By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 16, 2021 ~ During the financial collapse of 2008, money market funds found themselves holding toxic paper that no one wanted to buy. In order to stop panic runs on money market funds, on September 19, 2008 the U.S. Treasury Department issued a statement indicating it would guarantee more than $3.5 trillion in money market funds. As COVID-19 concerns took root in March of last year and the stock market plunged, the Fed launched another bailout program for money market funds on March 18, 2020. The program was called the Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility (MMLF) and was run out of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. Going forward, the Fed does not want to be in the position of having to bail out more privately owned money market funds. So the Fed has been seducing money market funds and other financial institutions … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 15, 2021 ~ Last Tuesday, Mike Derby reported at the Wall Street Journal that the President of the Dallas Fed, Robert Kaplan, had “made multiple million-dollar-plus stock trades in 2020, according to a financial disclosure form provided by his bank.” The individual stocks included shares of Apple, Alphabet (Google), Alibaba,  Amazon, Chevron, Delta Airlines, Facebook, General Electric, Johnson and Johnson, Oracle, Tesla and numerous others. Kaplan previously spent more than two decades at Goldman Sachs, one of the largest trading houses on Wall Street, and, apparently, he thinks he still works there. Think about this for a moment. While Fed Chair Jerome Powell is repeatedly testifying to Congress last year that its every monetary move during the pandemic was on behalf of the average American, the Dallas Fed President is making million-dollar bets on big tech stocks the Justice Department is investigating for anti-trust … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 14, 2021 ~ The Senate Banking Committee will hold a hearing today titled “Oversight of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.” The SEC needs a lot of oversight because that’s the federal agency that didn’t catch Bernie Madoff for more than four decades, despite a financial expert, Harry Markopolos, sending the SEC detailed written reports (in 2000, 2001, 2005, 2007 and 2008), making the case that Madoff was running a Ponzi scheme. The SEC was also asleep at the switch while Wall Street banks concocted their subprime debt bombs, then bet billions of dollars that they would fail while selling them to public pension funds as good investments. Those subprime bombs blew up in 2008, cratering the U.S. economy and leaving millions of innocent Americans jobless and homeless. More recently, the SEC was caught flat-footed when the family office hedge fund, Archegos Capital Management, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 13, 2021 ~ Most Americans believe that the unprecedented Fed bailouts of Wall Street didn’t begin until December of 2007, on the cusp of Wall Street’s financial collapse in 2008. That’s wrong. The Fed’s first massive bailout of Wall Street started on 9/11. By the closing bell on September 10, 2001, the day before the attacks, the Nasdaq stock market was already in the midst of a full-scale implosion, having lost 66 percent of its market value and wiping out $4 trillion of wealth. The Wall Street mega banks were in the cross-hairs at the time of then New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer for bringing to market Initial Public Offerings of companies that the banks’ own research analysts were internally calling “crap” and “dogs” while the same banks issued buy recommendations on the “dogs” to the unknowing public. One internal email from … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 10, 2021 ~ On September 11, 2001 we were living in the quaint town of Garden City, Long Island, New York. The town was a 46-minute ride to Manhattan on the Long Island Rail Road. That easy proximity to the Big Apple meant that many folks in the town worked for financial firms, including those located in the World Trade Center Towers. It also meant that Garden City was among the suburban towns that suffered significant loss of life on 9/11: 23 of our residents never came home on the Long Island Rail Road that day – or any day thereafter. Almost every person in Garden City knew someone who had died: a son, a wife, a husband, a parent, a neighbor, a colleague, or a fellow church member. Our heretofore cheerful town that clipped happy faces in the shrubs in the village square … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 9, 2021 ~ The highly respected and closely watched Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow forecast for the third quarter has been slashed by 41 percent since August 2 – from 6.3 percent GDP growth to a tepid 3.7 percent projected GDP growth on September 2. The next update to its forecast will occur tomorrow after the Producer Price Index (PPI) is released at 10 a.m. (The GDPNow update typically occurs within a few hours of a new data release.) The Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow model is the seasonally adjusted annual rate. It comes with the following caveat: “GDPNow is not an official forecast of the Atlanta Fed. Rather, it is best viewed as a running estimate of real GDP growth based on available economic data for the current measured quarter. There are no subjective adjustments made to GDPNow – the estimate is based solely on the mathematical results … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 8, 2021 ~ Natalie Mayflower Sours Edwards received her Ph.D. in 2007 from Virginia Commonwealth University. Her dissertation was titled: “Core Competences Required to Lead an Executive Level at the Department of Homeland Security.” On Friday morning, September 3, Edwards began serving a six-month sentence, to be followed by three years of supervised release, in the Federal Prison Camp known simply as “Alderson” in Alderson, West Virginia. There is currently a notice on the prison camp’s website that reads: “All visiting at this facility has been suspended until further notice.” This means that a woman who set out to help her country ferret out criminal money laundering now finds herself unable to even visit with her husband or her 16-year old daughter. Edwards is the heroic former Treasury official who tried in vain to get her superiors in the federal government to act on … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 7, 2021 ~ JPMorgan Chase has created its own digital coin called JPM Coin. The bank announced last October that the JPM Coin was being used commercially for the first time by “a large technology client to send payments around the world,” according to reporting at CNBC. According to JPMorgan’s website, the JPM Coin currently represents just U.S. dollars but the bank anticipates that it “will be extended to other major currencies, subject to market demand.” According to the trademark application for JPM Coin that was filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the JPM Coin is defined as follows: “Downloadable and recorded software for use in connection with transferring, managing and processing cryptocurrency, digital currency, virtual currency, and digital tokens based on blockchain technology.” JPM Coin runs on the Quorum blockchain, a network the bank developed as a private version of the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 3, 2021 ~ Under the headline New York City’s Katrina Moment: Death Toll From Drowning Rises, on November 1, 2012 Wall Street On Parade reported the following about deaths in New York City from Hurricane Sandy: “Despite what the paper of record would have you believe, Hurricane Sandy was not about killer trees. Hurricane Sandy, like Hurricane Katrina, was about killer water. “The New York Times put it this way on Tuesday, before the death toll had climbed even higher: ‘There were 22 deaths reported in New York City, where the toll was heaviest, and 5 more fatalities elsewhere in the state. Most of all, it was the trees. Uprooted or cracked by the furious winds, they became weapons that flattened cars, houses and pedestrians.’ “Here’s the way those last two sentences should have read: ‘Most of all, it was the wall of water. … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 2, 2021 ~ Jim Himes, a Democrat from Connecticut, chairs the House Financial Services Committee’s Subcommittee on National Security, International Development and Monetary Policy. That Subcommittee has just announced a hearing slated for September 23 at 10:00 a.m. titled: “Lending in a Crisis: Reviewing the Federal Reserve’s Emergency Lending Powers During the Pandemic and Examining Proposals to Address Future Economic Crises.” The list of witnesses for this hearing has not yet been announced. There’s good reason for every American to be nervous about the real agenda of this hearing. For starters, Jim Himes is a 12-year veteran of Goldman Sachs. Second, he lives in Greenwich, Connecticut – the tony enclave of hedge fund billionaires. In addition, six of his top 10 donors over his career in Congress are the mega banks on Wall Street. (See chart below.) There is also the fact that Himes … Continue reading →