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Discount brokerage Scottrade is being acquired by rival TD Ameritrade in a $4 billion deal. The companies announced the deal early Monday, following several weeks of news reports about the merger. The sale is subject to regulatory approvals, and is slated to close by Sept. 30, 2017. Scottrade will convert to TD Ameritrade systems in 2018. Combined, the two companies have $944 billion in total client assets and 10 million funded client accounts. "It gives us a lot of power to combine the two," Scottrade's founder and CEO Rodger Riney told the Post-Dispatch Monday. "It is a business that has...

Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein confirmed that he supports Hillary Clinton for president, despite his reluctance to endorse a candidate throughout the campaign. “I’m supportive of Hillary Clinton,” Blankfein said, according to a CNN transcript published by Bloomberg. “Yes, so flat out, yes, I do.”

illary Clinton And Wall Street: Financial Industry May Control Retirement Savings In A Clinton Administration BY DAVID SIROTA @DAVIDSIROTA AND AVI ASHER-SCHAPIRO ON 10/19/16 AT 12:50 AM Blackstone's Tony James: America's Not Great at Saving While Hillary Clinton has spent the presidential campaign saying as little as possible about her ties to Wall Street, the executive who some observers say could be her Treasury Secretary has been openly promoting a plan to give financial firms control of hundreds of billions of dollars in retirement savings. The executive is Tony James, president of the Blackstone Group. The investment colossus is most...

I have found evidence that may explain the intense interest of Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) in bailing out ShoreBank, the “community development” bank that has received extraordinary assistance from her and several other “friends in high places.” The New York Times confirms that Rep. Schakowsky played a leading role in the ShoreBank bailout. Yet ShoreBank is not based in Rep. Schakowsky’s congressional district, and she did not help the Bank of Lincolnwood–which is in her district, and failed in 2009–or Park National Bank, which was also active in community development in Chicago until it was closed by federal regulators last...

His only qualification was giving lots of money to the Clinton Foundation A few weeks ago, ABC broke the story of Raj Fernando, a big-money donor to the Clinton Foundation - as well as past campaigns of both Obama and Hillary - and how he managed to land a spot on the prestigious International Security Advisory Board. That’s a board generally populated by former generals, governors and top diplomats, who advise the Secretary of State on international security matters. Lots of eyebrows were raised when a securities trader with no background in any of this was introduced as a new...

Supporters of former Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders on Saturday expressed anger and vindication over leaked comments made by Hillary Clinton to banks and big business that appeared to confirm their fears about her support for global trade and tendency to cozy up to Wall Street. Clinton, who needs Sanders' coalition of young and left-leaning voters to propel her to the presidency, pushes for open trade and open borders in one of the speeches, and takes a conciliatory approach to Wall Street, both positions she later backed away from in an effort to capture the popular appeal of Sanders' attacks...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Supporters of former Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders on Saturday expressed anger and vindication over leaked comments made by Hillary Clinton to banks and big business that appeared to confirm their fears about her support for global trade and tendency to cozy up to Wall Street. Clinton, who needs Sanders' coalition of young and left-leaning voters to propel her to the presidency, pushes for open trade and open borders in one of the speeches, and takes a conciliatory approach to Wall Street, both positions she later backed away from in an effort to capture the popular...

Supporters of former Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders on Saturday expressed anger and vindication over leaked comments made by Hillary Clinton to banks and big business that appeared to confirm their fears about her support for global trade and tendency to cozy up to Wall Street. Clinton, who needs Sanders' coalition of young and left-leaning voters to propel her to the presidency, pushes for open trade and open borders in one of the speeches, and takes a conciliatory approach to Wall Street, both positions she later backed away from in an effort to capture the popular appeal of Sanders' attacks...

Sick Hillary Clinton gave speeches at $500,000 an hour to Wall Street. During the primaries, Bernie Sanders challenged her to release the transcripts. She refused. Today’s Wikileaks release shows why.

As this vitriolic, unpredictable, outrageously entertaining presidential campaign enters its final stages I find myself pondering what happens next. I was reminded of the last scene in the 1972 movie, The Candidate. The movie is about a young untested non-politician candidate for U.S. Senator in California who puts his fate in the hands of a veteran political operative and overcomes a double digit polling deficit to win a huge upset victory. His entire focus during the campaign was to win. In the final scene of the movie he is standing among the celebrating campaign staffers and the fawning press corp....

