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Recent Posts
- Meet the Banking Cartel that Is Planting the Seeds for the Next Banking Panic and Bailout
- Lobbyists Grab Control at House Financial Services Hearings, Backing Jamie Dimon’s Push to Gut Higher Capital Proposals
- Professors Point to JPMorgan Chase as Poster Boy of a Financial System Dependent on Corruption to Sustain Itself
- Another FDIC-Insured Bank Is Teetering, Closing at 27-1/2 Cents Yesterday, Down 96 Percent in a Year
- JPMorgan’s Pampered Client, Jeffrey Epstein, Broke a Lot More Laws Than Just Sex Trafficking of Minors
- Grab an Easy Chair and Watch 21 Experts Explore the Path from the Collapse of Lehman Brothers to This Spring’s Banking Crisis to the Urgency of Defanging the Mega Banks
- FDIC Releases a New Problem Bank List: It’s an Exercise in Fantasy
- Senate Banking to Convene Hearing Today on Climate Crisis Becoming a Homeowners Insurance Crisis
- Study Finds 75 Percent of U.S. Banks Didn’t Hedge Interest Rate Risk; Unrealized Losses on Securities $516 Billion at End of First Quarter
- A JPMorgan Court Filing Shows Another Bank Exec Visited Jeffrey Epstein’s Sex-Trafficking Residences 13 Times – Two More Times than Jes Staley
- Latest Grifting by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas Is Just Tip of the Iceberg
- The SEC and DOJ Are Doing Damage Control for 5-Count Felon JPMorgan Chase
- Follow the Money Trail that Got Unknown Ramaswamy in a Nationally-Televised Republican Presidential Debate
- Gary Gensler’s SEC Is Drawing a Dark Curtain Around Child Sex Trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, His Money Man Leslie Wexner and Their Ties to JPMorgan
- Deposits at the 25 Largest Banks Are Setting Lower Lows as Smaller Bank Deposits Set Higher Highs
- S&P Downgrades Credit Ratings on Five Banks, Puts Three Others on Negative Outlook
- New Court Documents Suggest the Justice Department Under Four Presidents Covered Up Jeffrey Epstein’s Money Laundering at JPMorgan Chase
- Giuliani Was in the Running to Be Trump’s Attorney General. His Authoritarian Rule as Mayor Suggests a Nightmare Outcome
- Mega Banks Take Down Stock Prices after a Fitch Warning About a Possible Downgrade to JPMorgan Chase and Its Peers
- Wall Street Mega Banks and Their Disgraceful Bailout Charts Since the Repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999
- Judge Jed Rakoff Has Regularly Dined in the Past with the Chairman of the Law Firm that Just Got a Big Win in His Court in the JPMorgan Sex Trafficking Case
- WeWork’s Stock Imploded to 13 Cents Yesterday; Its Cult-Master, Adam Neumann, Cashed Out Years Ago and Is a Billionaire
- Jamie Dimon Faces an Uphill Battle Convincing a Jury He Didn’t Know that Child Sex-Trafficker, Jeffrey Epstein, Was Financing His Operation Out of JPMorgan
- Moody’s Cuts Credit Ratings on 10 Banks; Places 4 of the 15 Largest Banks in U.S. on Review for Possible Downgrade
- The 25 Largest U.S. Banks Are Seeing the Largest Fall in Deposits in 38 Years With No Signs of Letting Up
- The Fitch Downgrade of U.S. Debt: What You Need to Know
- Former FBI Agent Prepared to Testify that JPMorgan Had Jeffrey Epstein Account for 28 Years – Not 15 Years – and “Impeded” Criminal Investigation of Epstein
- The Stock of Kidney Dialysis Firm, DaVita, Has Soared 2,500 Percent Since 1996; a New Book Reveals the Dangerous Cult Behind the Rise
- NYS Regulator Fined Deutsche Bank $150 Million Over Ties to Jeffrey Epstein but Says It Doesn’t Have a Scrap of Paper on JPMorgan and the Sex Trafficker
- Court Filing: JPMorgan Chase “Actively Participated in Epstein’s Sex-Trafficking Venture”
- Trillions of Dollars in Uninsured Deposits Are Now a Serious Albatross Around the Necks of the Mega Banks on Wall Street
- This Chart Shows How Wall Street Banks and the Fed Have Become a Match Made in Hell
- JPMorgan Chase Has Bled $230.6 Billion in Deposits Since Q1 2022, With Declines in 5 of the Last 6 Quarters
- Goldman Sachs’ Workers Have Screamed for Help in Lawsuits, Pitch Decks and the OpEd Page of the New York Times
- Swiss Government Plans to Lock Away Secrets on Credit Suisse Collapse for 50 Years
- JPMorgan Listed a “Lolita’s Closet” on the New York Stock Exchange for Jeffrey Epstein’s Money Man, Les Wexner
- JPMorgan Chase Files a Notice of Appeal in Jeffrey Epstein Victim Case It “Settled” for $290 Million
- Senator Elizabeth Warren Slams Treasury Secretary Yellen and Bank Regulator Hsu for “Courting Disaster” on Bank Mergers
- Gallup Poll: Confidence in U.S. Banks Stood at 60 Percent in 1979. Today, It Stands at 26 Percent.
- Lawsuit Bombshell: Sex Trafficker Jeffrey Epstein Was “a Business Partner” with Members of JPMorgan’s Board of Directors
- Large Banks Have Bled $921 Billion in Deposits Since April 2022 — the Fastest Pace in 40 Years — and a Much Larger Decline than Small Banks
- These Charts Show Why the Fed Is Terrified to Stop Raising Interest Rates and Why Nasdaq Is Ripping Higher
- Apple Hits $3 Trillion Market Cap After Spending More than Half a Trillion Dollars on Stock Buybacks Since 2013
- Tragic Death of JPMorgan Board Member Adds to the Bank’s String of Unusual Deaths
- This is the Bank Chart that Is Alarming Fed Insiders
- Lawyers for Epstein’s Victims Ask for $87 Million in Legal Fees from the $290 Million JPMorgan Settlement; Victims Could Get Nothing after Releasing their Claims
- JPMorgan Had a Secret Project that Is Now Spreading Its Scandalous Internal Emails with Sex Trafficker Jeffrey Epstein to News Outlets Worldwide
- Wall Street’s Most Dangerous Derivative Secrets Are Hiding in Plain Sight in a Regulator’s Report
- JPMorgan/Jeffrey Epstein Cases Are a Cross Between the Bank’s Chinese Princeling Scandal and Madoff Fraud, Using Sex with Minors as a Bribe
- JPMorgan Is Alleged to Have Used Its Hedge Fund’s Private Jet to Engage in Sex-Trafficking for Jeffrey Epstein
Search Results for: stress test
Wall Street Watchdog Assails Fed’s Stress Tests of Mega Banks as “Toothless” – Provides a Wakeup Call to Biden Administration

