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Recent Posts
- Intel, Boeing and U.S. Steel May Hold the Secrets to What’s Behind All the Talk of a U.S. Sovereign Wealth Fund
- Trump and Paulson’s Proposal: U.S. Sovereign Wealth Fund (or Another Grifter Bailout)
- A Wall Street Regulator Is Understating Margin Debt by More than $4 Trillion – Because It’s Not Counting Giant Banks Making Margin Loans to Hedge Funds
- After JPMorgan Threatens to Sue, the Fed Cuts Its Capital Requirement on the 5-Count Felon from a Planned 25 Percent Hike to Less than 8 Percent
- Three Megabanks Had Loans Outstanding of $1.832 Trillion to Giant Hedge Funds on March 31
- Jamie Dimon’s Washington Post OpEd Gets Pummeled at Yahoo Finance
- In the Span of 72 Hours, Four People Tied to a Hewlett-Packard Criminal Case Died in Two Separate Events
- Crypto Took Down Another Federally-Insured Bank and Just Handed Its CEO a 24-Year Prison Sentence
- All the Devils from 2008 Are Back at the Megabanks: Leverage, Off-Balance-Sheet Debt, Over $192 Trillion in Derivatives, Shaky Capital Levels
- New Study Says the Fed Is Captured by Congress and White House — Not the Megabanks that Own the Fed Banks and Get Trillions in Bailouts
- Data from the Fed’s Emergency Funding Program Shows Spring 2023 Banking Crisis Was Far Deeper than Americans Were Told
- These FDIC-Insured Banks Have Lost 69 to 40 Percent of their Market Value Year-to-Date
- Exposure at Hedge Funds Has Skyrocketed to Over $28 Trillion; Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Are at Risk
- We Charted the Plunge and Rebound in the Nikkei Versus Nomura and Citigroup; the Correlation Is Frightening
- Former U.S. Labor Secretary Says Billionaires Have No Right to Exist Because their Wealth Comes from Five Illegal or Bad Practices
- Citigroup Is Having a Helluva Summer: A Protest on Thursday Will Turn Up the Heat
- Nikkei Has Biggest Drop in History: Here’s What’s Causing the Global Market Selloff
- JPMorgan Is Tapping Illiquid Assets in its Global Collateral Program; the New York Fed Is Paying for Its Services
- Bank Regulators Issue Warnings on Fintech and Banking as Disasters Pile Up
- Donald Trump Gives a Speech on Not Letting China Win the Crypto Race – Not Realizing China Banned Crypto Mining and Transactions Four Years Ago
- The New York Fed Has Contracted Out Key Functions to JPMorgan Chase; We Filed a FOIA and Got These Strange Invoices
- On the Eve of Netanyahu’s Address to Congress, Senator Bernie Sanders Delivers a Breathtaking Assessment of His War Crimes
- Trump’s Sit-Down with Netanyahu at Mar-a-Lago Will Cost U.S. Taxpayers Millions While Profiting Trump’s Business
- Protecting Trump and His Jet-Setting Adult Children During His Presidency Cost Taxpayers Over $1 Billion
- A Congressman and a Doctor Reported a Woman Being Shot at Trump Rally: She’s Vanished from Official Reports
- Jamie Dimon Goes Missing from Earnings Call, After Dumping $183 Million of His JPMorgan Chase Stock Earlier this Year
- U.S. Senate Candidate Backed by Hedge Fund Billionaires Was Sitting in Front Row at Trump Rally as the Sniper Fired into the Bleachers
- Project 2025: The Fossil Fuel and Banking Money Behind the Madness
- The Fund Created to Unwind a Failing Megabank Has a Problem: There’s No Money in It
- Joe Biden Versus the New York Times
- Grand Jury Transcript in Jeffrey Epstein Case Is Released, Raising Questions about Epstein’s Darkest Secrets Being Protected in JPMorgan Cases
- The Supreme Court Crowns a King, Immunizing Future Criminal Acts Under Project 2025 – a Right Wing Manifesto
- The Debate Disaster and the Supreme Court’s “Chevron” Repeal Have a Money Trail Leading to Charles Koch
- Congressman Andy Barr Stacks a Hearing on the Fed’s Stress Tests with Lobbyists for Megabanks
- The Fed Posts Historic Operating Losses As It Pays Out 5.40 Percent Interest to Banks
- Goldman Sachs’ Bank Derivatives Have Grown from $40 Trillion to $54 Trillion in Five Years; So How Did Its Credit Exposure Improve by 200 Percent?
- The Fed and FDIC Wake Up Suddenly to the Threat of Derivatives, Flunking the Four Largest Derivative Banks on their Wind-Down Plans
- Is the Stock Market Setting Investors Up for a Tech Bust Similar to the Dot.com Bust?
