by Pam Martens and Russ Martens
Wall Street on Parade
The horror stories that continue to spill out about what Wall Street banks are doing behind their cloistered walls have blurred the actual function of Wall Street: to efficiently allocate capital so that new industries can be born and thrive in America, creating new jobs and a rising standard of living for all of our fellow citizens.
In the same week that the U.S. Senate Banking committee was taking testimony that one of the biggest Wall Street banks, Wells Fargo, was opening two million unauthorized customer accounts over at least a four-year span in order to generate fees and meet daily sales quotas, the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that just 68 new companies had been listed for public trading this year, a drop of 51 percent from the 138 companies that had gone public by this time last year.
Let’s recap what the public has learned over the past eight years about the Wall Street banking model from hell. (1) The greatest housing collapse since the Great Depression resulted from Wall Street banks muzzling their internal whistleblowers who wrote memos to management and shouted from the rafters that the banks’ mortgage loan departments were ignoring their own compliance rules and buying up tens of thousands of mortgages with wildly overstated incomes by the mortgage holder. (2) The banks then knowingly bundled these toxic mortgages into pools and paid the ratings agencies, Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s, to assign triple-A ratings to the offerings (called securitizations). (3) The banks knew these toxic mortgages would fail but they sold them to their customers as sound investments. (4) The banks also used their insider knowledge that the mortgages were going to fail to place bets (short sales) and reap billions of dollars in profits as the U.S. housing market collapsed and families were thrown into the streets.
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