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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
Two Fed-Supervised Banks Blew Up Last Week; Two More Dropped Over 40 Percent Yesterday; and the Fed Wants to Investigate Itself — Again
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 14, 2023 ~ Last Wednesday, federally-insured Silvergate Bank announced that it was closing shop and liquidating. Its parent’s stock price (Silvergate Capital, ticker SI) had lost over 90 percent of its value over the prior year; it was under a Justice Department investigation for how it moved money for crypto-kingpin Sam Bankman-Fried’s house of frauds; and its depositors were fleeing. Oh – and by the way – its primary regulator was the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. Last Friday, California state regulators closed Silicon Valley Bank and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) became the receiver. Its stock price had lost over 80 percent of its market value over the prior year; $150 billion of its $175 billion in deposits were uninsured, either because they exceeded the $250,000 FDIC cap and/or they were foreign deposits. The bank was effectively operating as a Wall … Continue reading
Silicon Valley Bank Was a Wall Street IPO Pipeline in Drag as a Federally-Insured Bank; FHLB of San Francisco Was Quietly Bailing It Out
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 13, 2023 ~ If you want to genuinely understand why Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) failed and why Jerome Powell’s Fed led the effort yesterday to make sure $150 billion of the bank’s uninsured depositors’ money would be treated as FDIC insured and available today, you need to take a look at how the bank defined itself right up until it blew up on Friday. (That history is still available at the Internet Archives’ Wayback Machine at this link. Give the page time to load.) This was a financial institution deployed to facilitate the goals of powerful venture capital and private equity operators, by financing tech and pharmaceutical startups until they could raise millions or billions of dollars in a Wall Street Initial Public Offering (IPO). The bank was also involved in managing the wealth of those startup millionaires or billionaires once they struck it … Continue reading
Bank Stocks Plummet as Bank Runs in the U.S. Gain Momentum at Federally-Insured, Non-Traditional Banks
Editor’s Update: California state regulators shut down Silicon Valley Bank during market hours on Friday, creating mayhem in the stock market’s banking sector. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) has been appointed the receiver at the bank. The FDIC issued a statement on Friday indicating that only insured depositors (those with $250,000 or less at the bank) will have full access to their money by Monday. As of December 31, Silicon Valley Bank had $209 billion in assets and $175 billion in total deposits, making it the second largest bank failure in U.S. history, after Washington Mutual which failed in September 2008 during the Wall Street financial crisis. Tragically, according to SEC filings, more than $150 billion of Silicon Valley Bank’s deposits were uninsured, leaving hundreds of the tech startup companies it served unsure of how to make payroll next week. By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 10, 2023 ~ … Continue reading
FDIC Investigators Are on the Premises of Collapsing Federally-Insured, Crypto Related Bank, Silvergate: It’s Not a Friendly Visit
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 8, 2023 ~ A very peculiar headline appeared at Bloomberg News yesterday concerning the collapsing federally-insured bank, Silvergate Bank, which became the go-to financial institution over the past few years for crypto exchanges around the globe. The headline read: “Silvergate Is in Talks With FDIC Officials on Ways to Salvage Bank.” That headline moved quickly to other news outlets, which dutifully regurgitated that there was an effort underfoot by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to save Silvergate Bank. Bloomberg News then went further out on a shaky limb with this paragraph: “Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. officials have been discussing with management ways to avoid a shutdown, according to people familiar with the matter. One possible option involves lining up crypto-industry investors to help Silvergate shore up its liquidity, said one of the people. FDIC examiners arrived at the firm’s La Jolla, California, offices last week, … Continue reading
Over the Past Year, Inflation Eroded Your Purchasing Power while the Stock Market Ate Away Your Investment Gains
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 7, 2023 ~ On Friday, March 4, 2022, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 33,614.7971. Yesterday, one year later, the Dow closed at 33,431.44, a negligible loss of a fraction of one percent – but still a loss. The Dow is composed of just 30 stocks. The S&P 500, a broader stock market index, includes the common stocks of 500 of the largest companies in the U.S. Over the past year, the S&P 500 fared even worse than the Dow. It went from 4,328.8729 on Friday, March 4, 2022 to yesterday’s closing price of 4,048.42 – a decline of 6 percent. The tech heavy Nasdaq Composite, which consisted of 3,607 component companies as of yesterday according to Nasdaq, delivered the worst performance of the three major indices over the past year. It traveled from 13,313.438 on Friday, March 4, 2022 to a closing … Continue reading
