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Recent Posts
- Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” Is a Grotesque Giveaway to Fossil Fuel Billionaires While Adding $3.3 Trillion to Nation’s Debt
- Senator Chris Murphy Charges that Trump “Has Opened a Channel for Bribery”
- Congressman Casten: Trump’s Assault on the Rule of Law Is Causing Capital Flight Out of U.S. by Foreign Investors
- Trump’s Approval Rating Drops to 80-Year Low; IMF Says U.S. Tariffs Now Exceed the Highs During the Great Depression
- Nasdaq Has Lost More than 3,000 Points Since Trump’s First Full Day in Office in 2025; the Pain Has Barely Begun
- The Bond Crisis Last Week Was a Global No-Confidence Vote in U. S. President Donald Trump
- Trump’s Tariff Plan Guts $5 Trillion in Stock Value in Two Days; Senator Warren Calls for Emergency Action Before Markets Open on Monday
- Trump’s Attacks on Big Law, Universities, and the Media Have a Common Goal: Silence Dissent Against Authoritarian Rule
- Trump Administration Gives All Clear to Laundering Money through Shell Companies and Bribing Foreign Officials
- Four Megabanks on Wall Street Hold $3.2 Trillion in Uninsured Deposits – Which May Explain Senator Schumer’s Pivot to the GOP to Stop a Government Shutdown
- Here’s What Came Crashing Down Yesterday for Trump’s “Genius” Guy, Elon Musk: Tesla Stock, Access to Twitter (X), His Years of Secret Calls with Putin
- After Banning the Associated Press, Trump Is Now Targeting Specific Journalists That He Wants to See Fired
- Closely Watched Atlanta Fed Model Predicts Negative U.S. Growth in First Quarter
- Trump’s Gangster Diplomacy Makes Front Page Headlines Around the Globe
- Who Benefits Alongside Elon Musk If He Succeeds in Killing the CFPB: the Megabanks on Wall Street that Underwrite His Tesla Stock Offerings
- In Trump 1.0, the State Department Used Taxpayer Money to Publish a Book Elevating Elon Musk to a Superhero; It Was Funded by USAID, the Agency Musk Wants to Quickly Shut Down
- News Host Joy Reid Raises Threat of Trump Selling U.S. to Putin; Ten Days Later Her Show Is Cancelled
- Elon Musk’s DOGE Appears to Be Violating a Court Order; It Has Taken Down Hundreds of YouTube Videos that Educate Americans on How to Avoid Being Swindled
- Barron’s Releases Audio of Jamie Dimon Cursing Out His Workers at a Town Hall, as Dimon Plans to Dump Another One Million JPM Shares
- There’s One Federal Investigative Agency that Neither Trump nor Elon Musk Can Touch: It Just Opened an Investigation into DOGE
- Elon Musk’s Companies Were Under Investigation by Five Inspectors General When the Trump Administration Fired Them and Made Musk the Investigator
- Donald Trump Gives the Greenlight to Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase to Return to Bribing Foreign Officials
- After Tech Geeks Built a Back Door to Loot Billions from FTX, Republicans Refuse to Investigate What Elon Musk’s Tech-Squad Did Inside the U.S. Treasury’s Payment System
- Former Prosecutor, Now U.S. Senator, Informs Tesla That CEO Musk May Be Violating Federal Law and to “Preserve All Records”
- Trump’s Hedge Fund Guy Is Now Overseeing the U.S. Treasury, IRS, OCC, U.S. Mint, FinCEN, F-SOC, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
- As Elon Musk Begins Shutting Down Payments to Federal Contractors, a Strange Money Trail Emerges to His Operatives Inside the U.S. Treasury’s Payment System
- JPMorgan Chase Charged by Yet Another Internal Whistleblower with Cooking the Books
- We Asked Google’s AI Search Model, Gemini, Questions About the Fed and Wall Street Megabanks: It Got the Answers Dead Wrong
- With Trump and Melania’s Crypto Coins Likely to Raise Legal Challenges, Why Didn’t Trump Fire the SEC’s Inspector General in His Purge of IGs?
- Fossil Fuel Industry Could End Up Paying Tens of Billions for LA Wildfires and Deceiving the Public on Climate Change for Decades
- It’s Being Called the Biggest Grift by a President in U.S. History: Trump and First Lady Launch their Own Crypto Coins
- Trump Plans to Install a Fracking CEO to Head the Energy Department and Declare a National Emergency on Energy to Gain Vast Powers
- Fossil Fuel Money Played a Role in the Los Angeles Fires and the Push to Install Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense
- When It Comes to Wealth Retention in Retirement, Concrete May Be the New Gold
- Wall Street Watchdog Warns “Clock Is Ticking on a Coming Catastrophic Financial Crash”
- Wall Street Is Sending the Same Message to Americans on Fossil Fuel Financing that It Sent on Cigarettes: Drop Dead
- In a Six-Week Span, this Dark Pool with a Curious Past Traded 3.7 Billion Shares
- Wall Street’s Lobby Firm Hired Eugene Scalia of Gibson Dunn to Sue the Fed for Jamie Dimon
- Postmaster General Louis DeJoy Made $561,051 in Compensation in 2024, as Mail Costs Spiked and Delivery Deteriorated
- Fed Chair Jay Powell Sends a Bold Message to Trump and Tanks the Dow by 1123 Points
- The Head of Fixed Income at T. Rowe Price Makes the Scary Case for the 10-Year Treasury to Spike to 6 Percent
- $663 Billion in Cash Assets Have Gone Poof at the Largest U.S. Banks
- Donald Trump to Ring Bell at New York Stock Exchange Today as Hit List Posters Appear in Manhattan Targeting Wall Street CEOs
- Trump Has a Slush Fund to Prop Up the Dollar – Will He Use It to Prop Up Bitcoin Instead?
- A CEO Assassination; a Billionaire Heiress/NYPD Commissioner; a Secret Wall Street Spy Center – Here’s How They’re Connected
- Despite More than 1600 Tech Scientists Signing a Letter Calling Crypto a Sham, Trump Names a Crypto Cheerleader for SEC Chair
- The Fed Rings a Warning Bell: Hedge Funds and Life Insurers Are Reporting Historic Leverage
- Trump’s Nominee for FBI Director, Kash Patel, Has Businesses Financially Intertwined with Trump
- Donald Trump Is at Risk of Getting Named in a Fossil Fuels Conspiracy Lawsuit
- Trump Is Having Difficulty Getting a Lawyer to Accept the Nomination for SEC Chair: Here’s Why
Category Archives: Uncategorized
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.
It’s Been More than Seven Months and Still No Investigative Findings on the Fed’s Trading Scandal

