Search Results for: rap sheet

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 25, 2018 ~ The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which has had two separate Wall Street lawyers at its helm for the past five years (under both the Wall Street- friendly Obama administration as well as the current Trump administration), has released a 558-page document that attempts to pass itself off as reforming Wall Street’s Dark Pools. Instead, it simply tinkers around the meaningless edges of reform. Dark Pools are trading venues that should not exist in an efficient, transparent and honest securities market. They are effectively unregulated stock exchanges being run internally by some of the biggest Wall Street banks on Wall Street: The same banks (like Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch) that have been serially charged with abusing their customers. Instead of sending their stock trades to the New York Stock Exchange or another independent stock exchange, the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 16, 2024 ~ Stanford Finance and Economics Professor Anat Admati has been valiantly attempting to save the American financial system from the corrupting influence and disinformation campaigns of men like JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon for more than a decade. Her voice is gaining traction and that’s making Dimon very nervous. Dimon has admitted in his recent letter to shareholders that his federal banking regulators want the bank to raise 25 percent more capital. Making banks hold more equity capital (as opposed to debt) is an issue that Admati has made a central focus of her arguments for years. Dimon’s bank would have a lot more equity capital if Dimon had retained the bank’s earnings each year instead of tapping those earnings to boost the bank’s stock price by using $117 billion of the bank’s earnings for share buybacks over the past decade. (Retained earnings add … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 18, 2024 ~ On Thursday of last week, two of JPMorgan Chase Bank’s federal regulators fined the riskiest bank in the United States $348 million dollars for engaging in “unsafe and unsound banking practices” for failing to supervise “billions” of trades on at least 30 global trading venues. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) fined JPMorgan Chase Bank $250 million while the Federal Reserve fined the bank $98.2 million. The OCC said the misconduct occurred since at least 2019. The Fed said the bank had engaged in the misconduct over the span of nine years, from 2014 to 2023. The key outrage embedded in these charges – that mainstream media failed to point out in its coverage last week – is that this “trading” activity did not occur at the registered brokerage firm of JPMorgan, which has properly licensed traders and trading … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 12, 2024 ~ On January 17 of this year, during a CNBC interview during the World Economic Forum in Davos, the Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon, made the unhinged remark that Donald Trump “was kind of right about NATO.” A New York Times article from January 14, 2019 outlined Trump’s position on NATO as follows: “There are few things that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia desires more than the weakening of NATO, the military alliance among the United States, Europe and Canada that has deterred Soviet and Russian aggression for 70 years. “Last year, President Trump suggested a move tantamount to destroying NATO: the withdrawal of the United States.” This past Saturday, during a campaign stop in South Carolina, Trump recited a prior conversation he said he had had about NATO with a world leader. The video clip of Trump’s remarks was aired yesterday on … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 5, 2024 ~ On January 17, Jamie Dimon stunned CNBC viewers when he launched into what sounded like a TV commercial for Republican Presidential candidate and 91-count indictee Donald Trump. Dimon stated: “Take a step back, be honest. He was kind of right about NATO, kind of right about immigration. He grew the economy quite well. Tax reform worked. He was right about some of China…He wasn’t wrong about some of these critical issues.” Dimon also said that Democrats need to be more respectful of their fellow citizens that identify as MAGA Republicans. Former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich was one of the folks who caught Dimon’s act and published a sharp retort, writing: “Kind of right about NATO? Trump wanted the U.S. to withdraw from NATO — and may get his way if he becomes president again. This would open Europe further to Putin’s aggression. “Kind of … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 8, 2024 ~ According to the complaint filed by lawyers for Jeffrey Epstein’s victims against the biggest bank in America, JPMorgan Chase, Epstein was running a “sex-themed cult.” According to a deposition of a JPMorgan banker, the only money-generating business that Epstein had was tending to his “network.” According to witness testimony, fulfilling the sexual fantasies of some men in Epstein’s “network,” was how he obtained six opulent homes and hundreds of millions of dollars in wealth. Epstein’s cult and network needed one essential ingredient to thrive: a financial institution willing to look the other way at vast sums of hard cash being withdrawn monthly and suspicious transfers of money between Epstein and his accomplices. Epstein found that for at least fifteen years at JPMorgan Chase according to documents and internal emails obtained in discovery in separate lawsuits against the bank in November and December … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 28, 2023 ~ The year 2023 will go down in U.S. banking history as the year in which the fastest bank runs in U.S. history occurred, producing the second, third and fourth largest banking failures in U.S. history in the span of seven weeks.  Losses of more than $32 billion from these failed banks hit the Federal Deposit Insurance Fund (FDIC). Adding to the regulatory hubris, the largest and riskiest bank in the U.S., JPMorgan Chase, was allowed by its compromised regulators to become even riskier by gobbling up the failed First Republic Bank while JPMorgan Chase got an unexplained $50 billion 5-year loan from the FDIC at an undisclosed interest rate to sweeten its purchase of the failed bank. And, what good is a banking crisis if the Fed can’t pony up yet another bank bailout fund, this time with loans of up to … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 19, 2023 ~ From 2010 through 2014, the most intractably corrupt industry in America – Wall Street – was the perpetual focus of the Senate Permanent Subcomittee on Investigations. The late Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) Chaired that Subcommittee throughout that span of time. Then Levin retired from the Senate in January 2015 and Wall Street’s name disappeared from hearings of that critical Subcommittee from 2015 through 2023 – a span of nine years. Wall Street did not become less corrupt from 2015 through 2023 to warrant it falling off the hearing schedule of the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. In fact, Wall Street became more corrupt. Financial watchdog, Better Markets, wrote the following in its detailed report in October on Wall Street mega banks’ unending crime spree: “For years, Better Markets has been tracking the enforcement actions against the nation’s six largest banks (the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 11, 2023 ~ During the Sunday, December 10 news program on CNN, “State of the Union with Jake Tapper and Dana Bash,” a deceptive, scare-mongering TV commercial popped up, warning that federal banking regulators’ proposed plan to require the mega banks on Wall Street to hold more capital against their riskiest trading activities “will increase the cost of mortgages and car payments” and “hurt small businesses, making it harder for them to access credit, meet payroll and run their operations.” The ad featured images of a farmer on his tractor, an auto mechanic, a worried small business owner, and other emotion-packed images. Wall Street On Parade has been warning our readers for weeks about this deceptive campaign by the Wall Street mega banks, so we jumped to our feet to get closer to the TV screen and read the fine print to see who … Continue reading →