Tag: Pam Martens

QUOTE OF THE DAY

“Among the items of interest in JPMorgan Chase’s written [earnings] presentation was that it spent $6.7 billion in this past third quarter buying up its own stock and thus boosting its stock price artificially beyond outside investor demand. The third quarter buybacks of its stock came on top of spending $5 billion in the second quarter and $4.7 billion in the first quarter, bringing its net repurchases of its own stock just so far this year to a whopping $16.4 billion — money that could have otherwise gone to loans to small businesses to kickstart innovation and job growth in America.

The [House Financial Services’] Subcommittee notes that buybacks have skyrocketed from less than $200 billion in 2000 to a record $811 billion last year. The mega banks on Wall Street are responsible for a big chunk of those dollars.

Another unprecedented and totally crazy aspect of today’s banking scene is that criminal felony charges no longer matter. You can be a bank like JPMorgan Chase, holding $1.6 billion in deposits for risk-adverse savers, while also being regularly charged with crimes.”

Pam and Russ Martens, Capping the Craziest Banking Era in US History

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QUOTE OF THE DAY

“Wall Street did not accidentally run a barge aground and leave a small oil slick on the Hudson River. Wall Street did not accidentally release tainted lettuce that sickened a few dozen people.

What Wall Street did was intentional and criminal: it financially engineered a toxic subprime house of cards which it knew from its own internal reviews was going to collapse; it then molded the toxic product into inscrutable bundles; it sold the bundles to unsuspecting investors around the globe while making side bets that it would all come crashing down.

Then, after causing the greatest financial collapse in the United States since the Great Depression, Wall Street’s unrepentant scoundrels paid themselves billions of dollars in bonuses with taxpayer bailout funds.”

Pam and Russ Martens, Wall Street On Parade

 


Pam Martens’ Warning to the Fed and the Clintons in 1998 – And She Warns Them Again Now

 Guest Post by Jesse

It is the same players that we saw enabling reckless behaviour in 1998: Citigroup, the Fed, and the Clinton-led Wall Street Democrats.

And here we are again, almost eighteen years later, watching the same short term, selfish behaviour by the big money banks putting the entire economy of productive individuals at risk again.

“There’s something big and scary going on behind the scenes but, as usual, the public isn’t reading about it on the front pages of the newspapers…

Dodd-Frank was supposed to push the derivatives out of the commercial banks which hold the insured deposits to prevent another taxpayer bailout, the so-called “push out” rule. But in December of 2014, Citigroup was able to sneak legislation into the must-pass spending bill to keep the government running that overturned the push-out rule…

Using its insured bank’s balance sheet as ballast, Citigroup’s bank holding company now ranks as the largest holder of all derivatives in the U.S. According to the Comptroller of the Currency, the very bank that blew itself up in 2008 and received the largest taxpayer bailout in history, now holds $55 trillion in notional amount of derivatives.

But far more alarming is the type of derivatives Citigroup appears hell bent on gaining market share in trading. Last week we reported that Citigroup is plowing into credit default swaps, the very derivatives that blew up the big insurance company, AIG, in 2008 and forced a government bailout of AIG to the tune of $185 billion…

On March 8 of this year [2016], the Office of Financial Research, which was created under the Dodd-Frank legislation to monitor the buildup of systemic financial risks, released a study on Credit Default Swaps. Its findings were deeply troubling…”

You may read the entire article at Wall Street On Parade.


QUOTE OF THE DAY

“Make no mistake about it, just as Lehman Brothers was set up to take the fall for triggering the 2008 collapse, China is being groomed as the new scapegoat for the coming crisis. But China’s economic slump is only a symptom, not the disease…

The reality is that the repeal of Glass-Steagall ushered in the greatest wealth transfer scheme in the history of America, allowing six mega banks in America to control the vast majority of insured deposits, use those taxpayer-backed deposits to gamble for the house, loot the bank from the inside by paying billions of dollars to select employees and customers and then hand the gambling tab to the taxpayer when the casino burns down. This model is a staggering headwind on both U.S. and global growth because it has created the greatest wealth and income inequality since the Great Depression.”

Pam and Russ Martens, The Real Reason Global Stocks Are Flashing Red this Morning


Still Backstopping the Banks With Public Money

Guest Post by Jesse

“Gentlemen! I too have been a close observer of the doings of the Bank of the United States. I have had men watching you for a long time, and am convinced that you have used the funds of the bank to speculate in the breadstuffs of the country.

When you won, you divided the profits amongst you, and when you lost, you charged it to the bank. You tell me that if I take the deposits from the bank and annul its charter I shall ruin ten thousand families. That may be true, gentlemen, but that is your sin!

Should I let you go on, you will ruin fifty thousand families, and that would be my sin! You are a den of vipers and thieves. I have determined to rout you out, and by the Eternal, (bringing his fist down on the table) I will rout you out.”

