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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
Wall Street’s Go-To Law Firm, Sullivan & Cromwell, Got in Bed with Crypto; Now Its Reputation Is Being Hammered
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 25, 2024 ~ Since January, the reputation of Wall Street’s go-to law firm, Sullivan & Cromwell, has been repeatedly hammered. It all stems from the law firm’s decision some years ago to involve itself in legal representations of crypto firms and/or their principals – an industry that 1,600 of the brightest scientific minds in technology have called a sham. On January 19, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals sharply rebuked the law firm’s position that it didn’t need an independent watchdog appointed by the U.S. Department of Justice to oversee the way it was handling the collapsed crypto house of frauds (known as FTX) in bankruptcy proceedings – despite it having significant conflicts of interests in the matter, such as previously providing legal representation to the mastermind of the fraud, Sam Bankman-Fried. On February 16, a federal lawsuit was filed against the law firm alleging civil conspiracy, … Continue reading
More Failed Banks and Office Building Demolitions Likely Before Real Estate Problems End, Warn Two Federal Agencies
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 21, 2024 ~ Federal banking oversight agencies are in agreement: U.S. banks are facing a potential tsunami of problems with commercial real estate loans in the office space sector. Last June 1, the Office of Financial Research (OFR), (the agency created under the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation of 2010 to warn about financial stability risks), explained why the vacancy rate in office buildings is in dramatic contrast to the actual occupancy rate, and thus bodes poorly for the future demand for renewing office leases. OFR writes as follows: “The health of the CRE [Commercial Real Estate] office sector is not only measured by the amount of space leased and rent paid today, but also by how much space will be required in the future. In addition to space available for sublease, we can estimate the amount of space currently occupied by employees by measuring card … Continue reading
During Spring Bank Panic of 2023, Liquidity Advances from FHLBs Topped Those of Q4 2008, when Wall Street Was in Collapse
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 19, 2024 ~ According to data from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and using a graph from the St. Louis Fed above, the liquidity crisis among banks in the spring of last year was far more dramatic than has been acknowledged by banking regulators. According to the data, during the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression (at the end of the fourth quarter of 2008 when Wall Street was in a state of collapse), banks had borrowed a total of $790 billion in advances from Federal Home Loan Banks (FHLBs). But during the bank panic in the spring of last year, those FHLB advances topped the Q4 2008 number, registering $804 billion as of March 31, 2023. According to data from the Congressional Budget Office, at the end of the quarter before the banking panic of 2023 (the quarter ending December 31, 2022) … Continue reading
JPMorgan’s Federally-Insured Bank Is Fined $348 Million for Losing Track of “Billions” of Trades
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 18, 2024 ~ On Thursday of last week, two of JPMorgan Chase Bank’s federal regulators fined the riskiest bank in the United States $348 million dollars for engaging in “unsafe and unsound banking practices” for failing to supervise “billions” of trades on at least 30 global trading venues. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) fined JPMorgan Chase Bank $250 million while the Federal Reserve fined the bank $98.2 million. The OCC said the misconduct occurred since at least 2019. The Fed said the bank had engaged in the misconduct over the span of nine years, from 2014 to 2023. The key outrage embedded in these charges – that mainstream media failed to point out in its coverage last week – is that this “trading” activity did not occur at the registered brokerage firm of JPMorgan, which has properly licensed traders and trading … Continue reading
Hedge Fund Titan John Paulson Made $1 Billion in an Illegal Goldman Sachs Deal; Trump Is Now Floating Him for Treasury Secretary
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 14, 2024 ~ According to headlines at Bloomberg News and Reuters this morning, Donald Trump is floating the notorious hedge fund billionaire, John Paulson, to be his next Treasury Secretary. Paulson has, apparently, earned consideration for the post the same way Steve Mnuchin, Trump’s former Treasury Secretary, got the job: by raising a lot of money for the Trump political campaign. Paulson has hosted multiple fundraising events for Trump in the current election cycle and in Trump’s failed run for reelection in 2020. Paulson is the founder and President of the hedge fund Paulson & Co. On April 16, 2010, the Securities and Exchange Commission had this to say about Paulson’s business morals when it announced formal charges against Goldman Sachs pertaining to the infamous 2007 ABACUS deal: “The SEC alleges that one of the world’s largest hedge funds, Paulson & Co., paid Goldman Sachs to … Continue reading
