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Recent Posts
- 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
- $244 Billion of Treasury Debt to Hit the Market Today and Tomorrow as Interest Rates Spike on Ballooning Supply
- CFTC Fines J.P. Morgan Securities — a Fed Primary Dealer — $100 Million for Failing to Surveil Potential Spoofing and High Frequency Trading for Eight Years
- Another FDIC-Insured Bank Got in Bed with Fintech; It’s Now Got a Dumpster Fire and Desperate Pleas from Customers for their Money
- Citigroup Gets Fined $79 Million Two Years After It Caused a $300 Billion Flash Crash in European Stock Markets
- After Weeks of Howling by MAGA Republicans for the Chair of the FDIC “to Resign,” a Democrat Delivers the Decisive Stab in the Back
- The Curious Money Trail Behind the Supreme Court/Clarence Thomas Decision to Rescue a Federal Agency that Wall Street Hates
- Saudi Arabia’s Wealth Fund Dumps Its JPMorgan Chase Stock; Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Did the Same in 2020
- One of Jeffrey Epstein’s Protectors at JPMorgan Chase, Mary Erdoes, Has Sold $29 Million of Her Stock in the Bank Since Just Before Epstein’s Arrest in 2019
- Delinquencies on Office Property Loans at Banks Are at 8 Percent While Office Loans the Banks Sold to Investors Show 31 Percent in Trouble
- Goldman Sachs Shines Up Its Swamp Creature Reputation by Rehiring Robert Kaplan as Vice Chairman – the Guy Who Traded Like a Hedge Fund Kingpin While President of the Dallas Fed
- Cleary Gottlieb – Outside Counsel to Wall Street’s Serially Bailed Out Megabanks – Tarnishes the FDIC Chair in its So-Called “Independent” Report
- JPMorgan Chase and Its Regulators Are Hiding Dark Trading Secrets at the Largest and Riskiest U.S. Bank
- Campus Protests Over Gaza Open a Pandora’s Box for Wall Street Megabanks that Underwrote $8 Billion of Israel’s Bonds in March
- Wall Street’s Megabanks Have Trillions of Dollars Off-Balance Sheet, in a Replay of Accounting Hubris that Led to the 2008 Wall Street Collapse
- JPMorgan Remains the Second Largest Money Market Fund Manager, Despite Needing Billions in Money Market Bailouts from the Fed in 2020
- The First Bank Failure of 2024 Leaves a 1-Cent Stock for Investors and $667 Million in Losses for the FDIC
- Catch and Kill Protection Rackets: Trump, Weinstein, Epstein and Wall Street
- Wall Street’s Judge Shopping Continues: It’s Trying to Stop the FTC’s Ban on Worker Handcuffs Known as Non-Compete Agreements
- The Fed Tallies Up a Big Threat to Financial Stability in the U.S.: “Runnables” at $21.3 Trillion
- Billionaire-Owned Media Has Gone Full Throttle to Save Fellow Billionaire, Jamie Dimon
- The Professor Who Wrote the Seminal Book on Wall Street Megabanks Calls Today’s Financial System “Dangerously Unstable”
- Gold Has Set Historic Highs this Year as the Federal Reserve Has Reported Historic Losses
- Stanford Finance Professor Anat Admati Is Making Jamie Dimon Very Nervous – Again Calling His Bank “Dangerous”
Category Archives: Uncategorized
The Banking Crisis for the Biggest U.S. Banks Began in April 2022; By December 14 They Had Shed $457 Billion of Deposits
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 22, 2023 ~ Pretty much everything the average American has read about the banking crisis is wrong. And there is at least a prima facie case that could be made that Big Media is responsible for that misinformation. Let’s start with the dozens of mainstream media reports that small banks were bleeding deposits and these deposits were flooding into the biggest banks in the U.S. as a safe haven. Those reports gave the distinct impression that the mega banks on Wall Street are viewed by Americans as a safe place to stash money, never mind that they blew up the U.S. financial system in 2008 and still have more than $200 trillion in derivatives lurking in the shadows. According to FRED data compiled by the St. Louis Fed (see chart above), bank deposits at the 25 largest U.S.-chartered commercial banks peaked at $11.556 trillion … Continue reading
The Banking Crisis Has Produced Extraordinary Testimony about Land Mines Lurking in the U.S. Banking System
