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Recent Posts
- Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” Is a Grotesque Giveaway to Fossil Fuel Billionaires While Adding $3.3 Trillion to Nation’s Debt
- Senator Chris Murphy Charges that Trump “Has Opened a Channel for Bribery”
- Congressman Casten: Trump’s Assault on the Rule of Law Is Causing Capital Flight Out of U.S. by Foreign Investors
- Trump’s Approval Rating Drops to 80-Year Low; IMF Says U.S. Tariffs Now Exceed the Highs During the Great Depression
- Nasdaq Has Lost More than 3,000 Points Since Trump’s First Full Day in Office in 2025; the Pain Has Barely Begun
- The Bond Crisis Last Week Was a Global No-Confidence Vote in U. S. President Donald Trump
- Trump’s Tariff Plan Guts $5 Trillion in Stock Value in Two Days; Senator Warren Calls for Emergency Action Before Markets Open on Monday
- Trump’s Attacks on Big Law, Universities, and the Media Have a Common Goal: Silence Dissent Against Authoritarian Rule
- Trump Administration Gives All Clear to Laundering Money through Shell Companies and Bribing Foreign Officials
- Four Megabanks on Wall Street Hold $3.2 Trillion in Uninsured Deposits – Which May Explain Senator Schumer’s Pivot to the GOP to Stop a Government Shutdown
- Here’s What Came Crashing Down Yesterday for Trump’s “Genius” Guy, Elon Musk: Tesla Stock, Access to Twitter (X), His Years of Secret Calls with Putin
- After Banning the Associated Press, Trump Is Now Targeting Specific Journalists That He Wants to See Fired
- Closely Watched Atlanta Fed Model Predicts Negative U.S. Growth in First Quarter
- Trump’s Gangster Diplomacy Makes Front Page Headlines Around the Globe
- Who Benefits Alongside Elon Musk If He Succeeds in Killing the CFPB: the Megabanks on Wall Street that Underwrite His Tesla Stock Offerings
- In Trump 1.0, the State Department Used Taxpayer Money to Publish a Book Elevating Elon Musk to a Superhero; It Was Funded by USAID, the Agency Musk Wants to Quickly Shut Down
- News Host Joy Reid Raises Threat of Trump Selling U.S. to Putin; Ten Days Later Her Show Is Cancelled
- Elon Musk’s DOGE Appears to Be Violating a Court Order; It Has Taken Down Hundreds of YouTube Videos that Educate Americans on How to Avoid Being Swindled
- Barron’s Releases Audio of Jamie Dimon Cursing Out His Workers at a Town Hall, as Dimon Plans to Dump Another One Million JPM Shares
- There’s One Federal Investigative Agency that Neither Trump nor Elon Musk Can Touch: It Just Opened an Investigation into DOGE
- Elon Musk’s Companies Were Under Investigation by Five Inspectors General When the Trump Administration Fired Them and Made Musk the Investigator
- Donald Trump Gives the Greenlight to Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase to Return to Bribing Foreign Officials
- After Tech Geeks Built a Back Door to Loot Billions from FTX, Republicans Refuse to Investigate What Elon Musk’s Tech-Squad Did Inside the U.S. Treasury’s Payment System
- Former Prosecutor, Now U.S. Senator, Informs Tesla That CEO Musk May Be Violating Federal Law and to “Preserve All Records”
- Trump’s Hedge Fund Guy Is Now Overseeing the U.S. Treasury, IRS, OCC, U.S. Mint, FinCEN, F-SOC, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
- As Elon Musk Begins Shutting Down Payments to Federal Contractors, a Strange Money Trail Emerges to His Operatives Inside the U.S. Treasury’s Payment System
- JPMorgan Chase Charged by Yet Another Internal Whistleblower with Cooking the Books
- We Asked Google’s AI Search Model, Gemini, Questions About the Fed and Wall Street Megabanks: It Got the Answers Dead Wrong
- With Trump and Melania’s Crypto Coins Likely to Raise Legal Challenges, Why Didn’t Trump Fire the SEC’s Inspector General in His Purge of IGs?
- Fossil Fuel Industry Could End Up Paying Tens of Billions for LA Wildfires and Deceiving the Public on Climate Change for Decades
- It’s Being Called the Biggest Grift by a President in U.S. History: Trump and First Lady Launch their Own Crypto Coins
- Trump Plans to Install a Fracking CEO to Head the Energy Department and Declare a National Emergency on Energy to Gain Vast Powers
- Fossil Fuel Money Played a Role in the Los Angeles Fires and the Push to Install Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense
- When It Comes to Wealth Retention in Retirement, Concrete May Be the New Gold
- Wall Street Watchdog Warns “Clock Is Ticking on a Coming Catastrophic Financial Crash”
- Wall Street Is Sending the Same Message to Americans on Fossil Fuel Financing that It Sent on Cigarettes: Drop Dead
- In a Six-Week Span, this Dark Pool with a Curious Past Traded 3.7 Billion Shares
- Wall Street’s Lobby Firm Hired Eugene Scalia of Gibson Dunn to Sue the Fed for Jamie Dimon
- Postmaster General Louis DeJoy Made $561,051 in Compensation in 2024, as Mail Costs Spiked and Delivery Deteriorated
- Fed Chair Jay Powell Sends a Bold Message to Trump and Tanks the Dow by 1123 Points
- The Head of Fixed Income at T. Rowe Price Makes the Scary Case for the 10-Year Treasury to Spike to 6 Percent
- $663 Billion in Cash Assets Have Gone Poof at the Largest U.S. Banks
- Donald Trump to Ring Bell at New York Stock Exchange Today as Hit List Posters Appear in Manhattan Targeting Wall Street CEOs
- Trump Has a Slush Fund to Prop Up the Dollar – Will He Use It to Prop Up Bitcoin Instead?
- A CEO Assassination; a Billionaire Heiress/NYPD Commissioner; a Secret Wall Street Spy Center – Here’s How They’re Connected
- Despite More than 1600 Tech Scientists Signing a Letter Calling Crypto a Sham, Trump Names a Crypto Cheerleader for SEC Chair
- The Fed Rings a Warning Bell: Hedge Funds and Life Insurers Are Reporting Historic Leverage
- Trump’s Nominee for FBI Director, Kash Patel, Has Businesses Financially Intertwined with Trump
- Donald Trump Is at Risk of Getting Named in a Fossil Fuels Conspiracy Lawsuit
- Trump Is Having Difficulty Getting a Lawyer to Accept the Nomination for SEC Chair: Here’s Why
Search Results for: JPMorgan
Senators Express Outrage at Hearing over Mnuchin’s Sneakiness with $500 Billion of Taxpayers’ Money

