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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
Fed Chair Bernanke Held 84 Secret Meetings in the Lead Up to the Wall Street Collapse
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 10, 2014 It’s been over five years since the collapse of iconic Wall Street firms such as Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers; the insolvency and bailout of AIG and Citigroup; the receivership of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; the shotgun marriage of Bank of America and Merrill Lynch. After a 5-year delay, the Federal Reserve has released the full transcripts of its meetings in 2007 and 2008 – the two key years of the crisis. But for unexplained reasons, the Fed Chairman, Ben Bernanke continues to redact 84 meetings from his appointment calendar that occurred between January 1, 2007 and the pivotal collapse of Bear Stearns on the weekend of March 15-16, 2008. At first blush, one might think that Bernanke is attempting to protect the image of the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors as independent of any political influence … Continue reading
Citigroup as Perpetual ‘Victim’ of Fraud: Shades of Parmalat in Oceanografia
By Pam Martens: March 6, 2014 Under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, publicly traded companies like Citigroup must certify in their filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission that they have adequate internal controls over their financial reporting. Notwithstanding Citgroup’s regular certifications to the SEC that its controls are adequate, we’ve been reading for years now how it claims to be a “victim” of fraud or the “victim” of a wayward employee’s misdeeds. The latest victimhood to hit Citigroup involves a Mexican oil services firm called Oceanografia. Citigroup’s Mexican banking unit, Banamex, lent $585 million to Oceanografia on the basis of accounts receivables it was to collect on contracts. Citigroup now says it has discovered it is a victim of fraud in that only $185 million of those accounts receivables actually exist at Oceanografia. Despite all those assurances that it has proper controls for its financial reporting, it had to file revisions … Continue reading
Panic at the Federal Reserve 2007: Robert Rubin Calls at 5 P.M.
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 5, 2014 Based on the appointment calendars of Former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request filed by Wall Street On Parade, and the newly released Fed transcripts and documents from the financial crisis era, we are able to reconstruct the August 2007 panic that gripped the Fed Chairman, notwithstanding the dozens of headlines now proclaiming the Fed remained in the dark about the seriousness of the crisis. It started with a call to Bernanke from Citigroup’s Robert Rubin at 5 p.m. on August 8, 2007. By the next morning, it appeared that the Fed Chairman had gone into a high state of alert. At 11:00 a.m. the next morning (August 9, 2007) Bernanke met with Lewis Ranieri, the granddaddy of mortgage backed securities and a pioneer in the securitization market. Fed Governor Randall Kroszner and Sandy Braunstein, … Continue reading
Fed Nominee Stanley Fischer Has a Citigroup Problem
By Pam Martens: March 4, 2014 Last evening, the U.S. Senate Banking Committee made the unexpected announcement that it was postponing the confirmation hearing of Stanley Fischer to serve as Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. Two other Fed nominees were to be vetted today. The hearing had been scheduled for 10 a.m. this morning in the Dirksen Senate Office Building. No reason was given for the postponement. There are surely some veteran lawyers at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) hoping the nomination of Fischer has been scuttled. The thought that Stanley Fischer, a former Vice Chairman of the serially corrupt Citigroup, could become Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve, a regulator of mega banks like Citigroup, is not a source of comfort. Fischer was nominated for the post by President Obama, whose devotion to failing up on Wall Street regularly sets new heights. As if … Continue reading
A Closer Look at Young Worker Deaths at JPMorgan Chase
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 3, 2014 In the past three months, at least eight JPMorgan Chase employees, aged 22 to 39, have passed away, including the three highly publicized, suspicious deaths of Gabriel Magee, Ryan Crane and a young man the media is now calling Dennis Li. The eight deaths are likely a small fraction of the actual number of JPMorgan employees in this age cohort who died during December 2013 and January and February of this year. Wall Street On Parade was able to locate this small sampling from online funeral home notices in the U.S., thus the sampling does not include deaths where a notice was not posted online or deaths in the 59 foreign countries where JPMorgan Chase has employees, other than the death of Magee and Li which occurred in London and Hong Kong, respectively. As detailed with names, ages and job titles … Continue reading
