By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 8, 2021 ~ Yesterday, Cornell Law Professor, Saule Omarova, withdrew from her nomination to become the head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the regulator of national banks. Emily Flitter, reporting for the New York Times, said it was because Omarova had been “painted as a communist.” In terms of the full story on why Omarova had to withdraw, that is like pointing to a single droplet of rain as the cause of a hurricane. In October, the Vanderbilt Law Review published a 69-page paper by Omarova in which she made the following bizarre recommendations to reform the U.S. banking system: (1) Move all commercial bank deposits from commercial banks to so-called FedAccounts at the Federal Reserve; (2) Allow the Fed, in “extreme and rare circumstances, when the Fed is unable to control inflation by raising interest rates,” to confiscate deposits … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 7, 2021 ~ Last Friday, December 3, 2021, the Nasdaq stock market recorded 12 stocks setting new 52-week highs in contrast to 585 stocks setting new 52-week lows. Let that sink in for a moment. There were 48.75 times more stocks setting new 52-week lows than were reaching new 52-week highs. That extremely negative reading of market breadth came on a day when the Nasdaq closed down just 1.9 percent. Imagine what the breadth would have looked like if the percentage decline on the overall market had been worse. Yesterday, Monday, December 6, with the Nasdaq closing up 139.6 points, the new 52-week lows still swamped highs, with 137 new lows and only 53 new highs. Unfortunately, Americans never see headlines in their newspapers about the deterioration in the stock market’s underpinnings. What they do see on a regular basis are headlines about the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 6, 2021 ~ Bitcoin was trading at over $57,000 on Friday. Over the next 24 hours it had plunged below $43,000. On some trading platforms, Bitcoin’s price was cut far below the $43,000 level. The Dow Jones news outlet, MarketWatch, reported that “NYDIG, a technology and financial services firm dedicated to bitcoin, said that the decline was even more severe for some offshore platforms such as Huobi, where bitcoin briefly touched a 24-hour nadir at $28,800 on Saturday.” Bitcoin front month futures on the CME at 7:49 a.m. ET this morning show it had bounced back to $48,715. This is hardly the first time this year that Bitcoin has put on a wild display of price swings. On May 19 Bitcoin removed any lingering doubts that it is a stable currency that could be used to pay for products or services. At that time … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 3, 2021 ~ Progressives are waiting with bated breath to see if President Joe Biden will show more moxie than former President Barack Obama when it comes to Wall Street regulation. So far, the record has been nothing short of bizarre. See here and here. When it came to Wall Street, Obama was all talk and no show. One gift to Wall Street that has been all but forgotten by progressives is that Obama was mandated under Section 1108 of the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation of 2010 to appoint the very first Vice Chairman for Supervision of banks at the Federal Reserve. Instead, Obama served out his two terms as President without ever filling that mandated post. It was not until the Presidency of Donald Trump in 2017 – seven years after the passage of Dodd-Frank – that Randal Quarles was appointed the very … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 2, 2021 ~ We can tell you with some confidence what Jamie Dimon, the Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, is going to be doing at 11:00 a.m. this morning. He’s going to be listening to a teleconference in a federal court case titled Shaquala Williams v JPMorgan Chase & Co. That’s because the outcome of that case will determine if the bank Dimon has helmed through five separate felony counts – all of which received non-prosecution agreements from the Justice Department – will finally be prosecuted for a crime. One might suspect that Kenneth Polite, the man President Biden nominated and the Senate confirmed to head the Criminal Division of the Justice Department in July, might also take an interest in this matter since the plaintiff is alleging that the Justice Department got played by JPMorgan Chase in its 2016 non-prosecution agreement. Unfortunately, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 1, 2021 ~ If you’re a stock market watcher you might want to invest in a neck brace if today’s whipsawing action is any gauge of what’s ahead. Just this morning we warned our readers to buckle up for the unwinding of the massive stock market bubble that Fed Chair Powell has been feeding with his keys to an unlimited, electronic-money printing press and his zero-interest-rate policy. As if on cue, the Dow Jones Industrial Average put on a firework display today, first zooming to an intra-day high of 35,004.64, then plunging to a low of 34,006.98. By the closing bell, the Dow was down 461.68. The decline in the Dow began shortly after 11 a.m. – almost three hours before the news broke that the first case of the new COVID variant, Omicron, had been reported in California. An Associated Press report was … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 1, 2021 ~ Fed Chair Jerome Powell along with Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen appeared before the Senate Banking Committee yesterday to deliver their semi-annual reports. Approximately 34 minutes into the hearing, in response to a question from Senator Pat Toomey, Republican from Pennsylvania, Powell announced that he was retiring the word “transitory” to describe the inflationary forces that have a grip on prices in the U.S. The stock market interpreted this to mean that Powell, who just eight days prior had become Democrat President Joe Biden’s nominee for another four years at the helm of the Fed, was now pivoting to cater to Republican inflation hawks in order to win their votes at his upcoming confirmation hearing. The Dow Jones Industrial Average quickly did a bungee dive of 402 points. About 90 minutes into the hearing, the stock market went into a new wave … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 30, 2021 ~ President Joe Biden clearly needs a new communications team that can explain to him the meaning of “under promise, outperform.” Biden began yesterday’s press conference on the newly discovered COVID variant, Omicron, stating that he had promised to always tell the American people the truth. Then he proceeded to deliver a pep talk devoid of hard evidence for the rosy promises he was making about his strategy for fighting the new Omicron variant. At one point, Biden told reporters that this Thursday he would be “putting forth a detailed strategy on how we’re going to fight COVID this winter – not with shutdowns or lockdowns, but with more widespread vaccinations, boosters and testing and more.” At this point, there is zero hard evidence that the current vaccines provide significant immunity against the Omicron variant. Scientists around the world have said that … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: November 29, 2021 ~ For more than two decades, the general counsels of Wall Street’s mega banks have been meeting together secretly once a year at ritzy hotels and resorts around the world. This would appear to be a clear violation of anti-trust law but since Wall Street’s revolving door has compromised the U.S. Department of Justice over much of that time span, there has been no pushback from the Justice Department to shut down these clandestine meetings. Wall Street insiders say that among the top agenda items at this annual confab are strategy sessions on how to keep Congress from enacting legislation that would bring an end to Wall Street’s privatized justice system called mandatory arbitration. This system allows the most serially corrupt industry in America to effectively lock the nation’s courthouse doors to claims of fraud from its workers and customers. This private justice system also … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 24, 2021 ~ Yesterday the Federal Reserve Board of Governors announced the termination of an enforcement action against Goldman Sachs that dates back to 2016. It’s one more case where Goldman Sachs, the “great vampire squid,” throws its lower-ranked employees under the bus and quickly returns to “relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” The Fed had fined Goldman Sachs a paltry $36.3 million in August of 2016 over its employees using confidential supervisory information that had been stolen from the New York Fed to make presentations to clients and prospective clients. The Fed’s settlement followed an October 28, 2015 settlement between Goldman and the New York State Department of Financial Services over similar charges. Goldman agreed to settle the NYSDFS case for $50 million. The case centers around Rohit Bansal, who had worked at the New York Fed and … Continue reading →