Search Results for: Federal Reserve

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 25, 2019 ~ If you are buying stocks based on what your stockbroker (a/k/a “financial advisor”) is telling you the research analysts at his brokerage firm are recommending, our headline above should provide a cautionary warning. On July 21, Philip Van Doorn, a reporter for Dow Jones’ MarketWatch, published a chart showing that 82 percent of bank research analysts on Wall Street have a “buy” rating on the stock of Citigroup. According to MarketBeat.com, among the stock analysts making “buy,” “outperform,” or “overweight,” recommendations on Citigroup are those receiving a paycheck from Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank, UBS, and Bank of America – all of whom have a vested interest in wanting Citigroup – and each other — to stay strong because they are all interconnected as derivative counterparties. All of these banks are in a unique position to … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 24, 2019 ~ On Monday, Democratic presidential contender Senator Elizabeth Warren posted a column on Medium that carried the provocative headline: The Coming Economic Crash — And How to Stop It. Warren’s column came just 11 days after we titled our own article: Is There a Stealth Financial Crisis? Alarm Bells Are Ringing. Warren wrote about economic trends like the fact that the U.S. manufacturing sector is already in recession and the staggering amount of household and corporate debt. We wrote about the striking similarities to the early warning signs that ushered in the 2008 financial crash and those happening right now: like being locked out of withdrawing money from a mutual fund because of a run on the fund and an inability to find a buyer for its illiquid investments; and a major international bank firing a big chunk of its labor … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 23, 2019 ~ Yesterday afternoon, Jamie Dimon had his world rocked. And not in a good way. Dimon is the Chairman and CEO of the largest bank in the United States, JPMorgan Chase, which has over 5,000 retail branches blanketing the U.S. and has scooped up $1.6 trillion in deposits, much of it from moms and pops who have no idea that the bank is a three-time felon. When you’re a 3-count felony bank and still on probation until January of 2020, you really don’t want to see your name appear in the New York Times connected to the most radioactive felon in the United States right now, Jeffrey Epstein, the man newly indicted on July 6 on charges of sex trafficking of underage girls and sexually assaulting dozens of them. But that’s what happened yesterday afternoon. The New York Times published a … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 17, 2019 ~ Yesterday the U.S. Senate Banking Committee assembled to hear Facebook’s David Marcus explain how the company wants to create a global digital currency called Libra, to be run by a Switzerland-based global organization called the Libra Association, made up of 27 members from the fields of payment systems, technology, telecommunications, blockchain services, venture capital, nonprofits and academic institutions. Given Facebook’s serial history of abusing the privacy rights of its users and selling their data without their permission, not to mention its role in facilitating Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, we immediately went to check out the names of the nonprofits that had signed up to monitor this sprawling international monetary system cooked up in a Facebook lab in a year’s time. We were hoping to see names like American Civil Liberties Union, Public Citizen, Consumer Federation of America, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 10, 2019 ~ Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO of the Wall Street mega bank, JPMorgan Chase, has weathered one scandal after another during his tenure, including the bank pleading guilty to an unprecedented three criminal felony counts in the past five years. Now the bank is back in the news for owning a massive container ship which was seized last week in the Philadelphia seaport by U.S. Customs and Border Protection following the discovery of 20 tons of cocaine located in containers on the ship on June 17. The cocaine is estimated to have a street value of $1.3 billion. The container vessel is the MSC Gayane and was being operated by the global shipping firm, Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC). The vessel is the largest ever to be seized in the 230-year history of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, according to the CBP’s … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 5, 2019 ~   According to press reports around the globe, there’s going to be a hot confab this Sunday by the Board of Deutsche Bank that will focus on the potential to create a so-called “bad bank” to hold some of Deutsche’s toxic assets along with discussions of cutting 15,000 to 20,000 employees from the payroll – meaning as many as one out of every five employees could get the axe. A big part of the job losses will hit Manhattan where Deutsche Bank has a heavy presence on Wall Street — which it plans to severely pare back. Here’s the short version on why the bank is contemplating these radical moves: Deutsche Bank has reported losses in three of the last four years; its share price has lost 90 percent of its value since February of 2007; as of the close … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 3, 2019 ~ According to the Center for Responsive Politics, which keeps meticulous tabs on political campaign flows, as of this morning, the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison – which has represented Citigroup through more than two decades of serial fraud charges – is the number one campaign donor to the Democratic Presidential hopeful Senator Kamala Harris. As the Center notes, the money isn’t coming from the law firm itself, but from its “PACs; their individual members, employees or owners; and those individuals’ immediate families.” The campaign ad for Harris reads like this: “Kamala Harris has spent her entire life defending our American values. From fighting to fix our broken criminal justice system to taking on the Wall Street banks for middle class homeowners, Kamala has always worked For The People.” But here we are in the early days of … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 1, 2019 ~ The current fragmented, opaque, and deeply conflicted structure of the U.S. stock market as well as the structure of the giant Wall Street banks that interact in every imaginable way with capital formation in America, is not in the public interest, the national interest or in the interest of capitalism itself. Let’s start with the structure of the stock market. Those quaint video clips that you see on television of traders mulling about on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange at 11 Wall Street in Manhattan, as executives from some new company that just listed its shares ring the bell to begin stock trading, is meant to lull the public into a sense of confidence that humans are still in charge and looking out for your retirement investments in your 401(k) or public pension plan. But 11 Wall … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 28, 2019 ~ How many second chances should a criminal recidivist get? JPMorgan Chase has logged in guilty pleas to three criminal felony counts in the past five years; it has a criminally-charged precious metals trader singing to the Feds currently as JPMorgan admits in regulatory filings that it’s under a new criminal investigation in that matter; the bank has paid $36 billion in fines for wrongdoing since the financial crash, including $1 billion for trading exotic derivatives in London with bank depositors’ money and losing at least $6.2 billion of those depositor funds (the London Whale scandal). And in just the past year it has proven that it’s “game on” for more regulatory fines and illicit profits. (See Could JPMorgan Chase Be Hit with a Fourth Felony Count for Rigging Precious Metals Markets?) Despite all of this, yesterday the Federal Reserve announced … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 19, 2019 ~ What good is being the President of the most powerful nation on earth if you can’t humiliate people on Twitter and fire them if they refuse to do your bidding (even if the law mandates their independence from politics.) This appears to be the thinking of Donald Trump, the sitting President of the United States. The Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, is the latest person to come into the President’s cross-hairs. Yesterday, Bloomberg News broke the story that “In February, the White House counsel’s office examined the legality of stripping Powell of his chairmanship and leaving him as a Fed governor.” The review of Trump’s legal options occurred “as the president repeatedly expressed public frustration with the Fed’s interest-rate increases,” according to the article. In an interview with the Washington Post last November, Trump said he was “not … Continue reading →