Investigative finance blog by Pam Martens and Russ Martens covering Wall Street, the Federal Reserve, bank failures, and market regulation.
One commenter likens it to the VICE News of Wall Street; others cite it for coverage of the Fed and the 2023 bank failures.
Lending money is always a transaction between two parties. Both should be responsible. The financial state of a country is easier to evaluate than that of a person, they shouldn't have faller for the tricks of Goldman Sachs.
> According to investigative reports that appeared in Der Spiegel, the New York Times, BBC, and Bloomberg News from 2010 through 2012, Blankfein, now Goldman Sachs CEO, Cohn, now President and COO, and Loudiadis, a Managing Director, all played a role in structuring complex derivative deals with Greece which accomplished two things: they allowed Greece to hide the true extent of its debt and they ended up almost doubling the amount of debt Greece owed under the dubious derivative deals.
source: http://wallstreetonparade.com/2015/06/goldman-sachs-doesnt-have-clean-hands-in-greece-crisis/
So, EU and IMF didn't catch that, they lent money in a stupidly criminal way and now they want it back at any cost to Greece. They lent Greece money when Greece didn't need it, and now request it back when they are down.
Of course Greece bears the brunt of blame here, but collective punishment at the level of a country is cruel. There are lots of innocents paying now for the financial dealings of the older generation.
It's sad to see EU reduced to this kind of relationships between us. Maybe EU isn't ready to exist as it is. They allowed countries into the union and Eurozone that didn't need to be there. Instead of having a corruption-reducing effect, corruption was…
"...Between March 10 and May 1 of this year, three of the largest bank failures in U.S. history occurred.
On March 10 the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) seized Silicon Valley Bank after $42 billion in deposits had exited the bank the day prior with another $100 billion queued up to leave the next day – meaning it was possible for a federally-insured bank to lose 85 percent of its deposits in the span of 48 hours in the digital age. (For a closer look at what was going on at Silicon Valley Bank, see our report: Silicon Valley Bank Was a Wall Street IPO Pipeline in Drag as a Federally-Insured Bank; FHLB of San Francisco Was Quietly Bailing It Out.)
Two more bank failures followed in short order: Signature Bank on March 12 and First Republic Bank on May 1. Both banks were experiencing bank runs as a result of a loss of confidence by their customers.
First Republic Bank, Silicon Valley Bank, and Signature Bank were the second, third and fourth largest bank failures in U.S. history, respectively. (The largest failure was Washington Mutual during the financial crisis of 2008.)
The Fed’s answer to this crisis of confidence was to allow JPMorgan Chase, officially the riskiest U.S. bank with a string of felonies, to buy the failed First Republic Bank. At the time, First Republic was the 14th largest bank in the U.S. and JPMorgan Chase was the number 1 largest bank with $3.3 trillion in consolidated assets. (Is there any logic, whatsoever, in allowing the riskiest…
I'm pretty skeptical of the reporting of this. The writing itself is quite subpar and the sourcing is touchy to say the least. I just picked a blurb at random.
> Despite his massive personal financial conflicts, Chair Powell has acted with impunity to advantage the Wall Street firms managing his investment fund holdings both before and after the pandemic. Indeed, in late 2019, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, Powell directed the Fed to engage in an unprecedented emergency repo program that provided nearly $20 TRILLION in cumulative loans to Wall Street, including ~$3.7 trillion to Japan’s Nomura Securities and ~$1.4 trillion to Germany’s Deutsche Bank trading arms. Industry experts have opined that the program was in direct violation of the Dodd-Frank Act.24
> 24 https://wallstreetonparade.com/2022/01/a-nomura-document-may-shed-light-on-the-repo-blowup-and-fed-bailout-of-the-gang-of-six-in-2019/
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens
> Mr. Martens’ career spans four decades in publishing and printing management, including magazine and music publishing and the non-profit sector. Mr. Martens has received numerous awards in publishing and graphic design.
> Ms. Martens worked on Wall Street for 21 years. The last decade of her career was spent as an outspoken critic of Wall Street’s corrupt practices, its private justice system and the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act.
Except there's no listed institutions / non-profits / publishers of note. If this is their bombshell article,…
Why is this hyperbole? My understanding is that the Fed has set aside $454 billion of taxpayers’ money via the CARES act to absorb the losses in the bail out programs set up by the Fed.
And this has more detail, from an earlier article [1]
Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania asked Quarles to clarify if the taxpayers’ money ($454 billion handed over by the Treasury to the Fed, which will then be used as equity in Special Purpose Vehicles set up by the Fed and leveraged up to $4.54 trillion to make loans and purchases of toxic assets on Wall Street banks’ balance sheets), is in fact going to be used to absorb losses on what the Fed is taking off the balance sheets on Wall Street. Quarles responded as follows:
“The Treasury has the fiduciary responsibility, if you will, to the Congress for the use of the funds that are appropriated to it. So I wouldn’t want to speak for them as to how that equity should be handled. But it is true that in the construction of the 13(3) facilities [Fed’s emergency programs] that use Treasury equity, the Treasury equity is there to insure the Fed, which statutorily cannot take losses, has to be sure that it won’t, is there to insure that that cushion exists for the funding portion of the facility.”
Fed Chairman Jerome Powell has already admitted that the $454 billion is to be used to absorb losses that it anticipates it will take.
[1]…
Trump has prohibited Musk from being involved in any reviews where he was a material conflict (FAA for example).
You keep saying things that are blatantly untrue, people give you massive evidence they aren't true, then you keep saying them. Why is that?
Elon Musk’s Companies Were Under Investigation by Five Inspectors General When the Trump Administration Fired Them and Made Musk the Investigator
https://wallstreetonparade.com/2025/02/elon-musks-companies-were-under-investigation-by-five-inspectors-general-when-the-trump-administration-fired-them-and-made-musk-the-investigator/
https://www.levernews.com/trump-purges-inspectors-general-investigating-musks-businesses/
Agency sent a memo to all agency staff notifying them that “all election security activities” would be paused pending the results of an internal investigation. The memo also stated that the administration was cutting off all funds to the Election Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center—a Department of Homeland Security–funded organization that helps state and local officials monitor, analyze, and respond to cyberattacks targeting the nation’s election hardware and software.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/02/trump-doge-layoffs-project-2025-election-security-cisa-firing.html
FDA staff were reviewing Elon Musk’s brain implant company. DOGE just fired…
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-11-21/tiger-global-s-now-worthless-ftx-bet-had-bain-s-due-diligence
> Bain & Co. was among consulting firms that helped conduct due diligence for Tiger Global Management’s investment in now-defunct crypto exchange FTX, according to people familiar with the matter. Tiger Global, which pays Bain more than $100 million a year to research private companies, has now written down its $38 million FTX stake to zero.
https://wallstreetonparade.com/2022/11/ftxs-latest-casualties-federally-insured-crypto-banks/
> As of September 30, 2022, Silvergate’s total deposits from all digital asset customers totaled $11.9 billion, of which FTX represented less than 10% ... The stock has lost 28 percent since FTX filed bankruptcy on November 11 ... We know of four FDIC-insured banks whose share prices have already been hit: Silvergate Bank, Customers Bank, Signature Bank and Metropolitan Bank.