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 20, 2020 ~ We’ve been watching Senate Banking Committee hearings for decades. There is typically some level of professional politeness by Senators toward witnesses that are testifying. That didn’t happen yesterday. Both Republicans and Democrats lashed out at Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin for effectively cooking up a deal that put him in charge of $500 billion of taxpayers’ money under the stimulus bill known as the CARES Act and has now left Congress in the dark about how that money is being spent. During the hearing, which was held virtually, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts summed up the situation to Mnuchin like this: “You are boosting your Wall Street buddies and leaving Americans behind.” The hearing was called to hear from both Mnuchin and Fed Chair Jerome Powell. The CARES Act, irresponsibly, gave Mnuchin control of $500 billion, of which $454 billion was … Continue reading
Taxpayers Are on the Hook for 98 Percent of the Fed’s $6.98 Trillion Balance Sheet

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 19, 2020 ~ If there has been any positive outcome from the COVID-19 pandemic, it has been that the American people are beginning to take a cold, hard look at how the U.S. economy has been engineered as a vast wealth transfer system for the one percent. We have peeled back the dark curtain further today on how the Federal Reserve has been structured as an unlimited money spigot to enrich that one percent as it privatizes profits for the criminally-inclined Wall Street titans and socializes the losses to the law-abiding 99 percent of hardworking Americans. ~~~ The Federal Reserve Board of Governors consists of seven individuals appointed by the President of the United States and confirmed by the U.S. Senate. As of today, only five of those Governor seats have been filled. As of last Wednesday, these five unelected individuals were overseeing … Continue reading
The Fed’s Chair and Vice Chair Got Rich at Carlyle Group, a Private Equity Fund with a String of Bankruptcies and Job Losses

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 18, 2020 ~ Private equity funds have been variously called “merchants of debt,” “vultures,” or “corporate raiders.” What a private equity fund typically does is to buy up companies by piling debt on the balance sheet, selling off valuable assets like real estate, extracting giant dividends for the private equity partners to the detriment of workers and customers, and then, frequently, letting the company collapse into bankruptcy while laying off thousands of workers or liquidating the whole company. It should give pause to every American that the two top men at the Federal Reserve who are implementing a new $4.54 trillion bailout fund for Wall Street, using $454 billion from taxpayers to absorb the losses, both got rich working for one of the world’s largest such private equity firms: the Carlyle Group. According to his official bio, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell was a … Continue reading
Wall Street Banks Paid $11.7 Billion in Dividends to Investors this Year while Taxpayers Must Absorb $454 Billion of Bank Losses

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 15, 2020 ~ Following the Wall Street banking collapse in 2008, the then head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) Sheila Bair wrote the book Bull by the Horns. She described how the Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) had ignored the systemic problems at Citigroup and allowed this “sick bank” to continue paying out cash dividends. Bair wrote as follows: “By November [of 2008], the supposedly solvent Citi was back on the ropes, in need of another government handout. The market didn’t buy the OCC’s and NY Fed’s strategy of making it look as though Citi was as healthy as the other commercial banks. Citi had not had a profitable quarter since the second quarter of 2007. Its losses were not attributable to uncontrollable ‘market conditions’; they were attributable to weak management, high levels of … Continue reading
Evidence Suggests U.S. Financial Crisis Started on August 14, 2019