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 18, 2023 ~ On Wednesday, March 8 of this year, the holding company for the federally-insured Silvergate Bank announced it was winding down the bank. It had little choice but to do so. It was experiencing a bank run and had incinerated its reputation by focusing on deposits from crypto companies, including those majority-owned by indicted crypto kingpin, Sam Bankman-Fried. According to testimony from the Chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), Martin Gruenberg, before the Senate Banking Committee on March 28, “in the fourth quarter of 2022, Silvergate Bank experienced an outflow of deposits from digital asset customers that, combined with the FTX deposits, resulted in a 68 percent loss in deposits – from $11.9 billion in deposits to $3.8 billion.” Silvergate Bank’s primary regulator was the San Francisco Fed. Two days later, on Friday, March 10, Silicon Valley Bank was put … Continue reading
Americans Stampeded into TreasuryDirect Last Year, Opening Almost 3 Million New Accounts to Capture Rising Yields on Savings Bonds and Treasurys
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 17, 2023 ~ Last year, newspapers across America were buzzing with the enticing yields available on U.S. savings bonds, Treasury bills and Treasury notes. It’s now apparent that millions of Americans got the message to move out of the meager yields being offered on savings accounts and money market at their bank and move to the free accounts and government-backed instruments offered by TreasuryDirect.gov. Investors, small and large, can buy directly from the U.S. Treasury at this site. According to data provided by TreasuryDirect, new account openings in 2022 surged to a total of 2,956,790 from a total of 460,057 in 2021 – an increase of 543 percent in one year. Even more impressive, the total par value of the savings bonds and Treasury securities purchased in those accounts went from $9,711,113,646 in 2021 to $87,775,900,168 in 2022 – an 804 percent increase. (See … Continue reading
Serial Ethical Lapses at the Federal Reserve Will Come Under Scrutiny in a Senate Hearing Tomorrow
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 16, 2023 ~ The pileup of conflicts of interests, ethical lapses, and overall moral turpitude at the Federal Reserve have resulted in a recent Gallup poll showing that confidence in the Federal Reserve Chair (currently Jerome Powell) has reached the lowest point in two decades of Gallup polling on this topic. Americans who have “a great deal” or “a fair amount” of confidence in the Fed Chair stands at just 36 percent according to the poll. Tomorrow, the Senate Banking’s Subcommittee on Economic Policy plans to confront the ethically-challenged structure of the Fed head on. It is a given that there will be some fireworks during this hearing because the Chair of this Subcommittee is Senator Elizabeth Warren, who has labeled Fed Chair Powell “a dangerous man” and called out a “culture of corruption” at the Fed last August. (Warren, a former Harvard Law … Continue reading
FDIC Seizure of Foreign Deposits at SVB Opens Pandora’s Box at JPMorgan Chase and Citi – Which Hold a Combined $1 Trillion in Foreign Deposits with No FDIC Insurance
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 15, 2023 ~ If you have been following the banking crisis, you have likely read at least a dozen times that on March 12 federal banking regulators, with the consent of the U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, invoked the “systemic risk exception” in order to protect both insured and uninsured depositors at the two banks that failed in March – Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank. That’s why there were gasps of shock on Saturday evening at around 5:30 p.m. when the Wall Street Journal (paywall) published the stunning news that depositors in the Cayman Islands’ branch of Silicon Valley Bank had their deposits seized by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), which they are unlikely to ever see again. As Wall Street On Parade has previously reported, under statute, the FDIC cannot insure deposits held on foreign soil by U.S. banks. What it … Continue reading
At Year End, 4,127 U.S. Banks Held $7.7 Trillion in Uninsured Deposits; JPMorgan Chase, BofA, Wells Fargo and Citi Accounted for 43 Percent of That
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 11, 2023 ~ If the dark secrets about the U.S. banking system that federal regulators have been keeping since the financial crash of 2008 are allowed to be aired in public Congressional hearings as a result of the current banking crisis – and mainstream media will grow a backbone and cover those hearings – it could help the U.S. avoid a catastrophic financial reckoning down the road. For years, Wall Street On Parade has been reporting that just four banks in the U.S. control more than 85 percent of all the opaque derivatives in the banking system. We have also regularly reported how federal agencies have singled out these four banks for posing systemic risk to the financial stability of the United States. We’re talking about JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Citigroup’s Citibank. On March 30, we crunched the numbers from … Continue reading
