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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
Powell Says Fed Doesn’t Have a Credibility Problem with the American People – Despite Gallup Poll Showing Lowest Confidence Since 2008 Financial Crisis
By Pam Martens: May 5, 2022 ~ At the Fed’s press conference yesterday, Federal Reserve Chair Pro Tempore Jerome Powell was asked by Mike McKee of Bloomberg Television a series of questions on monetary policy which ended with this: “Are you concerned about Fed credibility with the American people?” Powell answered the monetary policy questions but did not directly address the credibility issue. McKee then repeated the question, phrased as follows: “Do you think the Fed has a credibility problem?” Powell’s answer provides an alarming insight into with whom the Fed seeks to maintain confidence. Powell said this: Powell: “No. I don’t. A good example of why would be that—so in the fourth quarter of last year, as we started talking about tapering sooner and then raising rates this year, you saw financial markets reacting, you know, very appropriately. Not to bless any particular day’s measure, but the way financial markets—you … Continue reading
What You Can Expect to Hear at the Fed’s Press Conference Today
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 4, 2022 ~ The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) will release its decision on hiking the Fed’s benchmark interest rate at 2:00 p.m. ET today, along with its plans for shrinking the Fed’s $9 trillion balance sheet. The announcement will be followed with Fed Chair Pro Tempore Jerome Powell holding a press conference at 2:30 p.m. ET. (Powell still awaits full Senate confirmation for a second term as Fed Chair, thus the designation “Pro Tempore.” Wall Street is expecting a 50-basis point rate hike (half of one percent), which would put the Fed Funds rate in a range of 0.75 to 1 percent. Wall Street does not like large interest rate increases from the Fed because five of the megabanks are sitting with a $200 trillion albatross of derivatives around their neck with questionable counterparties on the other side of a lot of those … Continue reading
Citigroup’s Role in “Flash Crash” in Europe Yesterday Is Reminiscent of Its “Dr. Evil” Trade in 2004
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 3, 2022 ~ Yesterday the international newswire, Reuters, broke the story that the U.S. megabank, Citigroup, was responsible for a flash crash that plunged Sweden’s benchmark index, the OMX, by 8 percent at its low. The index later recovered to close with a loss of just under 2 percent. The plunge caused a rapid ripple effect that briefly spread to other European stock markets. Trading volume in Europe was lower than normal yesterday because the London Stock Exchange was closed for a banking holiday. (As detailed below, Citigroup previously exploited a low volume day in August 2004 in the European bond market.) Citigroup has confirmed its role in yesterday’s flash crash, releasing the following statement on Monday: “This morning one of our traders made an error when inputting a transaction. Within minutes, we identified the error and corrected it.” El Pais, a leading newspaper … Continue reading
Justice Department’s Investigation of Archegos Leaves Out Three Bank Names: JPMorgan, Citigroup and Bank of America
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 2, 2022 ~ Last Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Justice, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) brought charges against executives at Archegos Capital Management, the family office hedge fund that was somehow able to trick the most sophisticated trading houses on Wall Street into giving it 85 to 90 percent margin debt on concentrated stock positions – one of which had been called a “fraud” in a detailed report. Archegos blew itself up with that margin debt in March 2021, leaving a handful of these sophisticated trading firms acknowledging losses of more than $10 billion dollars. The complaint filed by the Justice Department is the only complaint from the three federal agencies that names the Wall Street banks involved – although it paints the banks as hapless victims of the fraud instead of co-conspirators. (The SEC complaint … Continue reading
Another Raid of Deutsche Bank, Another Dead Whistleblower
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 29, 2022 ~ The Financial Times is reporting this morning that “Germany’s federal police office, criminal prosecutors and the country’s financial watchdog BaFin are raiding Deutsche Bank’s headquarters in Frankfurt” this morning, according to a statement from prosecutors. The raid comes just four days after the body of Valentin (Val) Broeksmit, 46, was discovered at about 7 a.m. Monday at Woodrow Wilson High School in El Sereno, just outside of Los Angeles. Val Broeksmit was the son of William Broeksmit who was found hanged in his London home on January 26, 2014. The senior Boreksmit was a senior executive at Deutsche Bank involved in assessing risk on the bank’s balance sheet. (See our report: Documents Emerge in Senate Hearing from William Broeksmit, Deutsche Exec Alleged to Have Hanged Himself in January.) According to a profile of Val Broeksmit written by David Enrich in the New … Continue reading
Justice Department and SEC Portray Serially-Charged Banks on Wall Street as Hapless Victims of Archegos Fraud. Nobody’s Buying It.
