Search Results for: Federal Reserve

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 1, 2019 ~ Could Bernanke, Paulson and Geithner have possibly picked a more self-serving title for their latest revisionist history of their secret $29 trillion bailout of the most insidiously corrupt industry in America? Their new book is titled Firefighting: The Financial Crisis and Its Lessons. Every municipal and volunteer firefighter in America should come together to file a class action lawsuit against the three for invoking an honorable profession in their dishonorable gambit to set Wall Street up for another obscene heads-we-win, tails-you-lose bailout. What the shameless trio – former Fed Chair Ben Bernanke; former Treasury Secretary under G.W. Bush and Ex-CEO of Goldman Sachs Hank Paulson; and former New York Fed President and Treasury Secretary under Obama, Tim Geithner – are up to is to provide cover for the Wall Street lobbyists who are trying to bully Congress into repealing the … Continue reading →

  By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 29, 2019 ~ In what can only be described as a new low in defining deviancy down on Wall Street, Thomson Reuters’ International Financing Review (IFR) reported this past weekend that some of the biggest names on Wall Street have returned to creating and/or trading synthetic collateralized debt obligations (Synthetic CDOs). The products were a major factor in bringing the U.S. financial system to the brink of failure in 2008. Synthetic CDOs also resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars in fines and reputational damage to these same Wall Street behemoths as investigators found that the firms were allowing hedge funds to pick “crap” subprime mortgage bonds to stuff in the CDOs in order to make windfall profits for the hedge fund, which shorted (bet against) the CDOs. The Wall Street firms had full knowledge of what the hedge funds were doing … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 24, 2019 ~ What the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC) wanted to see the U.S. Justice Department pursue was a potential criminal prosecution of Stan O’Neal, the CEO of Merrill Lynch in the leadup to the financial crisis, and its then CFO Jeffrey Edwards, for “making materially false and misleading representations and omissions about (a) Merrill’s exposure to retained CDO positions, (b) the value of those positions and (c) the firm’s risk management.” The FCIC also believed that Merrill had lied “in the offering documents for its $1.5 billion Norma CDO that was sold to investors in March of 2007.” A CDO is a Collateralized Debt Obligation which can be stuffed with about anything but during the 2006-2007 period was typically stuffed with subprime mortgages or synthetics linked to subprime mortgages. It was Wall Street’s cash cow and through what amounted to pay-to-play … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 22, 2019 ~   Based on data that Wall Street On Parade has newly compiled, there is a strong suggestion that the Federal Reserve conspired with at least three of the largest Wall Street firms to hide their teetering condition from the public during the financial crisis, despite the fact that these were all New York Stock Exchange listed companies with a duty to reveal material, adverse financial information to the public in a timely fashion. If Maxine Waters wants to leave her mark in history as Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, she will subpoena records from the Federal Reserve on its biggest and dirtiest bailout program, known as the Primary Dealer Credit Facility (PDCF). She and her colleagues must then demand answers from Fed witnesses during the hearing Waters has scheduled for May 16 at 10:00 a.m. The upcoming hearing … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 17, 2019 ~ On July 21, 2011, when the GAO released its audit of the Federal Reserve’s secret $16.1 trillion in bank loans during the financial crisis, a foreign bank ranked number 9 on the list of the largest borrowers. The loans went not just to the largest banks on Wall Street but to foreign derivative counterparties to the Wall Street banks. The foreign bank that ranked 9 on the list of the largest borrowers was Germany’s largest bank, Deutsche Bank, which took $354 billion in revolving loans from the U.S. Federal Reserve. According to an article in the Financial Times last week “Germany’s federal and state governments have spent €70bn on bailing out banks since the financial crisis, according to an estimate by Gerhard Schick, head of lobby group Finance Watch.” The figure of  €70bn is about 79 billion U.S. dollars. Why … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 15, 2019 ~ If you want to very quickly understand why banks stopped lending to one another in 2008, credit markets froze, bank stock prices collapsed, and the Federal Reserve secretly pumped $16 trillion into banks, just take a few moments to study this chart from the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission of the derivatives casino that Goldman Sachs and the major banks on Wall Street had become in June of 2008. Wall Street banks knew they had created a collapsing house of cards but they didn’t know just how much exposure each bank had or which bank would fail first, so they simply stopped lending to each other, causing a run on the banks. Now, take a deep breath, because we have to tell you that if there was a derivatives graph of every other major Wall Street bank in June of 2008, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 12, 2019 ~ One day before Democrats on the House Financial Services Committee held an historic grilling of the CEOs of the mega banks on Wall Street, the nonprofit watchdog, Better Markets, released an in-depth research report on “Wall Street’s Six Biggest Bailed-Out Banks: Their RAP Sheets & Their Ongoing Crime Spree.” The report detailed facts, figures and this inescapable conclusion: “[Six Wall Street mega banks] have engaged in—and continue to engage in—a crime spree that spans the violation of almost every law and rule imaginable. Taking the breadth and depth of their illegal conduct as a whole, the six biggest banks in the country look like criminal enterprises with RAP sheets that would make most career criminals green with envy. That was the case not just before the 2008 crash, but also during and after the crash and their lifesaving bailouts…In fact, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 10, 2019 ~ At 8:00 a.m. yesterday, Politico’s Ben White and Aubree Eliza Weaver dropped the news nugget that the nonprofit watchdog, Better Markets, would be releasing one day ahead of today’s House hearing with the CEOs of the largest banks on Wall Street a report titled: “The RAP Sheet for Wall Street’s Biggest Banks’ Crime Spree,” which promised to detail, for the first time, “that of the more than $29 trillion in total bailouts, the six biggest banks in the country (Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, and Wells Fargo) received more than $8.2 trillion, or nearly one-third of the total bailouts provided to the entire financial system.” Wall Street On Parade has been reporting since 2012 that of the secret $16 trillion bailout loans made at almost zero interest rates by the Federal Reserve during the financial … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 9, 2019 ~  The Democrats are now in charge at the U.S. House of Representatives’ Financial Services Committee and they’re proving that they’re not afraid to take on the legions of Wall Street lobbyists and lawyers in order to do their job for the American people. Tomorrow, Democrats on the Committee will be grilling the CEOs of seven of the largest Wall Street banks. The Republican Committee members, if history is any guide, will be lauding the bankers based on talking points delivered by the banks’ public relations and lobbying firms. Democrats took over the House in January and Congresswoman Maxine Waters became the Chair of the House Financial Services Committee at that time. Waters has served on this Committee for the past 28 years – a period in which she has observed unending frauds against the investing public by the mega banks … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 8, 2019 ~ Steve Eisman is one of the central characters in the Michael Lewis bestselling book, The Big Short. In the movie of the same name, Steve Carell portrays Eisman’s role under the name Mark Baum. During the financial crisis of 2008, Eisman was working for FrontPoint Partners LLC, a hedge fund unit of Morgan Stanley which has been widely acknowledged to have made a boatload of money shorting subprime collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) filled with subprime residential mortgages. In other words, Eisman and FrontPoint were hoping to profit on American homeowners being unable to pay their tricked-up mortgages and being thrown out on the street. But according to Lewis, Eisman was not just shorting subprime drek – he was also shorting the teetering Wall Street banks, which were, by the way, holding trillions of dollars in Federally insured deposits of Moms … Continue reading →