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 2, 2021 ~ Dennis Kelleher, the co-founder, President and CEO of the nonpartisan Wall Street watchdog, Better Markets, has issued a scathing rebuke of the Federal Reserve’s so-called “stress tests” of the mega banks on Wall Street, calling them “toothless.” Kelleher’s criticisms revolve around two key points. The Fed is preordaining the outcome of the tests by (1) pumping up the banks’ capital with financial handouts prior to the tests and (2) by removing key aspects of the stress tests that would negatively impact the outcome. Kelleher writes that the Fed’s “unprecedented” support to financial markets and the economy since last March was $4 trillion and “has materially helped to bolster bank balance sheets and capital levels.” But Kelleher is overlooking the more than $9 trillion in cumulative repo loans that the Fed showered on the trading units of these mega Wall Street banks, at … Continue reading
The Fed Announces New Bank Stress Tests: Will Look at What Would Happen if a Major Counterparty Defaulted

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 17, 2020 ~ At the time the Fed released the results of its bank stress tests in June, it announced that because of the pandemic and unprecedented economic downturn, it would require additional stress testing of the biggest banks later this year. This afternoon, the Fed released those plans. Among the various hypothetical scenarios that the banks will have to perform against, 13 of the banks with significant trading operations will have to consider what would happen if a major counterparty blew up. The banks that will have to submit outcomes under this scenario include: Bank of America, Bank of New York Mellon, Barclays US, Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank USA, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, State Street, UBS, and Wells Fargo. The Fed will release bank-specific results before the end of the year. All 34 banks will face two hypothetical … Continue reading
Bombshell Report: Fed Is Aware that Big Banks Are Rigging their Stress Tests and Letting Them Get Away with It

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 11, 2020 ~ On January 31 of this year, researchers for the Federal Reserve released a study that showed that the largest banks operating in the U.S. have been gaming their stress test results by intentionally dropping their exposure to over-the-counter derivatives in the fourth quarter. The fourth quarter data is the information used by the Federal Reserve to determine surcharges on capital for Global Systemically Important Banks, or G-SIBs. The report, “How Do U.S. Global Systemically Important Banks Lower Their Capital Surcharges?,” was written by Jared Berry, Akber Khan, and Marcelo Rezende. We decided to evaluate this claim for ourselves, using the quarterly derivative reports provided by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the regulator of national banks. The data was appalling. The largest Wall Street banks not only dropped their level of derivatives by trillions of dollars in the fourth … Continue reading
Fed’s Stress Tests Results Based on GDP Decline of 8.5 Percent; Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow Forecast Says GDP Will Decline by 46.6 Percent

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 26, 2020 ~ Yesterday the Federal Reserve released its highly awaited stress tests on the biggest and most dangerous banks in America. The stress test results fill an 83-page document with dozens of charts showing what would happen to the banks under a hypothetical “severely adverse scenario.” This scenario, unfortunately, was previously prepared and pales in comparison to the actual economic damage rendered by the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, the severely adverse scenario for this year’s stress tests imagined the U.S. unemployment rate climbing to a peak of 10 percent in the third quarter of 2021. The unemployment rate is currently 13.3 percent. But far more frightening, the Fed’s severely adverse scenario for GDP imagined a decline of “8½ percent from its pre-recession peak, reaching a trough in the third quarter of 2021.” As of yesterday, June 25, the Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow estimate … Continue reading
Bloomberg Drops a Bombshell on the Fed’s Big Bank Stress Tests Set for Release Today