Wall Street Mega Banks Have Drawn a Law-Free Zone Around Themselves – The Media Is Complicit
By Pam Martens: March 13, 2024 ~ From revoking the American people’s right to a jury trial in matters involving Wall Street; to brazenly thumbing their nose at anti-trust law; to trading the stock of their own bank in the darkness of their own dark pools; to forming their own stock exchange; to committing serial felonies without being criminally prosecuted or having their bank charters revoked – Wall Street mega banks have drawn a law-free zone around themselves and are more dangerous today than they have ever been in U.S. history. The most dangerous eras for the American people versus Wall Street mega banks have been the late 1920s and 1930s; 2007 to 2010; and today. We know that today is the most dangerous era because we read 12,000 pages produced by the Senate Banking Committee of the early 1930s on the Wall Street corruption in the late 20s and 30s; we … Continue reading
A Financial Writer at New York Times Admits He’s Been Misrepresenting Bank Capital for 14 Years
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 12, 2024 ~ Yesterday, in an emailed newsletter to readers of the New York Times, financial writer Andrew Ross Sorkin effectively admitted that he has had no clue what bank capital actually is for the past 14 years so he just grabbed the phrase “rainy day fund” to describe it – notwithstanding that the phrase has no relationship to the factual definition of bank capital and serves only the interests of the banking lobby. Sorkin’s missive included this: “Andrew here. A year on since the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank renewed fears about the strength of the banking system, the debate about what should happen next continues. “But there is a more important, if perhaps prosaic, point that I want to address this morning: We’re thinking about ‘capital requirements’ — regulatory standards meant to protect banks against losses and runs on deposits, and whose levels have been a subject … Continue reading
FDIC Data Contradicts Fed Chair Powell: Shows Real Estate Problems Have Skyrocketed at Largest U.S. Banks, Not the Smaller Regionals
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 11, 2024 ~ On Sunday, February 4, the CBS program 60 Minutes aired a taped interview with Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell. The actual interview had occurred three days earlier and was conducted by 60 Minutes interviewer Scott Pelley. Two noteworthy things happened in connection with that interview: First, CBS did not indicate above the transcript of the interview that Powell’s comments had been materially shortened in the program that aired on TV; secondly, Powell calls the real estate problem at the largest banks “manageable” while shifting the more serious real estate loan problem to “smaller and regional banks.” Below is what Powell had to say about problem real estate loans at U.S. banks in the 60 Minutes’ interview. The bracketed bold text is what is in the transcript but did not air in the broadcasted program on television. (Scroll to 8 minutes and 20 … Continue reading
Senator Elizabeth Warren Calls Fed Chair Powell “Weak-Kneed”; Says He Is “Driving Efforts Inside the Fed” to Gut Higher Capital Requirements
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 7, 2024 ~ Engaged Americans are watching in real time a replay of how Wall Street mega banks in 2008 created the worst financial collapse since the Great Depression, then used their campaign money and lobbying clout to intimidate Congress and the Obama administration into passing the pathetically watered down financial “reform” legislation known as Dodd-Frank in 2010. The Fed has been bailing out the mega banks’ excesses and casino style of banking ever since. The same dynamic is playing out today with the proposal by three federal banking regulators (the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Reserve) to strengthen the capital requirements on the 37 largest banks in the U.S. – less than one percent of all banks in the U.S. For important background on the capital proposal, see our reports below: The Fed … Continue reading
Steve Mnuchin, Trump’s Treasury Secretary/Foreclosure Kingpin, Joins with Hedge Fund Guys to Grab a Teetering, Federally-Insured Bank for $2 a Share
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 7, 2024 ~ Former Trump Treasury Secretary, Steve Mnuchin, has teamed up with his pals from his days as a foreclosure kingpin at OneWest and assorted hedge funds/private equity guys, to pull a coup d’etat at the teetering New York Community Bancorp (NYCB), parent of Flagstar Bank. A press release from NYCB yesterday confirmed that Mnuchin and his pals would be injecting $1 billion in equity at a purchase price of $2 a share for NYCB, massively diluting existing shareholders whose share price on the last trading day of last year was $10.23. (For why shares of NYCB have been in free fall this year, see our report on Tuesday: New York Community Bancorp Was JPMorgan’s Top Regional Bank Pick for 2024; It’s Lost 73 Percent Y-T-D and Had Its Deposit Rating Downgraded to Junk.) Buttressing Mnuchin’s audacity, he will put himself and three of … Continue reading