By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 2, 2021 ~ We can tell you with some confidence what Jamie Dimon, the Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, is going to be doing at 11:00 a.m. this morning. He’s going to be listening to a teleconference in a federal court case titled Shaquala Williams v JPMorgan Chase & Co. That’s because the outcome of that case will determine if the bank Dimon has helmed through five separate felony counts – all of which received non-prosecution agreements from the Justice Department – will finally be prosecuted for a crime. One might suspect that Kenneth Polite, the man President Biden nominated and the Senate confirmed to head the Criminal Division of the Justice Department in July, might also take an interest in this matter since the plaintiff is alleging that the Justice Department got played by JPMorgan Chase in its 2016 non-prosecution agreement. Unfortunately, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 1, 2021 ~ If you’re a stock market watcher you might want to invest in a neck brace if today’s whipsawing action is any gauge of what’s ahead. Just this morning we warned our readers to buckle up for the unwinding of the massive stock market bubble that Fed Chair Powell has been feeding with his keys to an unlimited, electronic-money printing press and his zero-interest-rate policy. As if on cue, the Dow Jones Industrial Average put on a firework display today, first zooming to an intra-day high of 35,004.64, then plunging to a low of 34,006.98. By the closing bell, the Dow was down 461.68. The decline in the Dow began shortly after 11 a.m. – almost three hours before the news broke that the first case of the new COVID variant, Omicron, had been reported in California. An Associated Press report was … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 1, 2021 ~ Fed Chair Jerome Powell along with Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen appeared before the Senate Banking Committee yesterday to deliver their semi-annual reports. Approximately 34 minutes into the hearing, in response to a question from Senator Pat Toomey, Republican from Pennsylvania, Powell announced that he was retiring the word “transitory” to describe the inflationary forces that have a grip on prices in the U.S. The stock market interpreted this to mean that Powell, who just eight days prior had become Democrat President Joe Biden’s nominee for another four years at the helm of the Fed, was now pivoting to cater to Republican inflation hawks in order to win their votes at his upcoming confirmation hearing. The Dow Jones Industrial Average quickly did a bungee dive of 402 points. About 90 minutes into the hearing, the stock market went into a new wave … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 30, 2021 ~ President Joe Biden clearly needs a new communications team that can explain to him the meaning of “under promise, outperform.” Biden began yesterday’s press conference on the newly discovered COVID variant, Omicron, stating that he had promised to always tell the American people the truth. Then he proceeded to deliver a pep talk devoid of hard evidence for the rosy promises he was making about his strategy for fighting the new Omicron variant. At one point, Biden told reporters that this Thursday he would be “putting forth a detailed strategy on how we’re going to fight COVID this winter – not with shutdowns or lockdowns, but with more widespread vaccinations, boosters and testing and more.” At this point, there is zero hard evidence that the current vaccines provide significant immunity against the Omicron variant. Scientists around the world have said that … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: November 29, 2021 ~ For more than two decades, the general counsels of Wall Street’s mega banks have been meeting together secretly once a year at ritzy hotels and resorts around the world. This would appear to be a clear violation of anti-trust law but since Wall Street’s revolving door has compromised the U.S. Department of Justice over much of that time span, there has been no pushback from the Justice Department to shut down these clandestine meetings. Wall Street insiders say that among the top agenda items at this annual confab are strategy sessions on how to keep Congress from enacting legislation that would bring an end to Wall Street’s privatized justice system called mandatory arbitration. This system allows the most serially corrupt industry in America to effectively lock the nation’s courthouse doors to claims of fraud from its workers and customers. This private justice system also … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 24, 2021 ~ Yesterday the Federal Reserve Board of Governors announced the termination of an enforcement action against Goldman Sachs that dates back to 2016. It’s one more case where Goldman Sachs, the “great vampire squid,” throws its lower-ranked employees under the bus and quickly returns to “relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” The Fed had fined Goldman Sachs a paltry $36.3 million in August of 2016 over its employees using confidential supervisory information that had been stolen from the New York Fed to make presentations to clients and prospective clients. The Fed’s settlement followed an October 28, 2015 settlement between Goldman and the New York State Department of Financial Services over similar charges. Goldman agreed to settle the NYSDFS case for $50 million. The case centers around Rohit Bansal, who had worked at the New York Fed and … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 23, 2021 ~ Fed Chair Jerome Powell now finds himself in the same position as Morgan Stanley’s Howie Hubler and JPMorgan’s Bruno Iksil: he’s got a big trade on and no exit plan. The problem for the U.S. economy is this: Hubler and Iksil were gambling with billions of dollars. Powell is gambling with trillions of dollars. Powell’s Fed has effectively become the Whale in the U.S. debt market. Powell was last sworn in as Fed Chair on February 5, 2018. Five days earlier, the securities held on the Fed’s balance sheet totaled $4.2 trillion. As of last Wednesday, that figure stood at $8.179 trillion, thanks to Powell’s endless purchases of U.S. Treasury securities and agency mortgage-backed securities (MBS). Making this situation even more dicey, the Fed bought these debt securities with money it creates out of thin air. The U.S. taxpayer is on … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 22, 2021 ~ We have been reading lawsuits filed against Wall Street firms in the federal district court in the Southern District of New York for more than three decades. We didn’t think that we could still be shocked by what victims of Wall Street’s abuses tell the court. But the lawsuit filed on November 11 by Shaquala Williams against JPMorgan Chase contains allegations that are both stunning and unprecedented in our experience. Williams is an attorney who formerly worked in compliance at JPMorgan Chase. Part of her role was to make sure that the bank was in compliance with a non-prosecution agreement it had signed with the Justice Department in 2016. The Justice Department had charged in 2016 that JPMorgan’s Asia subsidiary had engaged in quid pro quo agreements with Chinese officials to obtain investment-banking business and had falsified internal documents to cover up … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 19, 2021 ~ Yesterday, at 11:41 a.m., as Cornell Law Professor Saule Omarova sat before the Senate Banking Committee for her confirmation hearing to head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the regulator of national banks, Republican Senator Tom Cotton Tweeted the following: “Saule Omarova stole $214 (~$400 adjusted for inflation) from T.J. Maxx in 1995. She’s woefully unqualified to supervise the banking system.” Cotton’s Tweet links to a Fox News report which indicates that it has obtained the police report that shows that Omarova was 28 years old at the time of the arrest in 1995. The items she was reported to have taken without paying for them were “four pairs of shoes, two bottles of cologne, two belts and socks.” According to the report, she had left the store with the items when confronted by a security guard … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 18, 2021 ~ Last Thursday, Hannah Levitt of Bloomberg News published a report about a large trader exodus at JPMorgan Chase. She wrote: “…By this fall, many of the team’s heaviest hitters had gone. “The setting wasn’t some struggling investment bank. It was the equity derivatives desk inside the mighty JPMorgan Chase & Co. – one of many pockets of employee turnover that have erupted there in recent months, keeping the company’s recruiters busy.” That article was published at 8:00 a.m. By 11:00 a.m., Bloomberg News was finessing that negative article with another article by Brian Chappatta, which appeared to be an attempt to boost both the bank’s reputation as well as that of its Chairman and CEO, Jamie Dimon. Chappatta wrote: “Even with competitive pay and the bank’s prestige, departure rates in many of its businesses are reportedly up at least a few percentage points from pre-pandemic … Continue reading →