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 25, 2020 ~ The Federal Reserve will release the results of its stress tests on the biggest and most dangerous banks at 4:30 p.m. today. But the potential results of those tests played a negative role in the stock market’s performance yesterday. The Dow’s drop of 710 points yesterday can be ascribed to two things: the alarming news reports that COVID-19 cases are skyrocketing in the second and third most populous states in the U.S. – Texas and Florida; and a bombshell report from Bloomberg News released at 7:00 a.m. yesterday morning. The Bloomberg article, by Lisa Lee and Shahien Nasiripour, cast the Federal Reserve in an unfavorable light over its failure to halt dividend payments at the biggest Wall Street banks, something that European bank regulators have done during the pandemic crisis. Eight of the largest U.S. banks announced in unison on Sunday, … Continue reading
Fed’s Stress Tests on Banks Should Have Factored in a Pandemic

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 26, 2020 ~ Each year the Federal Reserve comes up with a hypothetical, severely adverse economic scenario against which it evaluates the ability of Wall Street’s mega banks to weather the storm. Called “stress tests,” this year’s severely adverse scenario features a severe global recession, unemployment of 10 percent, elevated stress in corporate debt markets and commercial real estate, along with a bank’s major counterparty defaulting if it has significant derivatives trading exposures. The stress test results are typically disclosed in June by the Fed with an immediate announcement by the banks (that get the green light from the Fed) about how many billions of dollars they plan to spend on stock buybacks and dividend increases to artificially boost their share prices. What the Federal Reserve has not planned for in its stress test is a global recession (which was looking entirely likely … Continue reading
Fed’s Stress Test: Should JPMorgan Chase Have Gotten a Second Chance?

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 28, 2019 ~ How many second chances should a criminal recidivist get? JPMorgan Chase has logged in guilty pleas to three criminal felony counts in the past five years; it has a criminally-charged precious metals trader singing to the Feds currently as JPMorgan admits in regulatory filings that it’s under a new criminal investigation in that matter; the bank has paid $36 billion in fines for wrongdoing since the financial crash, including $1 billion for trading exotic derivatives in London with bank depositors’ money and losing at least $6.2 billion of those depositor funds (the London Whale scandal). And in just the past year it has proven that it’s “game on” for more regulatory fines and illicit profits. (See Could JPMorgan Chase Be Hit with a Fourth Felony Count for Rigging Precious Metals Markets?) Despite all of this, yesterday the Federal Reserve announced … Continue reading
The Fed’s Fancy Footwork on Stress Tests Was About Silencing Bank Examiners

By Pam Martens: March 12, 2019 ~ Last Wednesday, the Federal Reserve Board of Governors rushed through a rule change to its stress test for the too-big-to-fail banks on Wall Street, putting it into immediate effect without the customary 30-day delay. It is further noteworthy that the Board did not get the customary unanimous vote to move forward with the rule change: Fed Board Governor Lael Brainard, arguably the smartest member of the Board, voted against the rule change while the four other Governors, including Chairman Jerome Powell, voted in favor. There is a strong case that can be made that the rushed rule change was to protect the biggest banks on Wall Street – the ones serially charged with crimes around the globe – while putting the public at risk of another epic financial collapse. What the rule change effectively did was to tell the recidivist banks that their … Continue reading
These Charts Show the Fed’s Stress Tests as a Dangerous Illusion
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 7, 2017 Sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words. The charts above show how four of the largest Wall Street banks traded like clones of one another yesterday. Their share prices rallied at almost identical times and the rallies faded at almost identical times. The chart contrasting the trading pattern of JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley is particularly interesting. JPMorgan’s Chase bank has thousands of retail commercial bank branches spread across the United States. Morgan Stanley, on the other hand, has approximately 17,000 retail stockbrokers, now known as financial advisors. What both firms have in common is that they are among the five banks in the country that control a monster pile of derivatives on Wall Street. Ditto for the other two banks illustrated above: Citigroup and Bank of America. According to the most recent data from the Office of … Continue reading
After Passing Stress Tests, Wall Street Banks to Spend Like a Drunken Sailor – on their Own Stock Buybacks
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 29, 2017 Yesterday, the Federal Reserve announced the second leg of its 2017 stress tests for the nation’s most systemic financial institutions. Known as the Comprehensive Capital Analysis and Review (CCAR), the Fed said it “did not object to the capital plans of all 34 bank holding companies” although Capital One Financial will be required to “submit a new capital plan within six months that addresses identified weaknesses in its capital planning process.” That all clear from the Fed unleashed what JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon fondly refers to as “animal spirits” on Wall Street. The Fed had barely made its announcement when three of the biggest Wall Street banks announced they were earmarking about $47 billion to gorging on their own share buybacks. JPMorgan Chase led the pack with a potential buyback of $19.4 billion over the next 12 months, according to … Continue reading