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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
Senator Sherrod Brown Takes Testimony Today on Wall Street Firms Owning and Storing Physical Commodities
By Pam Martens: January 15, 2014 U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown, Chair of the Subcommittee on Financial Institutions and Consumer Protection, part of the Senate Banking Committee, will hold a hearing today at 2:00 p.m. on “Regulating Financial Holding Companies and Physical Commodities.” This will be the second time in six months that the U.S. Senate has investigated the alleged rigging of these markets by Wall Street firms as the Federal Reserve, the sole regulator to grant Wall Street the power to push into these markets, fails to take action to repeal its orders and asks for public comment through March 15, after which time it will study the problem some more. In his written testimony submitted to the Committee, on which he will take questions today, Norman Bay, Director of the Office of Enforcement at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), cited examples of fraudulent activity by Deutsche Bank, Barclays, … Continue reading
Was Chris Christie Ever Presidential Material?
By Pam Martens: January 14, 2014 At New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s news conference on January 9, he gave the country a clear perspective into his character, personality, and his temperament under fire. That was a very big mistake for his presidential ambitions. In Christie’s opening remarks and throughout the answer and question period with reporters, Christie’s narcissism was on full display. Governor Christie was holding court in an effort to do damage control over leaked emails showing that members of his closely-knit circle of associates had engaged in political payback in closing down lanes on the George Washington Bridge to cause enormous traffic tie-ups in Fort Lee, New Jersey – a town with a Mayor who had not endorsed the Governor for reelection. The traffic jams delayed first responders, put people’s lives at risk, and caused school children to be late getting to school. Even in an age where … Continue reading
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
Who Was the Mysterious ‘Bank 2’ That Turned In Madoff – To No Avail
By Pam Martens: January 9, 2014 According to the settlement documents released Tuesday by Preet Bharara, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Bernie Madoff was not content to simply engineer the largest Ponzi scheme under the very noses of the largest squad of regulators in the history of finance, he was simultaneously running a brazen check-kiting scheme under the same noses. Irving Picard, the Trustee of the Madoff victims’ fund set up by the Securities Investor Protection Corporation (SIPC), provided a great amount of detail on this operation in a court filing against JPMorgan in 2011. This week, U.S. Attorney Bharara added additional details. According to Bharara, Madoff was writing checks from an account at “Madoff Bank 2” – a bank other than JPMorgan – to Norman F. Levy, a mutual customer of both Madoff’s firm and JPMorgan. Later the same day, Madoff would transfer money … Continue reading
The Madoff Trustee Makes the Case; the Justice Department Collects the Money
By Pam Martens: January 8, 2014 A sense of déjà vu overwhelmed me yesterday reading the U.S. Justice Department’s settlement documents with JPMorgan in the Madoff case. I knew I had read most of this before. As it turns out, Irving Picard, the trustee for victims of the Madoff fraud had exquisitely presented all of this evidence in an amended complaint that he filed in court on June 24, 2011 – two and one-half years ago. There is one huge difference between what Picard entered into the public court record and what the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Preet Bharara, entered into the public record yesterday: Picard named names – at JPMorgan and at the feeder funds that blindly shoveled billions to Madoff. All of that explosive naming detail is missing in Bharara’s neat settlement, suggesting that is how the U.S. Attorney’s office wrung such an … Continue reading
As Citigroup Spun Toward Insolvency in ’07- ’08, Its Regulator Was Dining and Schmoozing With Citi Execs
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 7, 2014 Before Timothy Geithner became the 75th Secretary of the U.S. Treasury in 2009, he served as the President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York for five years. The New York Fed is one of Wall Street’s primary regulators. But after leaving his post at the New York Fed, Geithner testified before the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Financial Services on March 26, 2009 that he was not regulating Wall Street as he earned his $400,000 a year with car, driver and private dining room. At the 2009 hearing, in response to a question from Congressman Ron Paul, Geithner said: “That was a very thoughtful set of questions. I just want to correct one thing. I have never been a regulator, for better or worse. And I think you are right to say that we have to be very … Continue reading
The Untold Story of the Wall Street Crash of 2007
By Pam Martens: January 6, 2014 The conventional wisdom is that the crash on Wall Street that continues to devastate the U.S. economy and job growth began in earnest in 2008. That’s likely because marquee Wall Street firms, in business for 75 to more than 100 years, did not blow up until 2008. Bear Stearns imploded in March of 2008 and was taken over by JPMorgan. On the same day, September 15, 2008, that Lehman Brothers filed bankruptcy, Merrill Lynch was taken over by Bank of America. Other major Wall Street firms were propped up with the largest taxpayer bailout in the history of U.S. financial markets. A careful review of the report from the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC), Federal Reserve documents, Fed appointment calendars, and news archives indicate clearly that the financial system began “unraveling,” (as the FCIC phrased it) in 2007. More importantly, a number of events … Continue reading
Should a Free Press Have to Beg the Federal Reserve for Ben Bernanke’s Appointment Calendar?
By Pam Martens: January 2, 2014 Each business day, the President of the United States makes his daily schedule available to the press. The President is the Commander in Chief of the military, the man who signs or vetoes legislation, the individual with the power to initiate military action against another nation. To most Americans, he is viewed as the most powerful individual in the country. If such a powerful individual involved with so many delicate negotiations can share his daily appointment calendar with the American people, why can’t the Washington money men whose mandate is also to serve the country’s interest. The U.S. Treasury Secretary’s daily appointment calendar is posted on the Treasury’s web site. The web site tells us that the calendars “are generally posted every quarter.” However, the last six months of Jack Lew’s schedule are missing from this archive. What we do know from Jack Lew’s … Continue reading
Why Did the Justice Department Kill the Madoff Subpoena Against JPMorgan?
By Pam Martens: December 31, 2013 Since December 16, major business media have failed to dig deeper into a potentially blockbuster story involving the Justice Department’s refusal to honor a Wall Street regulator’s request for a subpoena against JPMorgan Chase to obtain Madoff related documents the firm was refusing to turn over. JPMorgan Chase was Madoff’s banker for the last 22 years of his fraud. The Trustee in charge of recovering funds for Madoff’s victims, Irving Picard, said in a filing to the U.S. Supreme Court this Fall that JPMorgan stood “at the very center of Madoff’s fraud for over 20 years.” It’s a big story when a serial miscreant like JPMorgan – which has promised its regulators to change its jaded ways in exchange for settlements – risks obstruction of justice charges by denying one of its key regulators internal documents. It becomes an explosive story when the Justice … Continue reading
Is the New York Fed Too Deeply Conflicted to Regulate Wall Street?
By Pam Martens: December 30, 2013 The Federal Reserve System that is charged with setting monetary policy in the United States consists of a Board of Governors in Washington, D.C. and 12 regional Federal Reserve Banks. The Board of Governors functions as an independent government agency – its Board is appointed by the President of the United States but its funding comes from the regional Federal Reserve Banks. Slowly, like a tiny Goldfish in a large tank of water that grows over time into a monster fish capable of clobbering anything else placed in the tank, one of the 12 regional Federal Reserve Banks has obtained unique powers not shared by the 11 other regional Federal Reserve Banks. This is just a partial list of how the New York Fed is unique among its peers: The President of the New York Fed sits permanently on the Federal Open Market Committee … Continue reading