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 21, 2022 On September 7 of last year, Wall Street Journal reporter Mike Derby broke the story that “Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas President Robert Kaplan made multiple million-dollar-plus stock trades in 2020, according to a financial disclosure form provided by his bank….” Kaplan was a sophisticated trader who previously worked at Goldman Sachs for 22 years, rising to the rank of Vice Chairman. His financial disclosure forms suggest that Kaplan maintained a trading relationship with Goldman Sachs, since he lists proprietary products created by “GS,” short for Goldman Sachs. It would be highly inappropriate for Kaplan to have a trading relationship with Goldman Sachs since it is a bank holding company supervised by the Fed. The strange thing about Derby’s reporting on Kaplan is that it didn’t capture the most scandalous aspect of Kaplan’s trading. According to Kaplan’s financial disclosure forms, he was … Continue reading
Biden Has Nominated a Man from the Sandy Weill/Robert Rubin/Tim Geithner School of Wall Street Hubris to Head Regulation at the Fed

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 20, 2022 ~ In addition to being a law professor at the University of Michigan, Michael Barr also holds the title as the “Joan and Sanford Weill Dean of Public Policy at the University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy.” The Ford School sits in a building called the Joan and Sanford Weill Hall, which was given that name as the result of a $5 million donation from the Weills. To anyone who hasn’t been in a coma since the Wall Street crash of 2008 – an event that sent the U.S. economy into the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression – an affiliation with the name “Weill” should have been an automatic disqualifier for any position in the Biden administration even remotely connected to regulating Wall Street. Instead, at the behest of some powerful person or persons, Michael Barr … Continue reading
Why Didn’t Vanguard, the Largest Mutual Fund Family in the U.S., Need to Borrow from the Fed while the Wall Street Titans Did?