Bitcoins, Murder-for-Hire, 28-Year Old Pie Makers: Welcome to the New World of Banking
By Pam Martens: February 27, 2014 Mark Karpeles, a 28-year old Frenchman and the head of the now shuttered Bitcoin web site Mt. Gox, where customers are said to have lost hundreds of millions of dollars, may be a very talented software developer and entrepreneur, but what he clearly is not is a competent banker; and yet, he was allowed to accept large quantities of deposits of money from the public. Mt. Gox, a purveyor of the virtual currency, Bitcoin, held no banking license or bank charter in the U.S. It had no FDIC insurance guaranteeing the deposits. There were no bank examiners periodically checking the books to be certain the deposits were safe. And yet, according to the chart below from Alexa, it may be U.S. citizens who suffered the largest losses. Alexa ranks sites by traffic from around the globe. Despite the fact that Karpeles was based in … Continue reading
Bitcoins, Tulips, and the Madness of Crowds
By Pam Martens: February 26, 2014 Coming off the greatest financial collapse in modern history because of unregulated derivatives backed by dodgy collateral, it is more than a little disconcerting that we are now forced to use our digital ink to explain the pitfalls of investing in a digital currency backed by air. There seems to be a mass hypnosis at work. For example, last evening, at 6:47 p.m., the wire service Reuters explained Bitcoin to its readers as follows: “Unlike traditional currencies, where a central bank decides how much money to print based on goals like controlling inflation, no central authority governs the supply of bitcoins. Like other commodities and currencies, its value depends on people’s confidence in it.” The last sentence of the Reuters statement was likely penned by someone who has never traded commodities or registered with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Bitcoin is decidedly not like other traded commodities. … Continue reading
Bombshell Documents Vanish in the JPMorgan-Madoff Investigation
By Pam Martens: February 25, 2014 According to a Freedom of Information Act response received by Wall Street On Parade, Federal law enforcement may share the blame with JPMorgan Chase for allowing Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme to be perpetuated for so long. On January 7 of this year in a press conference called to announce felony charges against JPMorgan Chase for its role in the Madoff Ponzi scheme, U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, FBI Assistant Director-in-Charge George Venizelos, and the Director of the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, Jennifer Shasky Calvery, took turns at the podium excoriating JPMorgan for observing brazen, long-term money laundering activity occurring under its nose in the business bank account it held for Bernard Madoff while ignoring its legally mandated duty to file a Suspicious Activity Report (SAR) with the federal government. The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, known throughout Wall Street and the banking world as FinCEN, is … Continue reading
Another Sudden Death of JPMorgan Worker: 34-Year Old Jason Alan Salais
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 23, 2014 On the evening of Sunday, December 15 of last year, six weeks before the onset of the latest rash of tragic deaths of young men in their 30s employed at JPMorgan, the Pearland, Texas police received a call of a person in distress outside a Walgreens pharmacy at 6122 Broadway in Pearland. The individual in distress was Jason Alan Salais, a 34-year old Information Technology specialist who had worked at JPMorgan Chase since May 2008. A family member confirmed to Wall Street On Parade that Salais died of a heart attack on the same evening the report of distress went in to the police. The incidence of heart attack or myocardial infarction among men aged 20 to 39 is one half of one percent of the population, according to the National Center for Health Statistics and National Heart, Lung, and Blood … Continue reading
IMF Fires a Warning Shot at the Fed on Deflation
By Pam Martens: February 20, 2014 The U.S. government’s economic policy wonks are the habitual finger wags. They’ve lectured Japan incessantly for 20 years on how to beat its intractable deflation problem and in more recent years pointed at China for keeping its currency artificially low to boost exports. Last October 30, when the U.S. Treasury released its semi-annual “International Economic and Exchange Rate Policies” report to Congress, it turned its finger-pointing on Germany, grousing that: “Within the euro area, countries with large and persistent surpluses need to take action to boost domestic demand growth and shrink their surpluses. Germany has maintained a large current account surplus throughout the euro area financial crisis, and in 2012, Germany’s nominal current account surplus was larger than that of China. Germany’s anemic pace of domestic demand growth and dependence on exports have hampered rebalancing at a time when many other euro-area countries have … Continue reading