By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 15, 2021 ~ Jeff Bezos, the founder and man at the helm of Amazon for the past 27 years, announced last month that he will be stepping down as CEO on July 5. Fifteen days later, according to Bezos, he and his brother Mark will take off on the first crewed space flight from his rocket company, Blue Origin. (Another seat on the flight has been auctioned online for $28 million. The winner has not yet been named.) Following on the heels of Bezos’ 2019 announcement of his divorce to his wife of a quarter of a century, MacKenzie Bezos, and tabloid headlines over his accusations of attempted extortion and blackmail by the National Inquirer over Bezos salacious texts to his girlfriend, shareholders were likely becoming eager for Bezos to hop aboard that spacecraft. What shareholders were apparently not thinking about was what was going … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 14, 2021 ~ Last Tuesday, June 8, at 4:59 a.m. EDT, the public interest news outlet, ProPublica, dropped a bombshell. A source unknown to it had leaked “a vast trove of IRS data on the tax returns of thousands” of the richest Americans, including the top 25 billionaires in the country as of 2018. The data covered numerous years of tax filings and showed that some of the most well known billionaires in the U.S. had paid no income taxes in some years. Carefully reading through the ProPublica material, a few critical details emerge. First, ProPublica does not appear to have tax return data for years later than 2018. Since it’s now June of 2021, that suggests that someone in the Trump administration might have downloaded this data to a thumb drive and waited until recently to leak it. ProPublica acknowledges that it’s had … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 11, 2021 ~ Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts chairs the Senate Banking Committee’s Subcommittee on Economic Policy. On Wednesday the Subcommittee held a hearing on a topic that is becoming ever more timely with each new Bitcoin extortion attack on an essential U.S. business. The hearing was titled: “Building A Stronger Financial System: Opportunities of a Central Bank Digital Currency.” To set the stage for the need for a regulated alternative to the crime network now trafficking in cryptocurrencies, Warren explained all the ways that cryptocurrencies are simply “lousy” for any socially-redeeming purpose. Warren stated: “Cryptocurrencies have turned out to be a fourth-rate alternative to real currency. First, cryptocurrencies are a lousy way to buy and sell things. Unlike the dollar, their value fluctuates wildly depending on the whims of speculative day traders. You know, in just the last two months, the value of … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 10, 2021 ~ Yesterday, Gary Gensler, Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, delivered a speech at the virtual Piper Sandler Global Exchange and FinTech Conference. Gensler promised to tackle at least some of the tricked-up aspects of the U.S. stock market that have rendered it the envy of organized crime, rather than the envy of the world as Wall Street titans like to delude themselves. If Gensler actually follows through on his promise, he will be doing far more than was done by Obama’s SEC chiefs, Mary Schapiro and Mary Jo White. There is a precise date as to when President Obama and SEC Chair Mary Jo White became overtly aware that the stock market structure had been outrageously rigged. That date is March 30, 2014 when famed author and former Wall Street veteran, Michael Lewis, went on 60 Minutes to proclaim: “The … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 9, 2021 ~ The Federal Reserve will release the results of its stress tests of the mega banks on Wall Street on June 24. That exercise is nothing more than a shell game to mislead Congress and the public into believing that actual due diligence is being done by the Fed on these massive federally insured banks with their inhouse trading casinos. (See Three Federal Studies Show Fed’s Stress Tests of Big Banks Are Just a Placebo.) In reality, the Fed is a completely captured appendage of Wall Street. The Fed has outsourced the nitty-gritty supervision of Wall Street banks to the New York Fed, which is, literally, owned by the same banks. (See These Are the Banks that Own the New York Fed and Its Money Button.) That the Fed is still allowed by Congress to have anything to do with supervising these … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 8, 2021 ~ If you’re an early riser and like a cup of coffee with online news before officially starting your day, you got your coffee sans the news at numerous websites this morning. From approximately 5:30 a.m. to 6:30 a.m. ET this morning, major news sites like the New York Times, CNN, Financial Times and Guardian U.K. were dark or had error messages. The sites were not just dark in the U.S. but around the world. According to Fastly, which took the blame for the outages, the disruption impacted major cities across the U.S. and around the world, including Los Angeles, New York, Boston, Chicago, London, Paris, Dubai, Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo, Stockholm, Munich, Amsterdam, Santiago, Rio de Janeiro and dozens more. According to the Guardian news outlet in the U.K., Fastly is “a cloud computing services provider” that is supposed to “speed … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 7, 2021 ~ Janet Yellen, the current U.S. Treasury Secretary, is also the Chair of the Financial Stability Oversight Council, which includes every Wall Street regulator. Before coming to the Treasury Department, Yellen was the Chair of the Federal Reserve and had spent the bulk of her working career at the Fed or the San Francisco Fed. When Yellen was not reappointed as Fed Chair by Donald Trump when her Chairmanship term expired in 2018, she immediately cashed in her chips on Wall Street, collecting millions of dollars in speaking fees in 2019, and undisclosed millions more in 2018. (See Janet Yellen’s Cash Haul of $7 Million Is Just the Tip of the Iceberg; She Failed to Report Her Wall Street Speaking Fees from JPMorgan and Others in 2018.) Yellen was a Federal Reserve Board Governor when she was appointed Fed Chair. Her term … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 4, 2021 ~ The House Financial Services Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, chaired by Congressman Al Green of Texas, will hold a hearing on June 30 titled:  “America on ‘FIRE.’ Will the Crypto Frenzy Lead to Financial Independence and Early Retirement or Financial Ruin?” The announcement of the hearing came yesterday, the same day that Wall Street On Parade reported that the Federal Trade Commission was witnessing a skyrocketing increase in crypto scams. The FTC wrote on May 17: “Reports to the FTC’s Consumer Sentinel suggest scammers are cashing in on the buzz around cryptocurrency and luring people into bogus investment opportunities in record numbers. Since October 2020, reports have skyrocketed, with nearly 7,000 people reporting losses of more than $80 million on these scams.” The Subcommittee has not yet posted its lineup of witnesses for the hearing. Republicans, who are the minority party … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 3, 2021 ~ If you want to get your hair cut outside of your home in the United States, the job has to be done by a licensed worker at a regulated business. The same thing applies to plumbers, electricians, home inspectors, real estate and insurance agents. They all require a license and are subject to regulatory scrutiny. Likewise, commodities like corn, sugar, wheat, lumber and oil are all traded on regulated exchanges which are overseen by a federal regulator. But, for reasons that have yet to be explained to the American people, when it comes to the $1.7 trillion cryptocurrency market – which is effectively a con-game based on the greater fool theory, nothing is regulated. Not the crypto currency; not the promoters; not the crypto exchanges; and not the firms that are providing as much as 100 times leverage to fuel this … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 2, 2021 ~ The chart above has been compiled by the St. Louis Fed using the New York Fed’s data for its issuance of Reverse Repurchase Agreements, otherwise known as Reverse Repos. What’s a Fed Reverse Repo? According to the New York Fed, it is when counterparties loan the Fed money in exchange for collateral, which is typically Treasury bills. In the most recent action, we’re talking about the New York Fed, acting on behalf of the Federal Reserve, selling U.S. Treasuries to Wall Street banks, trading houses, mutual funds and government-sponsored enterprises in overnight and weekend deals and paying zero or next to zero as an interest rate when it buys back the securities. Why would the smartest guys on Wall Street, who never let a loose dime slip through their fingers in order to get a larger cut of the annual bonus pool, be … Continue reading →