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 14, 2020 ~ In the Federal Reserve’s most recent “Supervision and Regulation Report” on the big bank holding companies it “supervises,” the Fed continued its attempts to perpetuate the narrative that “The banking industry came into 2020 in a healthy financial position” and has simply unraveled as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. That narrative is built on the same flimsy house of cards that the New York Times and Andrew Ross-Sorkin built the narrative that the mega banks on Wall Street were not responsible for the 2008 financial collapse. The Fed is desperate to promote this narrative to stop a new Congress next year from holding hearings on why the Fed, for the second time in 12 years, had to engage in trillions of dollars in Wall Street bank bailouts after reassuring Congress for years that the financial system was fine as … Continue reading
The Fed Hasn’t Spent a Dime Yet for Main Street Versus $735 Billion for Wall Street

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 13, 2020 ~ The stimulus bill known as the CARES Act (Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act) was signed into law by President Donald Trump on March 27. Among its many features (such as direct checks to struggling Americans and enhancing unemployment compensation by $600 per week for four months to unemployed workers so they could pay their rent and buy food) the bill also carved out a dubious $454 billion (or 25 percent of the total $1.8 trillion spending package) for the U.S. Treasury to hand over to the Federal Reserve. This was the Faustian Bargain the Democrats had to agree to in order to get the deal approved by the Wall Street cronies in the Senate. If you subtract the $454 billion from the $1.8 trillion total spending package, that left $1.346 trillion for other purposes. But the $454 billion … Continue reading
BlackRock Begins Buying Junk Bond ETFs for the Fed Today: It’s Already at Work for the Central Bank of Israel

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 12, 2020 ~ It’s off to the races today for BlackRock. The New York Fed, with authority from the Federal Reserve Board and backstopped with taxpayers’ money, will begin the first phase of the Fed’s unprecedented leap into shoring up the sagging prices of investment grade corporate debt and junk bonds. BlackRock has been selected by the New York Fed to be the investment manager for these bailout facilities and will begin Phase I today by buying up Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) containing investment grade corporate bonds as well as junk bonds. Making the situation particularly dicey is that BlackRock just happens to be one of the largest purveyors of said ETFs. The screaming conflict-of-interest that this raises in the minds of many is not ruffling any feathers at the New York Fed (which is itself a bundle of conflicts wrapped in a … Continue reading
Fed Report Shows Magical Thinking on Safety of Wall Street’s Banks

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 11, 2020 ~ The chart above from the November 2019 Federal Reserve report on the condition of the biggest banks in the U.S. shows that almost half were rated unsatisfactory. There have not been any reports since that November report until the latest one from the Fed which was released last week and dated May 2020. The new report carries this headline: “The banking industry came into 2020 in a healthy financial position.” This is part of the Fed’s strategy to lay its abysmal failure to supervise the mega Wall Street banks at the door of the coronavirus pandemic. It’s very easy today to get a totally bogus headline, one that is built completely on magical thinking, flashed across a TV screen in America. As the photo below illustrates, last Friday Steve Liesman of CNBC repeated this magical thinking from the Fed accompanied … Continue reading
Congress Sets Up Taxpayers to Eat $454 Billion of Wall Street’s Losses. Where Is the Outrage?

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 7, 2020 ~ Beginning on March 24 of this year, Larry Kudlow, the White House Economic Advisor, began to roll out the most deviously designed bailout of Wall Street in the history of America. After the Federal Reserve’s secret $29 trillion bailout of Wall Street from 2007 to 2010, and the exposure of that by a government audit and in-depth report by the Levy Economics Institute in 2011, Kudlow was going to have to come up with a brilliant strategy to sell another multi-trillion-dollar Wall Street bailout to the American people. The scheme was brilliant (in an evil genius sort of way) and audacious in employing an Orwellian form of reverse-speak. The plan to bail out Wall Street would be sold to the American people as a rescue of “Main Street.” It was critical, however, that all of the officials speaking to the … Continue reading
Wall Street’s Financial Crisis Preceded COVID-19: Chart and Timeline

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 1, 2020 ~ If a reputable polling outfit were to ask Americans what caused the current financial crisis on Wall Street, they would say the coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic. If Americans were asked in the same poll when the financial crisis on Wall Street started, they would tie it to outbreaks of the virus in the U.S. this year. But as the timeline below and the chart above clearly substantiate, the financial crisis on Wall Street began in earnest on September 17, 2019, almost four months before the first death from coronavirus anywhere in the world was reported in China on January 11, 2020 and five months before the first death in the U.S. was reported on February 29, 2020, having occurred one day earlier on February 28. (See the New York Times coronavirus timetable here.) This big disconnect between what people believe about … Continue reading