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 19, 2022 ~ For the past week, Wall Street On Parade has been crunching the cryptic data released by the Federal Reserve on March 31 that named the mutual funds that couldn’t meet redemption requests in their money market funds in March and April of 2020 without tapping loans from the Fed. As we reported yesterday, the Fed loaned a cumulative total of $162.9 billion from its Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility (MMLF) in March and April of 2020 with 72 percent of that total going to just six mutual fund families: Federated $27.75 billion; JPMorgan $24.8 billion; Morgan Stanley $19.55 billion; UBS $17.3 billion; Wells Fargo $15.5 billion; and BlackRock $11.98 billion. There are two striking aspects to this story. First, no mainstream media outlet will go near the story. The same media outlets that battled the Fed in court for more … Continue reading
Just Six Wall Street Firms Borrowed $116.83 Billion from the Fed’s Money Market Bailout Fund – 72 Percent of the Total

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 18, 2022 ~ The Federal Reserve has set up a veritable obstacle course to prevent the public from drilling down to see that just six big Wall Street firms received the lion’s share of loans from its emergency funding facility called the Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility (MMLF). The MMLF made emergency loans from March 23, 2020 through April 23, 2020, but the program did not end on April 23, 2020. That’s because these were not overnight loans. They were loans made for periods up to as long as 11 months in some cases – taking the program into 2021. The MMLF made loans against paper that could not be sold elsewhere that was sitting in money market funds that were having difficulty raising cash to meet redemption requests. The loans were for the same maturity as the paper being put up … Continue reading
Moscow Stock Exchange Index Is Slumping Toward Its Invasion Low
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 14, 2022 ~
The Moscow Stock Exchange Index, known as MOEX, tanked 4.9 percent on Thursday to close at 2,404.73. The Index is now down 36.5 percent year-to-date.
The stock exchange had shuttered stock trading after the trading session on February 25, 2022, the day after the Russian military invaded Ukraine. The Moscow Stock Exchange did not reopen for stock trading until March 24.
The Russian government had previously announced on March 1 that its Finance Ministry would use up to $10.3 billion from the National Wealth Fund to prop up share prices of Russian companies by buying up shares on the exchange. Those funds would appear to be running out as the MOEX had a rough tumble on Thursday and closed near the lows of the day.
JPMorgan Chase Has Sunk $84 Billion Into Buying Back Its Stock Over Past 5 Years; Now Its Stock Is Sinking

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 14, 2022 ~ JPMorgan Chase’s publicly-traded shares closed out 2021 with a share price of $158.35. At the closing bell yesterday, shares of JPMorgan Chase were at $127.30, a year-to-date price decline of 19.6 percent. That’s dramatically worse than its peer bank, Wells Fargo, and modestly worse than another peer bank, Bank of America. That performance is shocking because the Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon, is paid like a rock star by his Board, treated like a financial wizard by the business press, and perpetually brags about his bank’s “fortress balance sheet” in his musings to Congress and shareholders. But the share price performance is not shocking if one considers that one of the artificial props under the share price for the past five years has been Dimon’s crony Board of Directors authorizing giant share buybacks of the stock. According to … Continue reading
Here’s a List of Toxic Assets that Blew Up in Money Market Funds at Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley and Others that the Fed Bailed Out

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 13, 2022 ~ On March 31, the Federal Reserve finally released a trove of secret transaction data revealing which Wall Street trading houses had to borrow hundreds of billions of dollars from a panoply of Fed bailout programs. One of those bailout programs was the Fed’s Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility (MMLF) which bought paper residing in the money market funds of large Wall Street firms that no one else on the street wanted to buy – or at least at a price that would prevent staggering losses for the funds, which are supposed to trade at a stable $1 per share price. We have begun to unravel the cryptic details of the MMLF, although the Boston Fed which administered the program for the Federal Reserve used a bag of tricks to make that process as difficult as possible for journalists. For example, … Continue reading
Fed Governor Lael Brainard Should Not Be Leaking Details of Fed FOMC Minutes, Especially Given Her Husband’s Ties

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 12, 2022 ~ Multiple current and former Federal Reserve officials remain under investigation for the worst trading scandal in Fed history. This investigation includes the former President of the Dallas Fed, Robert Kaplan, who traded in and out of S&P 500 futures contracts in lots of “over $1 million” while sitting as a voting member of the Fed’s Open Market Committee (FOMC), which sets interest rates and makes other critical monetary policy decisions that move markets. The investigation also involves former Boston Fed President Eric Rosengren, who actively traded in a joint account with his wife, who had been given a margin account by a Fed supervised bank, Citigroup’s Citibank. (See our extensive archive on the Fed’s trading scandal.) Last Tuesday, President Biden’s nominee for Fed Vice Chair, Lael Brainard, who has been a Fed Governor since 2014 and has had a permanent voting … Continue reading