By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 4, 2025 ~ On the very day that Donald Trump is set to deliver a major address to a joint session of Congress, with a disapproval rating of 52 percent according to a CNN poll out on Sunday, the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s model for predicting U.S. economic growth is flashing red. The model is known as GDPNow and is highly respected for its accuracy. After an update yesterday based on new, incoming economic data, GDP for the first quarter is predicted to be -2.8 percent. The GDPNow staffers wrote this yesterday: “The GDPNow model estimate for real GDP growth (seasonally adjusted annual rate) in the first quarter of 2025 is -2.8 percent on March 3, down from -1.5 percent on February 28. After this morning’s releases from the US Census Bureau and the Institute for Supply Management, the nowcast of first-quarter real personal consumption expenditures … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 3, 2025 ~ Donald Trump’s gangster diplomacy and anger management issues went viral on the front page of newspapers around the globe on Saturday, following his verbal assault on Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the President of Ukraine, in the Oval Office on Friday. Those headlines were then parsed and debated on Sunday’s TV news programs here in the U.S. and by U.S. based newspaper columnists. Margaret Brennan of the CBS News program, Face the Nation, reported on her program on Sunday morning that “Our social media producers tell us that, as of this morning, we have had more than 100 million views on posts related to the meeting across our CBS News social media platforms.” The reason for the unprecedented interest is because no other U.S. President in history has conducted such thug “diplomacy” with a foreign ally by screaming at him in the Oval Office in … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 28, 2025 ~ On June 29, 2010 when the electric vehicle company, Tesla, launched its Initial Public Offering (IPO) on the Nasdaq Stock Market, its underwriters were trading powerhouses on Wall Street: Goldman, Sachs & Co., Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, and Deutsche Bank Securities. Over the next dozen years, Tesla would utilize these investment banks and others to raise billions more in secondary stock offerings of Tesla shares. It was a very happy marriage. The Wall Street megabanks made big fees on the underwritings and Musk was able to cash out tens of billions of dollars for himself in Tesla stock sales. That happy, mutually beneficial relationship turned sour when Musk borrowed $13 billion from a consortium of the megabanks to help fund his purchase of the social medium platform, Twitter, in 2022. (Musk has since renamed Twitter as “X.”) The banks got stuck with these … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 25, 2025 ~ During Donald Trump’s first term as president, while Mike Pompeo was serving as his Secretary of State, the State Department authorized a government contract on September 23, 2019 to translate and publish a book for young people that lavished praise on Elon Musk as an inspiring role model. The book’s title was: “Elon Musk and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, Young Readers Edition.” It was authored by then Bloomberg/Businessweek writer, Ashlee Vance, and based on his New York Times bestseller for adults, “Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX and The Quest for a Fantastic Future.” Curiously, however, the book wasn’t for U.S. children or even children on the same continent. The State Department award went to an organization called Steps to Success Public Association in Karakol, Kyrgyzstan. The federal account from which the $17,054 contract came was USAID, the federal agency that has … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 24, 2025 ~ On Thursday, February 13, MSNBC’s Joy Reid, host of the news program, The ReidOut, said this on air: “If Donald Trump announced tomorrow that he was selling the United States to Vladimir Putin personally and that we will now be owned by the Kremlin, every single Republican [in Congress] would say, ‘Yes, sir,’ and vote for it.” Reid’s remark came during her interview with Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), Minority Leader of the House of Representatives. Jeffries had just indicated that all it would take is three House Republicans to vote with Democrats in order to do the right thing for the American people they represent. You can watch the exchange here. Just five days before Reid’s staff learned that her show had been cancelled – by reading about it first in leaked media reports and then having the fact confirmed by management – Trump and … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 21, 2025 ~ Donald Trump loyalists, including Elon Musk and his “Muskrats,” (coders and techies that are loyal to Musk) have launched an unconstitutional reign of terror through federal agencies that are critical to the safety and security of Americans. Musk is the world’s wealthiest man, and foreign born, with a dubious history when it comes to following U.S. laws. Musk previously battled in court to obtain a $56 billion pay package at Tesla. (That’s billion not million.) Tesla is a publicly-traded company and Musk is its CEO – meaning that under law he owes an oath of loyalty to the company and its shareholders. Notwithstanding that law, Musk simultaneously serves as CEO of rocket and satellite company, SpaceX, and controls numerous other companies, including the social media platform, Twitter, which Musk has renamed “X.” In January and February of last year, Musk was profiled in two bombshell Wall Street Journal … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 19, 2025 ~ Something is seriously wrong in the House of Dimon – also known as JPMorgan Chase, the largest bank in the United States. Barron’s, part of the Dow Jones Company that publishes the Wall Street Journal, has released an audio of the Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon, dropping F-bombs in a profanity-laced tirade during a Town Hall with his employees last Wednesday. We carefully transcribed a portion of that audio. Dimon said this: “We also had—and you know I’m right about this one—a lot of you on the f***ing Zoom and you were doing the following, okay: looking at your mail; sending texts to each other about what an a**hole the other person is, okay; not paying attention; not reading your stuff, you know. And if you don’t think that slows down efficiency, creativity, creates rudeness — it does. Okay.” Apparently, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 18, 2025 ~ The Government Accountability Office (GAO) turned 100 years old in 2021. For more than a century it has been doing the work that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has been pretending to do, that is, competently root out fraud, waste and abuse in federal government programs without leaving a dangerous trail of chaos that threatens national security, personal privacy and the U.S. Constitution. If Elon Musk is sincerely interested in efficiency and government savings, why is he duplicating the work of the non-partisan GAO – while doing it in a grossly subpar and deeply conflicted manner? Thanks to two sitting U.S. Senators, the American people are going to get an investigation by the GAO into exactly what went down when DOGE accessed the U.S. Treasury’s payment system and gained access to highly confidential records of private American citizens. (Yesterday, the Associated … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 13, 2025 ~ Yesterday, the newly formed House Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency (DOGE) held its first hearing titled: “The War on Waste: Stamping Out the Scourge of Improper Payments and Fraud.” The Subcommittee appears to be part of an echo chamber attempting to bring legitimacy to President Donald Trump tapping his largest campaign donor, billionaire Elon Musk, to lead an effort to gut federal law enforcement and regulatory agencies and create enough savings to give tax breaks and other perks to the ultra-rich. Musk should be immediately disqualified from any such watchdog role for the following reasons: he effectively put Trump over the election finish line, giving $288 million to PACs or Super PACs supporting Trump; the Wall Street Journal (paywall) reported that Musk has been communicating with Russian President Vladimir Putin since 2022, notwithstanding the fact that Musk’s company SpaceX is a U.S. … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 11, 2025 ~ The President of the United States appears to be on a mission to Make Corruption Great Again. Just yesterday, Trump’s Justice Department ordered prosecutors to drop corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams. Also, Trump issued a pardon to former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, who was convicted in 2011 on corruption charges, including an FBI-recorded attempt to sell the U.S. Senate seat that was vacated when Barack Obama took the office of the President. Trump had commuted Blagojevich’s sentence during his first term as President. In a further jaw-dropping move yesterday, Trump issued an Executive Order that suspends the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) for 180 days, giving a greenlight to megabanks on Wall Street and other U.S. corporations to bribe officials in foreign countries to get business deals approved. The order bars federal prosecutors from starting any new FCPA … Continue reading →