STOCK MARKET WATCH -- Wednesday, 9 July 2014

[DemReadingDU]

37. Martens: Who Owns the U.S. Stock Market?

7/8/14 Who Owns the U.S. Stock Market?
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens

Serious observers of Wall Street are increasingly asking this question: could a group of trading venues with giant pools of capital, operating in the dark, using high-speed algorithms and artificial intelligence that has a massive historical database and gets smarter with each micro-second trade — effectively own the stock market. Today, we take a look at the massive trading control exercised by just five Wall Street firms.

JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup jointly control trillions of dollars in commercial bank deposits with thousands of branch bank buildings stretching across the United States scooping up the life savings of everyday Joes who have no clue these are also the Masters of the Universe on Wall Street. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley also own FDIC insured banks. Goldman Sachs Bank USA, as of March 31, 2014, has $104.7 billion in assets; Morgan Stanley Bank, N.A., as of the same date, has $108.8 billion in assets.
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According to some industry estimates, as much as 40 percent of stock trading in the U.S. may now be occurring off of public stock exchanges. These five firms account for a good chunk of that in their own dark pools which function as unregulated stock exchanges that do not make the bids and offers of the stocks they trade publicly available.
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The SEC is 80 years old. If it really wanted to properly police stock trading on Wall Street, one has to figure it would have had that Consolidated Audit Trail in place long before now.
The concentration of insured deposits in the U.S. among these firms; the fact that over 90 percent of derivative trading is controlled by these same firms; that the same firms, over and over again are jointly owning pieces of the same trading venues; that they are now trading billions of shares a week in darkness, should be enough to send Congressional banking committees into a frenzy of drafting new legislation to rein in this mess. It hasn’t happened. As Senator Dick Durbin famously said about Congress in 2009, the banks “frankly own the place.”

more...
http://wallstreetonparade.com/2014/07/who-owns-the-u-s-stock-market/