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 28, 2022 ~ Yesterday, the U.S. Department of Justice, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) brought charges against executives at Archegos Capital Management, the family office hedge fund that blew up in March of 2021. The Justice Department brought criminal charges while the SEC and CFTC brought civil charges. Archegos founder and owner Sung Kook (Bill) Hwang and its former CFO, Patrick Halligan, were indicted on securities fraud and racketeering charges. William Tomita, the former Head Trader, and Scott Becker, the former Chief Risk Officer, have pleaded guilty for their roles in the fraud and are cooperating with the Justice Department. All three federal agencies adopted the narrative that the biggest trading houses on Wall Street were the hapless victims of the Archegos’ fraud. That narrative is going to be difficult for a jury to swallow for … Continue reading
Global Megabanks Are Tanking – The Same Ones the Fed Bailed Out in 2019
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 27, 2022 ~ As long-term readers of Wall Street On Parade know well, we have regularly warned that the failure of Congress to meaningfully reform Wall Street by restoring the Glass-Steagall Act poses a national security threat to our nation in times of crisis. Instead of meaningful reform, Congress has stood by and watched the Fed bail out the global banks repeatedly since 2008 – either with direct loans or by keeping interest rates artificially low (“administered rates”) or through trillions of dollars in asset purchases from the banks (what the Fed prefers to call Quantitative Easing). The Fed’s balance sheet has ballooned from less than $1 trillion before the financial crisis in 2008 to $9 trillion today as a result of its willingness to perpetually bail out Wall Street. American taxpayers are on the hook for 98 percent of the Fed’s balance sheet … Continue reading
Markets Climb a Wall of Worry but a War, a Pandemic, Soaring Inflation and Opaque Megabanks Spell Big Trouble
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 26, 2022 When the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics released its Consumer Price Index (CPI) report on April 12, it showed that inflation had surged to the highest rate in 40 years, reaching 8.5 percent in March compared to the same month a year ago. The CPI report for February had shown a year-over-year increase of 7.9 percent – meaning that inflation had surged further in March and the Fed’s target of 2 percent inflation was getting further out of reach. While inflation has soared, supply bottlenecks from the pandemic and now Russia’s war in Ukraine are pushing down Gross Domestic Product (GDP) expectations. The highly-respected GDPNow model from the folks at the Atlanta Fed puts first quarter GDP in the U.S. at a tepid 1.3 percent. (That figure will be updated later today following the release of new home sales for March at … Continue reading
Fed Chair Powell Telegraphs the Perfect Storm for Wall Street’s Megabanks: Rapid Rate Hikes Hitting $234 Trillion in Derivatives
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 25, 2022 The Federal Reserve (the Fed) is the central bank of the United States. It sets monetary policy, including control of the benchmark short-term interest rate known as the Federal Funds rate, or in Wall Street jargon, the “Fed Funds” rate. This is a key rate because it signals the rate at which overnight loans are made between financial institutions and the direction of interest rates in general. Unfortunately, over time, the Fed has also been granted a supervisory role by Congress over Wall Street’s megabanks alongside its ability to bail them out when its crony brand of supervision fails. There was an epic failure in the Fed’s supervision of the Wall Street megabanks in the leadup to the 2008 financial crash and the September 2019 repo blowup. In both cases, the Fed made trillions of dollars in cumulative loans at below-market interest … Continue reading
While JPMorgan Chase Was Getting Trillions of Dollars in Loans at Almost Zero Percent Interest from the Fed, It Was Charging Americans Hit by the Pandemic 17 Percent on their Credit Cards
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 21, 2022
Under just three of the emergency bailout programs offered by the Fed to Wall Street, units of the megabank JPMorgan Chase tapped over $6 trillion in cumulative (term-adjusted) loans from September 17, 2019 through the first quarter of 2020. That figure will definitely go higher as the Fed is releasing the names of the banks and the amounts they borrowed on a quarterly basis for its repo loan program.
Thus far, the numbers stack up as follows: a trading unit of JPMorgan Chase borrowed $6.19 trillion from the Fed’s repo loan program from September 17, 2019 through March 31, 2020. (Those are cumulative, term-adjusted figures.) A significant chunk of that money was borrowed at interest rates as low as 0.10 percent. The loans were collateralized with mostly treasury securities and agency mortgage-backed securities (MBS).
A trading unit of JPMorgan Chase also borrowed $400 billion in cumulative, term-adjusted loans from the Fed’s Primary Dealer Credit Facility (PDCF) during 2020. All of those loans were made at a fixed rate of 0.25 percent even though the Fed accepted lower-grade collateral, such as asset-backed securities, for some of the loans.
JPMorgan Chase’s money market funds also needed to borrow a cumulative $24.8 billion from the Fed’s Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility (MMLF) to bail themselves out during March and April of 2020. Some of those loans didn’t mature until 2021. JPMorgan borrowed from the Fed’s MMLF at rates between 0.50 and 1.25 percent.
While JPMorgan Chase, which has admitted to five criminal felony counts since 2014, was getting these sweetheart deals from the Fed, it was charging Americans who were struggling from the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic as much as 17 percent on their credit cards. You can read one of its credit card customer’s complaints about that 17 percent interest at this link at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s (CFPB) complaint database.
Another JPMorgan Chase customer wrote to the CFPB that their employer filed for bankruptcy during the pandemic, leaving them unemployed. The customer said that when they asked JPMorgan for assistance in reducing the monthly amount they had to pay on their credit card, they were offered the following options: convert to a 60-month repayment plan with interest rates starting at 12 percent; no payment for 90 days but interest would continue to accrue at 14.24 percent; negotiate a payoff of the total principal balance of $14,000 with a 10 percent discount. (Where exactly would an unemployed person get $12,600 when they can’t meet their monthly credit card payment.) You can read the text of that complaint here.
We asked the CFPB database to show us just complaints against JPMorgan Chase since it started receiving those cozy low-interest repo loans from the Fed on September 17, 2019 – months before any COVID-19 cases had been reported anywhere in the world. The database turned up 28,974 complaints. You can browse through them here.
If you want to gauge the compassion that JPMorgan Chase has for its own low-wage tellers, you can read our report here. Despite the five felony counts and a rap sheet that would make the Gambino crime family blush under the leadership of Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan Chase’s Board has turned Dimon into a billionaire – on the backs of its low-wage tellers and customers paying double-digit interest rates on credit cards during a pandemic and declared national emergency.