Search Results for: JPMorgan

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 15, 2024 ~ On October 27 of last year, JPMorgan Chase filed an 8K form with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) advising that, for the first time ever, its long-tenured Chairman and CEO, Jamie Dimon, and his family, intended to “sell 1 million shares” of his common stock holdings in the bank in 2024. The news made headlines because an insider selling a large amount of stock in any company – and particularly a bank with JPMorgan Chase’s serial history of running afoul of the law – can be a harbinger of bad news ahead for other shareholders. Dimon didn’t wait long into 2024 to start dumping stock. JPMorgan Chase filed another SEC form this past February showing that Dimon had sold 821,778 shares of the bank’s common stock for $150,167,222.52, or an average share price of $182.73 – which was suspiciously close to … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 10, 2024 ~ As the financial crisis of 2008 was ravaging century-old financial institutions on Wall Street and collapsing the U.S. economy, the central bank of the United States, the Federal Reserve, launched an effort to restore market liquidity by becoming the buyer of the toxic sludge flooding Wall Street in the form of Mortgage-Backed Securities (MBS). On November 25, 2008, in delicately-parsed language, the Fed announced it planned to buy $500 billion of MBS that was backed by government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Ginnie Mae. That was the first of what would become Quantitative Easing (QE) to infinity at the Fed. The Fed’s MBS holdings have grown from the planned $500 billion to $2.4 trillion as of last Wednesday. Just as it did with the bulk of its $29 trillion bailout programs to Wall Street during and after the 2008 financial crisis, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 28, 2024 ~ Yesterday, American Banker released a report showing that five banks in the U.S. hold a combined half trillion dollars in commercial real estate (CRE) loans. It came as a big surprise to a lot of folks that the bank holding the largest amount of CRE loans is JPMorgan Chase – whose bank holding company is also exposed to $49 trillion in derivatives as of December 31, 2023 according to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. (See Table 14 at this link.) JPMorgan Chase is already considered the riskiest bank in the U.S. according to its regulators. American Banker reported the following CRE totals for the five banks: JPMorgan Chase, $173 billion; Wells Fargo, $139.65 billion; Bank of America, $82.8 billion; U.S. Bank, $55.66 billion; and PNC Bank, $48.89 billion. Some of the same hubris and willful blindness that prevailed in … 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: March 5, 2024 ~ New York Community Bancorp’s tumultuous share price descent began on January 31 when the bank filed an 8K form with the SEC indicating a $260 million net income loss in the fourth quarter; a dividend cut from 17 cents to 5 cents; and a $552 million provision for credit losses on commercial real estate. (Year-to-date, the company’s share price has lost 73 percent of its market value. Yesterday, its shares closed at $2.73, down 23 percent from the prior trading session on Friday, when the shares had lost 26 percent. ) Somehow, JPMorgan banking analyst Steven Alexopoulos was able to swat the gargantuan warning signs of January 31 away like a pesky gnat on an otherwise perfect day. On February 1, Alexopoulos penned a missive recommending that investors “take advantage of this valuation and accumulate shares on this weakness.” To drive home his … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 27, 2024 ~ On Friday, February 16, ahead of a three-day weekend, JPMorgan Chase quietly filed its 10-K (annual report) with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The document carried the bombshell that the bank had paid an astonishing $1.4 billon in legal expenses in 2023 – a 426 percent increase over the prior year’s legal expenses. While the bank didn’t break down the names of the law firms that received the lion’s share of those legal expenses, public records can fill in most of the blanks. Throughout 2023, JPMorgan Chase was paying the expensive lawyers at WilmerHale to defend it against a federal lawsuit brought by the David Boies law firm, Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP, on behalf of the raped, assaulted, and sex trafficked underage victims of Jeffrey Epstein. JPMorgan was also paying WilmerHale lawyers throughout 2023 to defend it against Epstein-related charges brought … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 26, 2024 ~ According to Form 4 filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission by corporate insiders, ten of the key executives at the largest bank in the United States, JPMorgan Chase, have dumped more than $150 million in common stock in the bank this year. The sales come as the bank’s stock has been hitting all time highs while the scandals at the bank are also hitting unprecedented levels. The largest seller by far was the Chairman and CEO of the bank, Jamie Dimon. According to his Form 4, on February 22 of this year, Dimon sold 737,420 shares of the bank’s common stock for $135 million. The newly promoted Troy Rohrbaugh, who is now Co-CEO of JPMorgan Chase’s Commercial and Investment Bank (CIB), sold 75,000 shares on February 22 of this year for $13.7 million. Stacey Friedman, General Counsel at the bank, sold … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 20, 2024 ~ Last Friday, ahead of a three-day weekend when bad news could be expected to evaporate into the ether by the next news cycle, JPMorgan Chase dropped a bombshell in its 10-K (annual report) filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The bank, which has admitted to an unprecedented five criminal felony counts since 2014, said its “trading venues” were under investigation by three unnamed regulatory bodies. This is a very serious matter for this particular bank because three of its prior felony counts involved rigging markets. The bank admitted to rigging foreign exchange markets in 2015 and to rigging, for more than eight years, the precious metals and U.S. Treasury markets in an agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice in September 2020. Two of the precious metals traders involved in the 2020 case, Gregg Smith and Michael Nowak, are sitting in … 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 30, 2024 ~ While many other countries mandate that publicly-traded companies rotate their audit firms after a maximum number of years, there is no such requirement in the United States at the present time. The 10-K (annual report) that JPMorgan Chase filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on February 21, 2023 carried this statement under the auditor’s name of PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP (PwC): “We have served as the Firm’s auditor since 1965.” Let that settle in for a few moments as we take a quick tour through the last 10 years of JPMorgan Chase’s history under the same Chairman and CEO, Jamie Dimon, and the same audit firm. In 2013, after the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations found that JPMorgan Chase had lied to its regulators while gambling in derivatives in London using depositors’ money from its federally-insured bank and losing $6.2 billion, the … Continue reading →