Andrew Jackson, in a meeting with the Bankers in Philadelphia, February 1834

Serious financial reform is almost never discussed in any meaningful way in the political campaign debates, for all the petty sniping and smart remarks that pass for a serious discussion of our policy issues.  Life imitates high school.

Goldman Sachs’ Rich Man’s Bank Backstopped by You and Me
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens
October 21, 2015

Continue reading “Still Backstopping the Banks With Public Money”

Who or What Is Killing the Bankers of Wall Street?

Guest Post by Jesse

“While the earnings of a minority are growing exponentially, so too is the gap separating the majority from the prosperity enjoyed by those happy few. This imbalance is the result of ideologies which defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation. Consequently, they reject the right of states, charged with vigilance for the common good, to exercise any form of control.

A new tyranny is thus born, invisible and often virtual, which unilaterally and relentlessly imposes its own laws and rules … In this system, which tends to devour everything which stands in the way of increased profits, whatever is fragile, like the environment, is defenceless before the interests of a deified market, which become the only rule.”

Francis I

“He was a murderer from the beginning, not standing with the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks of his own, for he is a liar, and the father of lies.”

John 8:44

It feeds on whatever is fragile, vulnerable, whether it be the environment, the public peace, the weak, the marginalized, the poor, the disabled, or the hearts and minds of children.

Peace and love are weakness; conquest and plunder are our calling.

There are a number of possible explanations for this recent cluster of untimely deaths on Wall Street.

Continue reading “Who or What Is Killing the Bankers of Wall Street?”

NY Fed Joins War On Whistleblowers To Shield Goldman Sachs From Its Own Examiner

Guest Post from Jesse

And this sort of egregious behaviour from a ‘regulator.’  They argue out of both sides of their mouths whether Goldman is a ‘bank’ or not, in order to get what they want for…  Goldman.

The Fed is not a government agency, but a privately owned creature of the very Banks whom it is charged to regulate and restrain.

And as we have seen, over and over again, the Fed is not part of the solution, but has become very much a part of the problem in distorting the banking system in favour of a few powerful financial interests.

A Mangled Case of Justice on Wall Street
By Pam Martens
May 8, 2014

On October 10, 2013, bank examiner Carmen Segarra and her attorney, Linda Stengle of Boyertown, Pennsylvania, took on one of the mightiest and interconnected institutions on Wall Street: the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. They relied on the Federal court system, funded by the taxpayer, and a fair and impartial judge to level the playing field. Things got off to a promising start.

Segarra was a bank examiner at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, a key regulator of Wall Street banks. She charged in her lawsuit that when she turned in a negative assessment of Goldman Sachs, she was bullied and intimidated by colleagues at the New York Fed to change her findings.

When she refused, she was terminated from her job in retaliation and escorted from the Fed premises, according to her lawsuit…

Read the entire story here.

DYING TO GET TO THE BOTTOM OF THIS

Do you get the feeling things are beginning to unravel? Do you smell a whiff of panic in the air? Do you sense the ruling elite are starting to turn on each other. The psychopaths in the boardrooms wouldn’t murder to cover up their criminal misdeeds or would they? This Fourth Turning is starting to heat up.

A Rash of Deaths and a Missing Reporter – With Ties to Wall Street Investigations
By Pam Martens
February 3, 2014

In a span of four days last week, two current executives and one recently retired top ranking executive of major financial firms were found dead. Both media and police have been quick to label the deaths as likely suicides. Missing from the reports is the salient fact that all three of the financial firms the executives worked for are under investigation for potentially serious financial fraud.

The deaths began on Sunday, January 26. London police reported that William Broeksmit, a top executive at Deutsche Bank who had retired in 2013, had been found hanged in his home in the South Kensington section of London. The day after Broeksmit was pronounced dead, Eric Ben-Artzi, a former risk analyst turned whistleblower at Deutsche Bank, was scheduled to speak at Auburn University in Alabama on his allegations that Deutsche had hid $12 billion in losses during the financial crisis with the knowledge of senior executives. Two other whistleblowers have brought similar charges against Deutsche Bank.

Deutsche Bank is also under investigation by global regulators for potentially rigging the foreign exchange markets – an action similar to the charges it settled in 2013 over its traders’ involvement in the rigging of the interest rate benchmark, Libor.

Just two days after Broeksmit’s death, on Tuesday, January 28, a 39-year old American, Gabriel Magee, a Vice President at JPMorgan in London, plunged to his death from the roof of the 33-story European headquarters of JPMorgan in Canary Wharf. According to Magee’s LinkedIn profile, he was involved in “Technical architecture oversight for planning, development, and operation of systems for fixed income securities and interest rate derivatives…”

Read the entire story here.