Jamie Dimon Is Fighting a Deposition in a Devastating Lawsuit Charging JPMorgan With Being the Cash Conduit for Jeffrey Epstein’s Sex Crimes
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 6, 2023 ~ The Attorney General’s office of the U.S. Virgin Islands (USVI) has filed a First Amended Complaint against JPMorgan Chase that has less redactions than an earlier version. The complaint makes devastating and detailed charges. It charges that the bank sat on a pile of evidence that Jeffrey Epstein was running a child sex trafficking ring as it continued to keep him as a client; accept his lucrative referrals of wealthy clients; and provided him with large sums of cash and wire transfers to pay off victims – one of whom was a “14-year old sex slave.” Attorneys for the bank are now resisting allowing Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon from being deposed under oath in the matter as to what he knew and when he knew it. The case is USVI v JPMorgan Chase Bank N.A. (22-cv-10904) in U.S. District Court … Continue reading
Silvergate, a Federally Insured Bank, Just Blew Up from Ties to Crypto
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 2, 2023 ~ The one thing a depositor never wants to hear from a bank that is holding his or her life savings is that it has doubts about its “ability to continue as a going concern.” Unfortunately, those very words appeared in a filing made yesterday by Silvergate Capital with the Securities and Exchange Commission – which pretty much guarantees that the ongoing run on deposits at Silvergate will continue with an added sense of urgency. Silvergate Capital is the owner of the federally-insured and taxpayer-backstopped bank, Silvergate Bank, which decided several years back that it would be a cool idea to become the go-to depository bank for crypto companies. One of those outfits was Sam Bankman-Fried’s now collapsed house of fraud. Accounts at Silvergate Bank included Bankman-Fried’s crypto exchange, FTX; his hedge fund, Alameda Research, which prosecutors say looted his FTX crypto … Continue reading
Two Indicted Masterminds of the FTX Fraud Were Clients of Big Law Firm Sullivan & Cromwell
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 1, 2023 ~ On January 17, Sullivan & Cromwell law partner Andrew Dietderich filed a declaration in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware that acknowledged – after much prodding by the U.S. Trustee – the more than 20 legal engagements Sullivan & Cromwell had been involved in with Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX Group before it filed for bankruptcy on November 11, 2022. According to the declaration, the law firm’s legal work began 15 months prior to the collapse of the firm. (See our previous report, Sam Bankman-Fried, BlockFi and Sullivan & Cromwell: A Viper’s Nest of Conflicts and Intrigue.) This does not look good for the 144-year old law firm because the Securities and Exchange Commission is now charging that FTX was a fraud from the very beginning and Sam Bankman-Fried illegally used FTX customer funds from the very beginning. Making the … Continue reading
Goldman Sachs Is Being Sued for 27 Separate Stock Offerings It Underwrote
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 28, 2023 ~ As we reported on February 7, there are some very strange things going on at Goldman Sachs. After reading the Wall Street investment bank’s annual report, which was filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission last Friday, the word “strange” doesn’t seem to do justice to the situation. Goldman Sachs is looking more like a litigation warehouse these days than an investment bank. According to Goldman’s annual report, it is being investigated for pretty much everything it does to make money: derivatives, currencies, mortgages, financial advisory, securities lending, dark pools, investment management, commodities, U.S. Treasuries, corporate bonds, credit cards, hiring and compensation practices, research practices, compliance with the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, transactions involving government-related financings – and on and on. Things are so bad that it concedes in this annual report that it may have under-reserved for its legal costs … Continue reading
The Same Day Sam Bankman-Fried Is Hit with a New Count of Bank Fraud, Three Regulators Warn About Crypto Bank Runs
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 27, 2023 ~ On December 13, the U.S. Department of Justice released an 8-count criminal indictment against the former crypto kingpin, Sam Bankman-Fried. He was charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud, wire fraud, conspiracy to commit commodities fraud, conspiracy to commit securities fraud, conspiracy to commit money laundering, and conspiracy to defraud the Federal Election Commission and commit campaign finance violations. Last Thursday, the Department of Justice added four additional criminal counts against Sam Bankman-Fried in a superseding indictment. These include: bank fraud; conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business; and two counts involving the purchase and sale of derivatives. Bankman-Fried’s jury trial is scheduled to start in October. The charge of bank fraud is something that jury members can get their minds around – particularly when the alleged bank fraud is shown to have taken place at federally-insured banks which are backstopped … Continue reading