Academic Study Finds that One of the Four Largest U.S. Banks Could Be at Risk of a Bank Run
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 9, 2023 ~ The systemic threats to the U.S. financial system were not remedied when Congress passed the watered-down Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation in 2010. While that has been evident with each Federal Reserve bailout of the mega banks and their derivative counterparties, the threat has now gained increased urgency for Congress to confront as a result of a new academic study. A team of four highly-credentialed academics at four separate universities present compelling evidence that one of the four largest U.S. banks, with “assets above $1 trillion,” could be at risk of a bank run. The study is titled: “Monetary Tightening and U.S. Bank Fragility in 2023: Mark-to-Market Losses and Uninsured Depositor Runs?” Its authors are Erica Jiang, Assistant Professor of Finance and Business Economics at USC Marshall School of Business; Gregor Matvos, Chair in Finance at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern … Continue reading
Deposits at JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo Shrank by $465 Billion Y-O-Y; More than Twice the Total of 4,000 Small Banks
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 8, 2023 ~ Since the banking crisis began making headlines at expensive media real estate, the narrative has been that deposits are fleeing the small commercial banks and flooding into the biggest banks that are perceived as too-big-to-fail and thus offer a safer venue for deposits. Because these mega banks are the same ones that the Fed has been bailing out since the financial crisis of 2008, that narrative requires believing that our fellow Americans are dumber than a stump. We decided to check out that narrative for ourselves. Not only is that scenario wrong, but it is so decidedly wrong, and it’s so easy to get the accurate figures, that from where we sit it looks like there might have been an agenda by someone to harm smaller banks. (Since it’s short sellers who have benefited to the tune of more than $7 … Continue reading
Americans Are Wrong to Worry About FDIC-Insured Bank Deposits; They Need to Worry About Sales Hustlers Inside those Banks and Short-Selling Barbarians
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 4, 2023 ~ Federal deposit insurance was created under the Banking Act of 1933 and became effective on January 1, 1934. Since that time, no depositor in a federally-insured bank account has ever lost a dime of their deposits if they stayed within the deposit insurance cap and they made sure that the deposit was actually in a federally-insured instrument. For example, you can’t buy the corporate bonds of a federally-insured bank and get federal deposit insurance on the bonds. You can’t walk into a federally-insured bank and sit down with a fast-talking insurance salesman and buy an insurance product, such as an annuity, and get federal deposit insurance on the annuity. You can’t walk into a federally-insured bank and sit with a wily securities salesman (a/k/a “wealth advisor”) and get federal deposit insurance on a stock mutual fund he might decide to sell … Continue reading
Short Sellers Cratered Silvergate Bank and First Republic; They’re Now Targeting PacWest and Numerous Other Regional Banks
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 3, 2023 ~ President Joe Biden is putting the national security of the United States at risk by not suspending the short-selling of federally-insured banks. Concerns over the safety and soundness of the U.S. financial system could cause money flight out of the U.S., impacting the strength of the U.S. dollar and a loss of confidence by our foreign allies. This is also a matter that impacts the financial lives of every American, because every American – rich, poor or middle class – will suffer the consequences in terms of ability to access bank credit and higher fees on that credit as a result of rebuilding the rapidly depleting federal Deposit Insurance Fund that protects bank deposits. The second, third and fourth largest bank failures in the history of the U.S. have now occurred in the span of seven weeks (First Republic Bank, Silicon … Continue reading