- Chase Bank Customers Are Reporting a Wave of Wire Fraud in their Accounts; the Bank Won’t Make Good on the Looted Funds
- The Senate Race in Ohio Is the Sickest in U.S. History in Terms of Billionaire Money from Outside the State
- Sullivan & Cromwell’s Legal Work for Sam Bankman-Fried’s Crypto House of Fraud Is Getting a Closer Look in Two Federal Court Cases
- Crypto Tries to Recreate the Koch Money Machine to Pack Congress with Shills
- French Fears Ignite Selloff in U.S. Megabanks and Foreign Peers
- Crypto Just Got Exponentially More Dangerous: Meet Fairshake
- Nvidia Hit a $3 Trillion Market Cap Last Week; Dark Pools Are Making Over 300,000 Trades in the Stock Weekly
- The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Is Making Enemies in All the Right Places
- A Former Exec at Citibank Raises Alarm Bells in Federal Court Over Failed Risk Controls Inside the Bank
- Charles Koch’s Money Is Being Used in Elections in Ways Only Orwell Could Have Imagined
- Freakonomics and Frankenbanks: JPMorgan Chase Sucked Up 18 Percent of All Profits of 4,568 FDIC-Insured Banks in the First Quarter
- Academic Study Provides Hard Numbers to the Sick, Revolving Door Culture at Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Citigroup
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Will the New Criminal Probe Against JPMorgan Trigger Its Two-Year Probation Agreement?
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 5, 2014 On January 6 of this year, JPMorgan Chase entered into a two-year probation agreement known as a “deferred prosecution” agreement with the U.S. Justice Department. The deal allowed JPMorgan to avoid prosecution for two felony counts related to its failures in serving as Bernard Madoff’s bank as tens of billions of dollars were laundered between accounts while it made none of the required suspicious activity reports – except one to the United Kingdom. The deferred prosecution agreement, signed on January 6, 2014, required that for the next two years, JPMorgan had to bring to the attention of Federal prosecutors any knowledge of wrongdoing inside the bank, cooperate fully and in good faith, and agree to “commit no crimes under the federal laws of the United States subsequent to the execution of this agreement…” If JPMorgan broke its end of the bargain, … Continue reading
$400 Billion of Deficit Reduction Comes from those Savvy Traders at the New York Fed
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 4, 2014 Economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has been showering praise on the current administration for shrinking the budget deficit while scolding the press for failure to adequately report it: “where are the front-page news reports?” he writes on October 9. The media has been duly pressed into action with Bloomberg News reporting a big headline today on its digital front page: “U.S. Deficit Decline to 2.8% of GDP Is Unprecedented Turn.” But here’s a missing detail that carries a dark side: Over the past six years, $400 billion of deficit reduction has had nothing to do with Congress or the President and everything to do with those savvy traders sitting behind their Bloomberg terminals with their speed dials to Wall Street at the New York Fed. Like every other regional Federal Reserve Bank, the New York Fed, by law, … Continue reading
The New York Fed Has Contracted JPMorgan to Hold Over $1.7 Trillion of its QE Bonds Despite Two Felony Counts and Serial Charges of Crimes
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 3, 2014 The Federal Reserve Board of Governors in Washington, D.C., which functions as the central bank of the United States, has farmed out much of its Quantitative Easing (QE) programs to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York since the financial crisis of 2008. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York has, in turn, contractually farmed out a hefty chunk of the logistics of that work to JPMorgan Chase in the last six years. Sitting quietly on the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s web site is a vendor agreement and other documents indicating that JPMorgan Chase holds all of the Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS) that the New York Fed has purchased under its various Quantitative Easing programs. As of last Wednesday, that figure was $1.7 trillion dollars. (The New York Fed has confirmed that JPMorgan is custodian for these assets.) In … Continue reading
Here’s Why the Fed’s $4.45 Trillion Balance Sheet Is Not Going to Shrink
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 30, 2014 Back on June 25 of this year, Wall Street On Parade ran the following headline: “BOE’s Carney: Inflated Central Bank Balance Sheet the New Normal; Expect to Hear the Same Conclusion from the U.S. Fed.” The day before our headline, Bank of England Governor, Mark Carney, had just explained to Parliament why their central bank’s balance sheet, bloated through quantitative easing, was not going to be shrinking anytime soon. Carney: “…I would define – picking up on what my colleagues have said – pre-crisis position as a position that’s consistent with the normal course of liquidity requirements of the banking system…What has changed, to the good, in terms of the banking system here is that through regulation and supervision we have put much more responsibility on the banks themselves to hold liquidity to manage liquidity shocks. And, as a consequence of … Continue reading
Why Does the U.S. Senate Need a Petition Drive to Hold Hearings on the Secret Goldman Sachs’ Tapes
