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Recent Posts
- The Supreme Court’s EPA Decision Is One More Win for Charles Koch’s Dystopian America
- Deutsche Bank and JPMorgan Chase Have Been Trading Like Clones for Two Months; Both Are Down Almost 30 Percent Year-to-Date
- Report: JPMorgan Chase and Citibank Hold 90 Percent of All Gold and Other Precious Metals Derivatives Held by All U.S. Banks
- The Glue that Connects Jeffrey Clark, John Eastman, Ginni Thomas, and the Guy Who Was Air-Dropped into the DOJ, Is Charles Koch’s Money
- As This Crypto Stock’s Price Collapsed, Goldman, JPMorgan and Citigroup Issued Buy Ratings
- JPMorgan Chase’s Derivatives Spike by $14 Trillion in First Quarter to Six-Year High of $60 Trillion
- Is the Crypto Threat to U.S. Financial Stability $889 Billion or $10 Trillion?
- Crypto Victims’ Cries for Help Are Piling Up at a Federal Complaint Center
- Has Crypto Endangered Federally-Insured Big Banks? Ask State Street
- After Crypto Money Piled into Campaign Coffers of Senators Lummis and Gillibrand, They Introduced a Sweetheart Legislative Bill for Crypto
- As the Speeding Crypto Train Crashes, Scientific and Engineering Experts Tell Congress that Both Crypto and Blockchain Were a Sham from the Beginning
- The Fed Fingers Its Worry Beads: Mortgage Rates Double in Six Months to 6.28 Percent; Crypto Crashes; Layoffs Explode in FinTech
- Crypto-Carnage Hits Every Asset Class Tied to Crypto
- Five U.S. Megabanks Have Lost $300 Billion in Market Cap in One Year; Crypto Is in Meltdown this Morning; and the Fed Will Hike Rates Further on Wednesday
- The Money Trail to the January 6 Attack on the Capitol Is Ignored in Last Night’s Public Hearing
- As Tech Startups and Blank-Check Companies Blow Up in Investors’ Portfolios, SEC Chief Gensler Gives Yet Another Speech
- These Charts Show the Wealth Devastation to U.S. Investors from Wall Street’s Unchecked Corrupt Practices
- Domestic Crude Oil Peaked at $145 a Barrel in 2008. It Closed Yesterday at $118.50. So Why Is Gas at the Pump at All-Time Highs?
- Fed Data Shows a Half Century of Moderate Growth in the Fed’s Balance Sheet through Two World Wars – Then a Seismic Explosion Under Bernanke, Yellen and Powell
- Redditors Are Furious at the SEC’s New Ad Campaign Portraying them as Idiot Investors
- Senator Sherrod Brown Goes After 0-Count Felon Wells Fargo; Ignores 5-Count Felon JPMorgan Chase
- Credit Unions and Banking Groups Warn of “Devastating Consequences” of a U.S Central Bank Digital Currency
- Stable Coin and Cryptocurrency Investors Are Not the Only Ones in Tears: Ten Crypto Mining Stocks Have Fallen by 50 to 80 Percent Year-to-Date
- New York Fed Stuns with New Report: At Year End Its Trading Desk Owned 38 Percent of All 10-30 Year U.S. Treasuries
- JPMorgan Whistleblower Names Former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair in Court Documents as Receiving “Emergency” Payments from Bank
- Wall Street Traders Are Being Ordered to Hand Over their Personal Phones for Examination by the Firm’s Lawyers: How Is This Legal?
- How Crypto Is Using the Behavioral Dynamics of Bernie Madoff’s Fraud
- Senator Elizabeth Warren Lauds the New York Stock Exchange for Investor Protections. It’s Currently Trading Multiple Alleged Frauds.
- Fed Chair Powell Says “Markets Are Orderly” and “Functioning.” They’re Not.
- Jerome Powell’s Fed in Two Frightening Charts
- Warren Buffett Is Taking a Flyer on $3 Billion of Citigroup’s Stock — After It Loses 40 Percent in a Year
- Crypto’s Crash: 100-to-1 Leverage Goes Poof!
