Search Results for: jay clayton 8 out of 10

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 18, 2021 ~ The billionaire hedge fund titan of Citadel LLC and its market-making/trade execution arm, Citadel Securities, delivered a load of horse pukky in his written testimony to the House Financial Services Committee. Griffin is slated to appear as one of six witnesses at the hearing scheduled at noon today to examine the trading in shares of GameStop in January. 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. The stock price then quickly plunged back to earth. It closed yesterday at $45.94. GameStop is listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Its shares are not supposed to trade like a penny stock operated out of a boiler room. … 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: January 19, 2021 ~ Last Tuesday, Wall Street was stewing over the Reuters report that President-Elect Joe Biden was likely to name Gary Gensler, the former Chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), as the new Chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The CFTC oversees the futures market. The SEC oversees the trading of stocks; the stock exchanges; the broker-dealers and investment banks that underwrite and trade stocks; and how all of these firms interact with investors. The SEC also oversees Wall Street’s dubious Dark Pools – which Wall Street On Parade has challenged as engaging in potentially illegal behavior. By Friday, January 15, Wall Street’s banks ended in a sea of red with Citigroup losing a whopping 6.93 percent on the day. All of the mega banks posted losses far exceeding the meager 0.57 percent decline in the Dow Jones … 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: November 9, 2020 ~ After successfully warding off barbarians outside the gates of the local election offices during the count of mail-in ballots, President-elect Joe Biden now has a new army of barbarians to deal with. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, using data collected by the Federal Election Commission, the industry category called “Finance, Insurance & Real Estate” donated a stunning $201,675,240 to Biden’s campaign and PACs supporting him. Add to that the category of “Lawyers and Lobbyists,” which donated $52,378,087, and you’re looking at a cool quarter of a billion dollars. The bulk of the $52 million that came from “Lawyers and Lobbyists” was donated by the lawyers and partners of the big law firms that represent the biggest Wall Street banks and securities firms. Big donors to Biden and the Democratic Party in the 2019/2020 cycle hail from such law … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 5, 2020 ~ Is the Chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Jay Clayton, a watchdog or a lapdog? If you judge him by his actions since taking office on May 4, 2017, it looks like the latter. That was easily predictable given that Clayton had represented 8 of the 10 largest Wall Street banks in the three years prior to taking his seat as Chair of the SEC. Clayton is also the man who is now attempting to elevate his role to that of the top criminal prosecutor in Wall Street’s home turf of Manhattan, by knocking Geoffrey Berman out of the job. That office is the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York where there are pending investigations related to both Donald Trump as well as Clayton’s former clients, the big banks on Wall Street. One person in … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 29, 2020 ~ As the attention of Americans is focused on surviving the pandemic and the pivotal presidential debate tonight, William Barr’s Justice Department decided to quietly hand an early Christmas present to a notorious Wall Street bank. Under the richly compensated leadership of Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan Chase, the largest bank in the United States, has admitted to an unprecedented five criminal felony counts since 2014 and put on criminal probation three times. Dimon notched two of those felony counts in his belt today. (That’s five felonies more than the bank pleaded guilty to in its prior 100 years of existence. Translation: this is not normal even on Wall Street.) The bank has agreed today to pay criminal fines and admit to two felony counts of wire fraud for manipulating (spoofing) trading in the precious metals and U.S. Treasury markets. … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 16, 2020 ~ On December 6 of last year, four reporters at Bloomberg News signaled that the U.S. Department of Justice was close to a settlement of its criminal investigation of Goldman Sachs in the 1MDB matter. The reporters wrote as follows: “The Justice Department and other federal agencies, in internal discussions held in recent weeks, have weighed seeking penalties between $1.5 billion and $2 billion, the people said. That’s less than what some analysts have signaled Goldman might have to pay. While a settlement could be announced as soon as next month, the terms could change before a deal is finalized…” The terms, indeed, seem to have changed. It’s now more than 9 months since that article was published and there hasn’t been a peep out of the Justice Department about criminal charges against Goldman Sachs. According to the Bloomberg report, Barr … 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 →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 16, 2020 ~ It’s no wonder that American citizens are receiving just a tiny snippet of critical news from mainstream media. Federal regulators have set a new low in withholding documents that the public and the media are entitled to under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). These censored documents could inform us on what’s really driving policy decisions in Washington. Take our latest FOIA brush with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Foreign central banks and sovereign wealth funds are required under law to report their publicly-traded U.S. stock positions no later than 45 days after the end of each calendar quarter. This is done on Form 13F, which is filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, if those stock holdings reach $100 million or more. The central bank of Israel, known simply as the Bank of Israel, has not been doing … Continue reading →