Search Results for: Federal Reserve

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 27, 2018 ~ The much anticipated Gross Domestic Product (GDP) number for the second quarter of 2018 was released at 8:30 a.m. this morning. President Trump had played advance man for the number during a rally yesterday saying some were predicting it could be over 5 percent but he would be happy if it had a 4 in front of the number. The number came in at 4.1 percent with the first quarter GDP being revised up to 2.2 percent. While the President would like to see this as a lasting trend owing to the brilliance of his economic policies, experts say the U.S. is far more likely to revert back to the trend of growth in the 2 percent range. The Federal Reserve is projecting a GDP rate of 2.8 percent for all of 2018; 2.4 percent in 2019; and back to … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 24, 2018 ~ The New York Times published a 1300-word shallow dive into the byzantine, globally-interconnected world of financial derivatives in its print edition yesterday. After years of ignoring this seismic problem since it last blew up the U.S. financial system in 2008, what accounts for the New York Times’ newfound interest? We can sum up its 1300 word article using only three letters – CYA. What frightened the Times into this foray into the dark web of financial derivatives held by the biggest Wall Street banks was a frightening, 111-page deep dive into the subject by Michael Greenberger, a law professor at the University of Maryland’s Carey School of Law. Greenberger knows a thing or two about derivatives, having previously served from 1997 to 1999 as the Director of the Division of Trading and Markets at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 23, 2018 According to a report at Reuters yesterday, while Stanley Fischer (the former head of the Israel Central Bank) was sitting in the curious position as Vice Chair of the Federal Reserve in 2015 (the U.S. central bank), he took a meeting with Maria Butina, whom U.S. prosecutors charged last week with being a Russian spy. That’s pretty embarrassing. But that turns out not to be the most interesting part of the Reuters story. The newswire reports that the meeting was arranged by “the Center for the National Interest, a Washington foreign policy think tank….” As it turns out, foreign policy is not exactly all that this taxpayer-subsidized nonprofit does. According to Greenpeace, based on very solid evidence, this is a “Koch Industries climate denial front group.” The Center for the National Interest publishes a magazine, National Interest, which Greenpeace says in … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 17, 2018 ~ With all the front page headlines on Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election to put Donald Trump in the White House, there needs to be some reflection on what’s happening today. Trump’s poll numbers are not collapsing today because the U.S. stock market appears to like Donald Trump. And since tens of millions of Americans’ 401(k) plans and future retirement prospects are tied to the stock market, self interest is playing a role in propping up the President’s approval ratings. But to an ever growing degree, the U.S. stock market is being propped up by hedge fund algorithms, corporations taking on debt to buy back their own stock, big Wall Street banks’ dark pools trading in darkness and foreign central banks and foreign sovereign wealth funds gobbling up U.S. stocks. Now it seems that the tiny window the public has … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 12, 2018 ~   According to a statistical release from the Federal Reserve, as of March 31, 2018 there were 1,812 commercial banks in the United States holding consolidated assets of $300 million or more. Of those 1,812 banks, just four banks (JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Citigroup’s Citibank) held 45 percent of the consolidated assets of those 1,812 banks. But looking at data at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) the situation is even more extreme. The FDIC shows there are 5,606 insured banks in total holding $17.531 trillion in assets. JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Citigroup’s Citibank are holding 40.42 percent of the assets of all the insured banks in the country. Let us put it another way. Those four banks represent 0.07 percent of all banks in the U.S. but they have somehow managed to … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 11, 2018 ~  Just days before President Trump announced his Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh on Monday evening, a dark money group called the Judicial Crisis Network (JCN) was airing a television ad calling some of the most trusted  Democrats “extremists.” As photos of Senators Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and Jeff Merkley flashed across the screen (along with other well known Democrats) a voice warned that these “extremists will lie and attack the nominee.” One thing this threesome actually stands out for is telling the hard truths to the American people. During his presidential bid in 2016, Sanders traveled around the country telling tens of thousands of people at his rallies that the “business model of Wall Street is fraud.” Warren exposed the $6 trillion in a backdoor bailout that the Federal Reserve had funneled secretly to Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch during … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 9, 2018 Since 1999 the chief risk officers of the Wall Street banks that blew themselves up in 2008 because of reckless and irresponsible risk practices have been meeting in secret and calling themselves the Counterparty Risk Management Policy Group (CRMPG). Their plan was to periodically release erudite-sounding reports to regulators suggesting that Wall Street could police itself under a set of “Guiding Principles” in order to perpetuate its off balance sheet debt bombs, unregulated OTC derivatives and a self-regulation regime. The group was led by former New York Fed President E. Gerald Corrigan who then moved on to a lucrative career at Goldman Sachs. Representatives from banks like Lehman Brothers, Citigroup, Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch sat on key committees of the Group and helped to formulate the “Guiding Principles” for Wall Street. Lehman Brothers filed bankruptcy on September 15, 2008 – … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 6, 2018 ~ Last year Simon & Schuster released The Chickenshit Club: Why the Justice Department Fails to Prosecute Executives by the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist at ProPublica, Jesse Eisinger. If you read nothing else this summer, you should read this book followed by Nomi Prins’ Collusion: How Central Bankers Rigged the World. The two books provide Americans with a comprehensive understanding of how the Justice Department, Federal regulators, a growing number of Federal judges and the central bank of the United States known as the Federal Reserve have been corrupted by corporate influence. To a large degree, they now serve their corporate masters, not the American people. The Chickenshit Club is a lively, fascinating and disturbing look behind the scenes at the U.S. Justice Department, its U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York and the judges and lawyers who … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 3, 2018 ~ Here’s the thing about stock market bubbles: they can last far longer than even expert analysis suggests they should. But correctly defining a stock market as an unsustainable bubble is still a worthy exercise since it clarifies how much one stands to lose when the bubble does eventually pop. One of the market watchers who is unabashedly calling for a major market correction – potentially in the realm of 60 percent from peak to trough – is John P. Hussman, President of Hussman Investment Trust. In his most recent market commentary, Hussman writes: “Unlike much of the recent bull market, present market conditions reflect not only extreme valuations (including a full syndrome of overvalued, overbought, overbullish features), but also divergence and dispersion in our measures of market internals. It’s that deterioration in market internals that threatens to unleash the beast … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 29, 2018 ~ The U.S. Federal Reserve, the country’s central bank that is supposed to serve the interests of the nation, gave the largest Wall Street banks a big, irresponsible gift yesterday. The big banks will now be able to spend approximately $170 billion buying back their own stock and paying out increased dividends to shareholders instead of doing what banks are supposed to do: make loans to worthy businesses to stimulate the U.S. economy. But don’t expect to find that critical news on the front page of your local newspaper. The front pages of newspapers across America proved once again today that chaos in the running of the Federal government is dominating news reporting while it continues to relegate to the back pages the alarming risks that are growing again on Wall Street. This raises the question as to whether the chaos … Continue reading →