- Citigroup’s Stock Price Is Still Down 84 Percent from the Year of Crash in 2008
- Scandalized Dallas Fed Keeps It All in “The Family” with Appointment of Lorie Logan as President
- Senator Tells Treasury Secretary Yellen that Crypto Market Is Now Larger than Subprime Market that Triggered Global Financial Crisis
- Charts: “Massive Buyers’ Strike” for Tech; Bitcoin as an Inflation Hedge Exposed as a Bad Joke; Megabanks in Freefall
- These Stock Patterns Are Impossible – Without Brazen Manipulation that the SEC Is Choosing to Ignore
- Goldman Sachs Says Its Dark Pools Are Under Investigation – Along with About Everything Else the Firm Does
- Powell Says Fed Doesn’t Have a Credibility Problem with the American People – Despite Gallup Poll Showing Lowest Confidence Since 2008 Financial Crisis
- What You Can Expect to Hear at the Fed’s Press Conference Today
- Citigroup’s Role in “Flash Crash” in Europe Yesterday Is Reminiscent of Its “Dr. Evil” Trade in 2004
- Justice Department’s Investigation of Archegos Leaves Out Three Bank Names: JPMorgan, Citigroup and Bank of America
- Another Raid of Deutsche Bank, Another Dead Whistleblower
- Justice Department and SEC Portray Serially-Charged Banks on Wall Street as Hapless Victims of Archegos Fraud. Nobody’s Buying It.
- Global Megabanks Are Tanking – The Same Ones the Fed Bailed Out in 2019
- Markets Climb a Wall of Worry but a War, a Pandemic, Soaring Inflation and Opaque Megabanks Spell Big Trouble
- Fed Chair Powell Telegraphs the Perfect Storm for Wall Street’s Megabanks: Rapid Rate Hikes Hitting $234 Trillion in Derivatives
- While JPMorgan Chase Was Getting Trillions of Dollars in Loans at Almost Zero Percent Interest from the Fed, It Was Charging Americans Hit by the Pandemic 17 Percent on their Credit Cards
- It’s Been More than Seven Months and Still No Investigative Findings on the Fed’s Trading Scandal
- Biden Has Nominated a Man from the Sandy Weill/Robert Rubin/Tim Geithner School of Wall Street Hubris to Head Regulation at the Fed
Search Results for: russian nesting dolls
JPMorgan and Madoff Were Facilitating Nesting Dolls-Style Frauds Within Frauds
By Pam Martens: January 13, 2014 Last week JPMorgan Chase paid $2.6 billion in fines and restitution, signed a deferred prosecution agreement and walked away from their 22-year involvement with Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. But according to court documents filed in 2011 by the Trustee of the Madoff victims’ fund, Irving Picard, this was not a simple case of poor risk management at JPMorgan. This was an operation structured like those Russian nesting dolls, with the Ponzi scheme as the outside doll with many more frauds layered inside the big one. After reading the documents released by the Justice Department in connection with the settlement, the Los Angeles Times asked in a photo caption of a smirking Madoff outside of Federal Court: “Bernie Madoff: Was he part of the JPMorgan ring, or was JPMorgan part of his ring?” The New York Times had a far more charitable stance, with Floyd … Continue reading
Senator Elizabeth Warren and Bloomberg News Need to Give It a Rest with Bashing Wells Fargo and Turn Their Attention to 5-Count Felon, JPMorgan Chase

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 17, 2021 ~ On Tuesday of this week, Bloomberg News published its umpteenth negative article on the San Francisco-headquartered bank, Wells Fargo. This time around, the article was highlighting Senator Elizabeth Warren calling for Wells Fargo to be broken up, with its federally insured bank separated from its Wall Street businesses. Bloomberg News syndicates its articles, so this story was quickly splashed all over other news outlets. And that’s the way it has been going since 2017. When Senator Warren bashes Wells Fargo, she gets lots of coverage by New York media outlets. Since March of 2018, Bloomberg News has published more than 80 negative articles on Wells Fargo with headlines like these: Wells Fargo CEO Abruptly Steps Down, Succumbing to Scandals; Wells Fargo’s CEO Disputes Claim His Bank Is Too Big to Manage; Elizabeth Warren on Wells Fargo CEO’s Departure: ‘About Damn Time’; Ex-Wells Fargo Bosses Face … Continue reading
In the WeWork IPO, the Money Trails End Up at JPMorgan’s Doorstep

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 16, 2019 ~ According to the amended prospectus filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission to alert the public to the thousands of warts with malignant possibilities sprouting out of the office rental company, WeWork, which plans to offer its shares to the public for the first time, JPMorgan Chase will receive something no other underwriter is getting in this deal: a cool $50 million extra as a “structuring fee.” On top of that, of course, the bank will also get the fat underwriting fees that the other banks involved in the IPO get. That’s just one of the many curious ways that JPMorgan Chase stands out in its relationship with WeWork. (The parent of WeWork, The We Company, is actually offering the shares to the public.) As it turns out, quite a few of JPMorgan Chase’s commercial real estate clients who have … Continue reading
Investigations
In-depth research on public interest topics frequently ignored by corporate media. (For most recent reports, scroll to the end.) Maria Bartiromo and the Co-Branding of CNBC and Citigroup: February 2, 2007 The cozy nexus between CNBC and Citigroup, the company on which it is supposed to be providing objective reporting. Madoff and the SEC’s Revolving Door: August 31, 2009 …the background of the member of the team heading up the Inspector General’s Office of Investigations, J. David Fielder, should have sounded alarm bells to Congressional investigators. Wall Street Titans Use Aliases to Foreclose on Families: October 5, 2009 A federal agency tasked with expanding the American dream of home ownership and affordable housing free from discrimination to people of modest means has been quietly moving a chunk of that role to Wall Street since 2002. In a stealth partial privatization, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) farmed out … Continue reading