NEW YORK — For a time, Occupy Wall Street was everywhere with its grass-roots encampments — first in New York City, then globally — and the refrain, “We are the 99 percent!” And then it was gone. Its most famous camp in lower Manhattan was cleared out in an overnight police raid two months after it started, and other Occupy locations fizzled soon thereafter. But five years later, demonstrators gathered once again in New York’s Zuccotti Park on Saturday to commemorate the movement and what they said has been its lasting impact.....

Wall Street is pricing in a landslide victory for Hillary Clinton, but if she starts to lag, there could be a big unwinding of stock and bond market positions, according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch's David Woo. Woo said the market is also pricing in a split Congress, with Republicans controlling the House and Democrats the Senate. That would maintain the deadlock in Washington. "You have a Democrat president, and a Republican controlled Congress which means you have gridlock in Washington. The market is pricing in this gridlock, meaning it's going to be that much of the burden of...

The Fed has not only failed to fix what's broken in the U.S. economy--it has actively mad those problems worse. The Federal Reserve claims its monetary interventions saved America from economic ruin in 2009, and have bolstered growth ever since. Don't hurt yourself patting your own backs, Fed governors past and present: it's bad enough that the Fed can't fix the economy's real problems--its policies actively make them worse. After seven long years of politicos and the financial media glorifying the Federal Reserve's policies as god-like in their power and efficacy, let's take a quick look at the results of...

<p>Now the furious owner of the 14-bedroom estate in Bridgehampton plans to sue Barna, 31, for $1 million, saying the Wall Street hot shot had claimed the party would be a fundraiser for an animal charity for a mere 50 guests. Plus, Barna is disputing the $27,000 Airbnb rental and is refusing to pay.</p>

The AP review of Clinton's calendar — her after-the-fact, official chronology of the events of her four-year term — identified at least 75 meetings with longtime political donors and loyalists, Clinton Foundation contributors and corporate and other outside interests that were either not recorded or listed with identifying details scrubbed. The AP found the omissions by comparing the 1,500-page document with separate planning schedules supplied to Clinton by aides in advance of each day's events. The names of at least 114 outsiders who met with Clinton were missing from her calendar, the records show...

Politics Election 2016 Several GOP Business Leaders Are Backing Clinton Democratic presidential candidate to get backing from executives, some of whom cite unease with Trump’s candidacy By Laura Meckler June 23, 2016 12:09 a.m. ET More than 50 business executives, including several longtime Republicans, endorsed Hillary Clinton for president on Thursday as her campaign seeks to capitalize on discomfort with Republican Donald Trump. They include Jim Cicconi, senior executive vice president at AT&T Services Inc., and Dan Akerson, who held top positions at General Motors Co. and Nextel Communications Inc. A Clinton campaign aide provided the list. The endorsements reflect...

By making the stock market the only game in town, the Powers That Be can no longer afford to let it decline for any reason. Market technicians have long observed that the holes in charts left when markets gap up or down at the open of trading almost inevitably get filled later on. When the market gaps down, it will eventually rise to fill that gap. When the market gaps up, it will eventually decline to fill that open gap. Since there are open gaps galore lurking in the lower depths of the S&P 500's chart, that would typically suggest...

“Someone” is getting desperate. Throughout the last week, anytime stocks have begun to correct or drop, “someone” has bought S&P 500 futures to prop the market up. Anyone who’s been involved with the markets for a while knows the difference between real buyers and manipulation. This is manipulation plain and simple. Look at all those “V” rallies. Three days in a row stocks opened DOWN and someone immediately stepped in and began buying aggressively. Another tell-tale sign of manipulation: the buying halts almost the moment stocks get to 2,100 on the S&P 500. At this point the manipulation ends. And...

Wall Street seems to be growing more comfortable with the possibility of Donald Trump winning the presidential election, according to a recent poll by Strategas Research Partners. A survey conducted by the firm among more than 650 institutional clients, shows that 50 percent of the respondents believe the billionaire businessman will secure the presidency, compared with only 22 percent back in April. Even as Trump's prospects improved in the eyes of investors, the stock market has climbed almost 2 percent in May and hovers near an all-time high. "The most jarring change is that it appears that the possibility of...

FIRST, if you have not followed the “Tripwire Series” this update might take a while to fully digest. There are key indications the real presidential decision-makers have shifted. I would strongly suggest you watch this video before continuing, and remind yourself that Andrea Mitchell is Alan Greenspan’s wife (this is one of the “keys” moving forward). The video is Mika Brezinski outlining the latest State Department report on the Hillary Clinton E-Mail Scandal: “it feels like Hillary Clinton is lying”