Search Results for: JPMorgan

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 3, 2022 ~ Playing out in a federal courtroom in Chicago have been JPMorgan traders telling a jury that it was standard operating procedure at the bank to rig precious metals markets in order to make huge profits for their trading desk. That case is U.S. v. Smith in the Northern District Court in Chicago. (Case number 1:19-cr-00669.) Now there may be more explosive revelations spilling out against JPMorgan Chase in the Southern District Court in Manhattan beginning this fall. That case is Shaquala Williams v JPMorgan Chase. (Case number 1:21-cv-0932.) Last week, Judge Jed Rakoff, who is overseeing the Williams case, ruled that JPMorgan’s motion for dismissal would not prevail on Williams’ claim for retaliatory dismissal and ruled that a jury trial would begin on November 7. (Judge Rakoff did dismiss the Williams’ claim that the bank’s actions had adversely affected a job offer.) … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 26, 2022 ~ The long-tenured Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon, likes to use the phrase “fortress balance sheet,” when talking about his bank to Congress or shareholders. But the data stored at its federal regulators show that the bank is, by far, the most systemically dangerous bank in the United States. And, despite its high risk profile, neither Congress nor federal regulators have restricted its growth. Its assets have soared by 65 percent since the end of 2016 and stood at $3.95 trillion as of March 31, making it the largest bank in the United States. Making this situation even more dangerous, the bank has admitted to five criminal felony counts over the past eight years and a multitude of civil crimes and multi-billion dollar fines — all during the tenure of Dimon. Neither Congress nor federal regulators nor the Justice Department … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 19, 2022 ~ JPMorgan Chase is the largest federally-insured bank in the United States. It is also one of the largest trading houses on Wall Street. That’s the Faustian bargain the Clinton administration entered into with Wall Street when it repealed the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999. According to data from the FDIC, as of June 30 of last year, JPMorgan Chase Bank N.A. had 4,925 branches in 44 U.S. states holding $2.01 trillion in deposits. Many of those deposits belong to mom and pop savers who have no idea that the bank has admitted to five criminal felony counts since 2014 and has a rap sheet that is the envy of the Gambino crime family. (Apparently, a federal judge in New York overseeing a current JPMorgan case is just as naïve about the bank’s criminal history. More on that shortly.) The bulk of Americans … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 8, 2022 ~ In 2018, Bloomberg reporters Peter Waldman, Lizette Chapman, and Jordan Robertson published a stunning expose on how JPMorgan Chase was spying on its employees, including after hours, using as many as 120 engineers from the data mining company Palantir Technologies Inc. According to the Bloomberg report, “It all ended when the bank’s senior executives learned that they, too, were being watched, and what began as a promising marriage of masters of big data and global finance descended into a spying scandal.” But the surveillance program did not end. The bank simply developed its own proprietary spying system instead. Business Insider reporter, Reed Alexander, has reignited the scandal with the news that the internal surveillance program at JPMorgan Chase is now called “Workforce Activity Data Utility” or WADU. According to Business Insider, the surveillance is fostering paranoia inside the bank with … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 30, 2022 ~ JPMorgan Chase’s stock has lost 27 percent of its market value year-to-date through its June 29 closing price. But more disturbing than that is the above chart showing that the behemoth German lender, Deutsche Bank, has been trading like a clone of JPMorgan Chase for the past two months. Deutsche Bank’s stock price is down just one percentage point more than JPMorgan Chase year-to-date. JPMorgan Chase is the largest federally-insured bank in the United States. Looking like one is tied with an umbilical cord to Deutsche Bank has its perils on Wall Street. Let’s start with the raids on the Deutsche Bank’s headquarters, two of which coincided with dead bodies turning up. On November 29, 2018, Deutsche Bank’s headquarters in Germany were raided by 170 members of law enforcement. Prosecutors explained the action by stating that “Deutsche Bank helped customers found … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 29, 2022 ~ Last Tuesday, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) released its quarterly report on derivatives held at the megabanks on Wall Street. As we browsed through the standard graphs that are included in the quarterly report, one graph jumped out at us. It showed a measured growth in precious metals derivatives at insured U.S. commercial banks and savings associations over the past two decades and then an explosion in growth between the last quarter of 2021 and the end of the first quarter of this year. In just one quarter, precious metals derivatives had soared from $79.28 billion to $491.87 billion. That’s a 520 percent increase in a span of three months. (See Figure 18 at this link. The last ten years of the graph is shown above.) Having studied these quarterly reports since the 2008 financial crash, we … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 27, 2022 ~ When the cryptocurrency exchange, Coinbase, first offered its stock to the public on April 14, 2021, its S-1 Registration Statement that was filed with the SEC indicated that Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Citigroup were its financial advisors, along with Allen & Company. Most Americans would assume that if one is the financial advisor to a company going public for the first time, the financial advisor would know a considerable amount about that company’s business and future prospects. But as we reported last Wednesday, horror stories in the thousands about how Coinbase runs its exchange have been piling up in the publicly accessible database of the federal regulator, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Three business days after we published that information, Goldman Sachs finally put out a sell rating on the stock of Coinbase. The news came from Goldman Sachs before the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 24, 2022 ~ Add JPMorgan Chase, the biggest bank in the United States with an unprecedented five criminal felony counts since 2014, to the growing list of debacles of which the Fed has lost control. The Fed has its bank examiners pouring over the books of JPMorgan Chase on an ongoing basis, but somehow the bank’s dangerous book of derivatives has been allowed to spike by $14.42 trillion in the first quarter of this year, soaring from $45.84 trillion on December 31, 2021 to $60.26 trillion on March 31, 2022. That’s an increase of 24 percent in a three-month span. That information comes from page 18 of the newly-released report on derivatives in the banking system from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC). The Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 was supposed to stop the insanity of unfathomable amounts of risky derivatives being … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 1, 2022 ~ Wall Street On Parade was previously a big fan of Senator Sherrod Brown, the Chair of the Senate Banking Committee. Not so much anymore. Brown supported the nutty nomination of Saule Omarova to head the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the regulator of national banks, while attempting to spin the naysayers as part of a smear campaign. So far this year, the Senate Banking Committee has held hearings on tangential areas while ignoring the biggest threats to financial stability in the U.S.: the $200.18 trillion in notional derivatives (face amount) concentrated at just five Wall Street megabanks (JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America). There have been no subpoenas flying from the Senate Banking Committee as the Fed continues to cover up the largest trading scandal in its history and refusing to release to … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 25, 2022 ~ An attorney turned whistleblower who worked in compliance at JPMorgan Chase, Shaquala Williams, has named former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair as one of the parties receiving improperly processed “emergency payments” from the bank. Williams is suing the bank for retaliating against her protected whistleblowing activities by terminating her employment after she raised concerns about these payments to Blair and other serious compliance issues. (The case is Shaquala Williams v JPMorgan Chase, Case Number 1:21-cv-09326, which was filed last November in the Federal District Court for the Southern District of New York.) The new revelation naming Tony Blair was contained in a transcript of Williams’ deposition that was filed with the court last week. Prior to that, Blair had been referred to simply as “a high risk JPMorgan third-party intermediary for Jamie Dimon…” in the Williams’ complaint. The fact that Williams … Continue reading →