By Pam Martens: October 29, 2014 It appears that Senators Elizabeth Warren and Sherrod Brown believe they may have a battle on their hands getting their colleagues on the Senate Banking Committee to agree to hold hearings on the now notorious tape recordings secretly made by former New York Fed bank examiner, Carmen Segarra, showing a cozy relationship between the regulator and Goldman Sachs. Petitions have sprung up all over the internet, with more than 129,000 signatures as of this morning, demanding that Congress hold hearings to investigate whether the Federal Reserve System, and specifically the New York Fed, function as merely sycophantic fronts for Wall Street or if they serve any meaningful regulatory role. In addition to petitions at Credo, MoveOn.org and Public Citizen, campaign sites for Senators Warren and Brown have also set up petitions, but those sites do not show how many signatures have been collected. As … Continue reading
Wall Street Journal: Wealth Inequality Is Your Own Dumb Fault
By Pam Martens: October 28, 2014 Yesterday the Wall Street Journal gave prominence to the following headline on page one of its newspaper with the story jumping to page A2: “Bad Market Timing Fueled Wealth Gap.” Through the use of the word “fueled” in that headline, the reader is conditioned to believe that market timing is a significant cause of wealth inequality in the United States – a completely bogus idea for which there exists mountains of research to the contrary. The online version of the article includes a video interview with the author, Josh Zumbrun, and this caption appears under the video: “Millions of Americans bought high and sold low, which caused them to unknowingly widen economic inequality. WSJ’s Josh Zumbrun explains on MoneyBeat with Paul Vigna.” The crux of this thesis is built in the first three paragraphs of the article as follows: “Millions of Americans inadvertently made … Continue reading
Hillary Clinton’s Continuity Government Versus Elizabeth Warren’s Voice for Change
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 27, 2014 The contrast between Wall Street’s continuity government in Washington under another Clinton in the White House and the charismatic populist voice of Senator Elizabeth Warren as she stumps for Democrats in the midterms, is awakening millions of Americans to the idea that there may be choices after all in the 2016 presidential election. Columnist Eugene Robinson said it best last Monday in the Washington Post, writing that Senator Warren’s “swing through Colorado, Minnesota and Iowa to rally the faithful displayed something no other potential contender for the 2016 presidential nomination, including Hillary Clinton, seems able to present: a message.” What Robinson really means is “a message of hope” – that Wall Street’s wealth transfer system, institutionalized under a protection racket by members of Congress who keep their seats using Wall Street’s campaign dough, could come under serious challenge with Warren in … Continue reading
New York Fed’s Conference Evokes Thoughts of Violence Against Wall Street
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 23, 2014 What the New York Fed attempted to pull off this past Monday with its full-day conference for the execs of wayward Wall Street banks was a public relations stunt to switch the national debate from its culture to Wall Street’s culture. Styled as a “Workshop on Reforming Culture and Behavior in the Financial Services Industry,” the event came less than a month after ProPublica and public radio’s “This American Life” released internal tape recordings made by a former New York Fed bank examiner, Carmen Segarra, revealing a regulator with no bark or bite. ProPublica’s Jake Bernstein wrote that the tapes and a confidential report by an outside consultant demonstrated the New York Fed’s “history of deference to banks.” But there is far more to this story. Wall Street banking executives, who elect two-thirds of the Board of Directors of the New … Continue reading
How High Up Did the London Whale Criminality Go at JPMorgan?
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 22, 2014 Yesterday the Inspector General of the Federal Reserve System released a highly abbreviated report on the New York Fed’s supervision of JPMorgan’s Chief Investment Office (CIO) that spawned the $6.2 billion in exotic derivative losses in 2012 – using hundreds of billions of dollars in FDIC insured deposits to make those wild bets. The debacle became known as the London Whale since the outsized trades were conducted in London. The four page summary report that was sanitized for the public includes two bombshells for those who took the time to read the report carefully. First, the Inspector General specifically notes that “we selected July 2004 through April 2012 as the time period for our evaluation. July 2004 marked JPMC’s merger with Bank One Corporation (Bank One), and JPMC created the CIO in 2005.” What is the relevance of that nugget? We … Continue reading
IBM Has to Pay a Foreign Government $1.5 Billion to Unload a Business?
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 21, 2014 In 30 years of observing Wall Street, we can’t remember a headline like the one that appeared yesterday at Reuters: “IBM to Pay GlobalFoundries $1.5 Billion to Take Chip Unit.” When one can’t even give a business away that includes thousands of patents, IBM engineers and two operating factories, times are tough. The market thought so also; by the closing bell yesterday, IBM’s stock was down $12.95, or 7 percent, to $169.10. The acquirer of the IBM semiconductor business, GlobalFoundries, is headquartered in Silicon Valley. Its parent is Advanced Technology Investment Company (ATIC), which is owned by the Abu Dhabi government’s investment arm, Mubadala Development Company. In May, ATIC announced it was changing its name to Mubadala Technology. Abu Dhabi likely drove a very hard bargain with IBM in this deal because it has good reason to question promises made by American … Continue reading