Two Dow Stocks, Two Cultures of Corruption: Boeing versus JPMorgan Chase

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 25, 2022 ~ Boeing and JPMorgan Chase are two of the component stocks of the 30-stock index known as the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which is broadly considered to be a barometer of the growth prospects of the U.S. economy. Both companies have been criminally charged by the U.S. Department of Justice in the recent past. (In the case of JPMorgan Chase, it has been charged with an unprecedented five criminal felony counts since 2014.) Both companies were part of badly conceived mergers that headed them toward a culture of corruption. On January 7 of last year, the U.S. Department of Justice entered into a deferred prosecution agreement with Boeing over a one-count criminal charge of a conspiracy to defraud the United States. Acting Assistant Attorney General David P. Burns of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division said this about Boeing’s conduct: “The tragic crashes … Continue reading
Michael Cohen Got $3 Million More from Unnamed Sources; Records Vanish

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 17, 2018 ~ The intrepid investigative reporter, Ronan Farrow, who has a shiny new Pulitzer on his shelf for his investigations into Harvey Weinstein, published an article last night at The New Yorker that should alarm every American. It turns out that it was a law enforcement official who leaked the confidential government file on Donald Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen out of concern that someone in the government was making other undisclosed files on Michael Cohen’s funny money transactions involving an additional $3 million disappear. Cable news has breathlessly been reporting for days now on the financial file that the law enforcement official leaked to Michael Avenatti, attorney for porn star Stormy Daniels, who was paid $130,000 from Cohen’s secret account – a limited liability corporation established in Delaware with the name Essential Consultants LLC. (“Essential” suggesting that if you want the President’s … Continue reading
Trump Bank Regulator Wants to Merge Taxpayer-Backstopped Banks With Corporate Conglomerates
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 13, 2017 A man holding one of the most important and powerful jobs for keeping the U.S. banking system safe from another epic crash like that of 1929 and 2008 has tongues wagging over the bizarre speech he delivered at the Clearing House Annual Conference last Wednesday in New York. Keith Noreika is the acting head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the Federal agency responsible for supervising national banks and inspecting them for safety and soundness. What Noreika recommended last Wednesday, however, would make the U.S. banking system significantly more dangerous than it already is. Noreika thinks there is no good reason to prevent giant corporate conglomerates from owning insured depository banks that are backstopped by the U.S. taxpayer. He had this to say in his speech last week: “The narrative persists to keep commercial interests from owning or … Continue reading
Cartels R Us: Tab for Rigging Foreign Exchange $3.3 Billion and Rising
By Pam Martens: November 12, 2014 Two U.S. and three foreign banks have been charged with rigging the foreign exchange market where $5.3 trillion changes hands daily and have settled civil claims for $3.3 billion. (The charges are very similar to those in the rigging of the international interest rate benchmark known as Libor.) Additional charges and settlements by other regulators are expected to follow before the end of the year. The U.S.-based Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) levied a total of over $1.4 billion in fines against JPMorgan, Citigroup, UBS, HSBC and RBS. The same five banks were fined $1.7 billion by the U.K.’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). Swiss regulator FINMA charged only UBS with a fine of $139 million and included rigging of precious metals trading along with rigging foreign exchange. While the details that were released are skimpy and the Financial Conduct Authority is already being criticized … Continue reading
How High Up Did the Madoff Fraud Go at JPMorgan?
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 13, 2014 Helen Davis Chaitman is a nationally recognized litigator and author of The Law of Lender Liability. And she is two other things as well – a Bernie Madoff victim who lost a large part of her life savings to his Ponzi scheme and the tenacious lawyer who represented other victims of his fraud in district and appellate courts. Now, together with attorney Lance Gotthoffer, Chaitman has written a book titled JPMadoff: The Unholy Alliance Between America’s Biggest Bank and America’s Biggest Crook. The book is being made available to readers on a new web site which will provide a chapter each month. The first chapter is currently available and Chaitman says that the second chapter, to be posted on September 12, will detail what JPMorgan knew and when it knew it. The web site also provides a quick means of contacting your … Continue reading