had this nugget of wisdom to share with the audience: “Looking back at enforcement actions, a common theme emerges – where opacity exists, bad behavior tends to follow. As Joseph Pulitzer said: ‘There is not a crime, there is not a dodge, there is not a trick, there is not a swindle, there is not a vice which does not live by secrecy.’ The remainder of my remarks will concentrate on topics that have proven over time to be fertile ground for fraud on investors. The SEC may not yet have policy or rulemaking answers in these areas, but we are on the lookout for ways … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 25, 2017  When we created the website for Wall Street On Parade, it took us about 30 minutes to add a free plug-in function so that our readers could search the text of every article we have ever written. (See Search box in upper right-hand corner of our menu at the top of this website.) But at Wall Street’s top cop, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), if one wants to search corporate filings, one is limited to a four-year text search. This bizarre restriction inhibits investigative journalists from capably doing their job and connecting dots. This might sound like a small complaint were it not part of a larger pattern of technological failures by the SEC which have allowed Wall Street firms to run amok for decades. The biggest technological failure, of course, is the SEC’s inability to launch a Consolidated Audit … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 5, 2017 On Wednesday, the General Accountability Office (GAO), the bipartisan congressional watchdog, released an in-depth report on the U.S. government’s challenging fiscal outlook. Despite its surprising revelations, the study received little to no coverage by major media outlets. While most Americans have been led by political rhetoric to believe that government programs like Medicare and Medicaid are the biggest threats to the future U.S. fiscal picture, the GAO study found the following: “While health care spending is a key programmatic and policy driver of the long-term outlook on the spending side of the budget, eventually, spending on net interest becomes the largest category of spending in both the 2016 Financial Report’s long-term fiscal projections and GAO’s simulations.” The GAO cited a simulation that showed net interest payments on U.S. debt increasing “from $248 billion in fiscal year 2016 to $1.4 trillion in … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 19, 2016 Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman is raising a question in the pages of the New York Times this morning that has been on the minds of Europeans since Donald Trump won the U.S. presidential election on November 8: has America fallen? Krugman’s column came two days after we had heard the following story from a friend: a few days after the November 8 election, a young man in his twenties got into a cab in New York City heading for John F. Kennedy International Airport. The cabbie asks why the young man is leaving. The student explains that he has been attending a university in New York City but his parents in Germany had called and ordered him to come home immediately. Their exact statement to him was: “leave immediately, America has fallen.” What could cause this kind of reaction from parents … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 12, 2016 Yesterday we published our 1,007th article here at Wall Street On Parade on the insidiously corrupt financial system in the United States known as Wall Street. It’s a system that now operates as an institutionalized wealth transfer mechanism that is hollowing out the middle class, leaving one of every five children in our nation living in poverty, while funneling the plunder to the top one-tenth of one percent. Tens of millions of Americans clearly understand that an entrenched system of corruption such as this, perpetuated through a revolving door between Wall Street and Washington, while enshrined by a political campaign finance system that recycles a portion of the plunder to ensure greater plunders, will inevitably leave the nation’s economy in tatters — again. That’s because systemic corruption and legalized bribery within the financial arteries of the nation can only create grossly … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 26, 2016 Yesterday, speaking before a rally audience in Rhode Island, Donald Trump called the coordination of election strategy between presidential candidates Senator Ted Cruz and Governor John Kasich “collusion.” (See video clip below.) He then made the following off the wall statement:  “If you collude in business, or if you collude in the stock market, they put you in jail.” That statement is profoundly important on multiple levels. For one, it raises the question of just how closely Donald Trump has followed the serial crimes of Wall Street and the Justice Department’s failure to deliver jail time. Despite holding a degree from the Wharton School, perhaps Trump thumbs through the real estate section of the New York Times and skips over the Wall Street news. Maybe Trump is entrenched in an illusion that it’s his charisma and star quality that is responsible … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 5, 2015  Last week we wrote about the invisible hand’s removal of a negative paragraph on the financial industry from the Pope’s speech before a joint session of Congress and some bizarre shenanigans with Fed Chair Janet Yellen’s highly anticipated speech in Amherst, Massachusetts. This past Saturday, Adam Posen, the President of a powerful think tank, the Peterson Institute for International Economics, delivered a speech at a conference sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, calling the U.S. Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC) “a mess.” That speech has gone missing from online access. FSOC is the body created under the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation of 2010 to reassure the American people that Wall Street would never again be able to take the U.S. economy, the financial system, and the housing market to the cleaners and then get a multi-trillion dollar bailout. FSOC … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: April 13, 2015 For nine years now we have written about Wall Street’s institutionalized system of transferring wealth from decent, hardworking Americans to the denizens of Wall Street and those it selectively chooses to favor in the one percent class. The methods of wealth transfer are as diverse as they are diabolical, thus even well intentioned members of Congress cannot stem the havoc on the financial well being of the average American and the overall economy. One facet that all of these wealth transfer systems have in common is that they all masquerade under a benign sounding name. The 401(k) plan is viewed by most Americans as a way to save for retirement. That’s a good thing – right? It is not a good thing when two-thirds of your savings over a working lifetime end up in Wall Street’s pocket, as carefully demonstrated by Frontline and math-checked … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 30, 2014  As Wall Street On Parade reported last week, Jeffrey Kleintop, Chief Market Strategist for LPL Financial, reports that corporations are now the single largest buying source for U.S. stocks – authorizing buybacks of their own stocks to the tune of $754.8 billion in 2013 alone. And it’s a long-term trend. According to Birinyi Associates, for calendar years 2006 through 2013, corporations authorized $4.14 trillion in buybacks of their own publicly traded stock in the U.S. — raising the question, just what kind of a bull market is this? JPMorgan Chase, the largest U.S. bank by assets, has turned share buybacks into an art form, buying back a whopping $17,945,000,000 of shares from 2010 through 2013. In just the calendar year of 2011, JPMorgan spent a stunning $8,827,000,000 on stock buybacks. According to JPMorgan’s most recent quarterly report filed with the Securities … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: May 15, 2014 Since Michael Lewis first uttered the immortal words on 60 Minutes on March 30 that “stock market’s rigged” through the willful collusion of exchanges, large broker dealers and high frequency traders, it has become clear that the public relations game plan of the regulators and self-regulators is to pray for a technology-challenged Congress and a gullible public. J. Bradley Bennett, Executive Vice President of Enforcement at FINRA, the industry’s self regulator, suggested that high frequency trading was no different than buying a first class ticket on an airplane. (Wall Street On Parade suggested that this is only true if one has also hijacked the plane and robbed the passengers in coach.) Next up was SEC Chair Mary Jo White who flatly told the House Financial Services Committee on April 29 that “the markets are not rigged” despite three books and dozens of research papers documenting … Continue reading →