Search Results for: JPMorgan

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 11, 2025 ~ The President of the United States appears to be on a mission to Make Corruption Great Again. Just yesterday, Trump’s Justice Department ordered prosecutors to drop corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams. Also, Trump issued a pardon to former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, who was convicted in 2011 on corruption charges, including an FBI-recorded attempt to sell the U.S. Senate seat that was vacated when Barack Obama took the office of the President. Trump had commuted Blagojevich’s sentence during his first term as President. In a further jaw-dropping move yesterday, Trump issued an Executive Order that suspends the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) for 180 days, giving a greenlight to megabanks on Wall Street and other U.S. corporations to bribe officials in foreign countries to get business deals approved. The order bars federal prosecutors from starting any new FCPA … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 31, 2025 ~ The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) has gotten its hands on a blockbuster 35-page letter that a former JPMorgan banker sent to the bank’s Audit Committee of the Board of Directors in August 2023. The letter asserts that the bank has been ginning down the amount of capital it is required to hold by improperly using an accounting technique called “netting.” The whistleblower asserts that “this could have allowed JPMorgan Chase to generate an additional $2 billion in net income in one year alone.” The whistleblower indicates that he/she brought this alleged malfeasance to bank officials in 2018 but was “ultimately retaliated against and laid off in 2022.” That is becoming a common refrain by whistleblowers inside JPMorgan Chase: they say they are rewarded for bringing improper, or brazenly illegal, conduct to the attention of their superiors by being shown the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 14, 2024 ~ For years now, we have observed the digital front page of Bloomberg News treating JPMorgan Chase’s Chairman and CEO, Jamie Dimon, as the wise, venerable statesman of Wall Street. (See here, here, and here for a quick background.) That reverential treatment has continued as the bank Dimon is charged with overseeing has admitted to the following: laundering money for the largest Ponzi scheme mastermind in history, Bernie Madoff; rigging foreign exchange markets; rigging trading in U.S. Treasury securities and the precious metals markets; using depositors’ money from its federally-insured bank to trade derivatives in London and lose at least $6.2 billion of its depositors’ money; bribing Chinese officials with jobs for their relatives in order to get business deals in China. Even worse, throughout much of last year, the Attorney General of the U.S. Virgin Islands built a comprehensive case in federal court … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 26, 2024 ~ On Tuesday, the Financial Times broke the story that JPMorgan Chase and HSBC had been named in a new report by the U.S.-based think tank, the Center for Advanced Defense Studies (C4ADS), for their role in laundering payments for the notorious mercenary group, Wagner, that has supported Russian military operations in Ukraine, the Middle East, Latin America and Africa. The think tank wrote that the involvement of the banks with Wagner had been done “unwittingly.” That’s also how JPMorgan Chase explained its money laundering for Ponzi kingpin Bernie Madoff for decades and for the international sex trafficker of children, Jeffrey Epstein, for at least 15 years. Curiously, neither the Wall Street Journal nor the New York Times found the information in the think tank’s report worthy of sharing with their readers. Wall Street On Parade, on the other hand, finds it highly … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 4, 2024 ~ It appears that Senator Elizabeth Warren was spot on in her assessment of the lack of a backbone for Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell when it comes to raising capital requirements on the powerful megabanks on Wall Street. At a March 7 Senate Banking Committee hearing in which Powell was appearing as a witness, Warren said this: “Despite all you said last year when the banks failed [in the spring banking crisis of 2023] about supporting Vice Chair Barr’s recommendations to strengthen rules for big banks, public reporting now says that you are driving efforts inside the Fed to weaken the capital rule. You even told the House Financial Services Committee representatives yesterday that you think it’s ‘very plausible’ that you withdraw the rule.” The capital rule that Senator Warren is referring to was proposed more than a year ago by … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 12, 2024 ~ According to a report at the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Financial Research (OFR), the Gross Notional Exposure at hedge funds has skyrocketed by 24.5 percent in the span of one year: from $22.946 trillion on March 31, 2023 to $28.579 trillion on March 31, 2024. (Run your cursor along the top green line at this link to observe the stunning growth in hedge fund exposures despite the banking crisis in the spring of 2023 when the second, third and fourth largest banks blew up.) Gross Notional Exposure (GNE) is defined by OFR as “the sum of the absolute value of long and short exposures, including those on and off the balance sheet.” The OFR was created under the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation of 2010 to keep bank and market regulators informed of growing risks, in the hope of preventing another financial … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 1, 2024 ~ On Monday, we wrote about the $2.3 trillion in agency mortgage-backed securities (MBS) that JPMorgan Chase is being paid to hold for the New York Fed as custodian and the multitude of related services for which it is billing the New York Fed on a monthly basis. Wall Street On Parade had filed a Freedom of Information Act request for JPMorgan’s invoices to the New York Fed for calendar year 2023. Instead of the 20 business days that a FOIA is supposed to take, we were stonewalled for three months and then received invoices with dollars amounts redacted. One fascinating bit of information we were able to glean from the invoices was that JPMorgan is billing the New York Fed for a service titled: “Tri-Party Collateral Management.” (Scroll toward the end of the invoices at this link.) We have been researching … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 29, 2024 ~ The New York Fed, which has bank examiners engaged in supervising JPMorgan Chase, has also repeatedly provided bailout funds to JPMorgan Chase; was supervising JPMorgan Chase when it lost $6.2 billion of deposits from its federally-insured bank by gambling in derivatives on its London trading desk; allowed JPMorgan Chase’s Chairman and CEO, Jamie Dimon, to previously sit on the New York Fed’s Board of Directors, even as he faced the $6.2 billion derivatives trading scandal; and the New York Fed has exclusively used JPMorgan Chase to hold, as custodian, more than $2.3 trillion of the Federal Reserve’s Mortgage-Backed Securities (MBS) for the past 15-1/2 years – despite JPMorgan Chase admitting to five felony counts brought by the criminal division of the U.S. Department of Justice during that time. If there was an admitted felon in your neighborhood, would that be your … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 17, 2024 ~ We can’t remember a time when the Chairman and CEO of the largest, most complex and scandal-ridden bank in the United States, Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, was too busy to squeeze in an appearance at the company’s heavily-scrutinized quarterly earnings call with analysts. That happened last Friday. When something happens for the first time at a bank that has racked up five felony counts, has been doled out non-prosecution and deferred-prosecution agreements by the U.S. Department of Justice in a steady drumbeat since 2014, and spent most of last year in the headlines for a decade of sluicing tens of thousands of dollars per month in hard cash to the international sex trafficker of children, Jeffrey Epstein, it pays to sit up and pay attention. Reuters’ reporter John Foley also found it “unusual” that Dimon had missed the earnings call … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 3, 2024 ~ On Monday, the transcript of the July 19, 2006 grand jury proceedings involving sexual assaults and rape by Jeffrey Epstein against underage girls in Palm Beach County, Florida was released by a Circuit Court. The Palm Beach Post newspaper had sued in that court for release of the transcript in 2019 in order to shine more light on how Florida State Attorney, Barry Krischer, had ignored a powder keg of evidence against Epstein that had been developed by the Palm Beach Police and cut a sweetheart deal under pressure from Epstein’s attorneys. Florida legislation, signed into law by Governor Ron DeSantis, called for the transcript to be released on or after July 1, in response to the extensive public interest in the case. Despite police evidence that Epstein had sexually assaulted dozens of underage school girls, Krischer and the U.S. Department … Continue reading →