Search Results for: JPMorgan

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 15, 2016 The corrupt and collapsing two-party political system in the U.S. is coming under renewed attack by the young generation.  Trump Tower in New York City, where Republican President-elect Donald Trump is holed up, has become a veritable police fortress at street level with much of the sidewalk area barricaded from pedestrian traffic. Progressive protesters have been regularly massing outside of the building since Trump’s win in the presidential election on November 8. Many of their posters read: “Not My President.” But yesterday, young progressive protesters targeted the Capitol Hill office of a sitting Democratic Senator, Chuck Schumer of New York. As two of his clerks attempted to look unruffled and busied themselves behind their computers, about two dozen young people marched into Schumer’s office singing this song: “We are standing for our future, we are hearing what is wrong, we are … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 11, 2016  Yesterday, CNBC announced that anonymous sources had told the cable business news outlet that Trump’s advisers were considering JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon for U.S. Treasury Secretary. The rumor nugget was quickly spread by other media outlets. The likelihood is that the rumor is coming from Jamie Dimon’s hyper-charged public relations machine rather than from Trump’s closest advisers. Should Dimon get the nomination from Trump he would have to appear before the Senate Banking Committee for his confirmation hearing. He would be facing hostility from progressive Senate Democrats on the Committee like Senators Elizabeth Warren, Sherrod Brown and Jeff Merkley for overseeing a Wall Street mega bank that has garnered an unprecedented three felony counts from the U.S. Justice Department in just the past three years while Dimon took home massive pay and bonuses. Two felony counts against the bank were for aiding … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 8, 2016  Two partners at major law firms have likely been holding their breath since WikiLeaks released an email on November 1 showing that Obama had vetted Hillary Clinton for Vice President and the review came back “too critical,” thus leading Obama to select Joe Biden as his Vice Presidential pick during the 2008 campaign. The vetting memorandum on Clinton shows in the email thread to have been transmitted with the email but WikiLeaks has not provided it – yet. According to the email, which carries a capitalized heading of “CONFIDENTIAL,” the vetting of Clinton had been done by James Hamilton, then a law partner at Bingham McCutchen LLP. Hamilton is now a partner at Morgan Lewis, a firm with a long history of ties to Wall Street. His official bio shows that he “served as the Clinton-Gore transition counsel for nominations and … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 4, 2016 A few years back, when William D. Cohan was writing for Bloomberg News, one could reliably count on him to hold Wall Street’s feet to the fire. Now Cohan is writing for the New York Times and it feels like the Times sent him for an in-house lobotomy or at least a crash course in reoriented thinking. Consider Cohan’s article from yesterday in the Times, titled Why Washington Needs Wall Street. First Cohan piles on to the recent bashing of Senator Elizabeth Warren by Roger Lowenstein in the pages of the Times. Warren has led a meaningful, multi-year charge to expose the failed reforms and lapdog regulators overseeing Wall Street, which is hands-down the most corrupt industry in America and located in the same home town as the New York Times.  (If you can’t clean up your own home town, what … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 2, 2016  It’s more than a coincidence that at a time when the two leading candidates for the highest office in the United States are considered untrustworthy by tens of millions of their fellow citizens, the industry that has perpetually attempted to stack the political deck in Washington has also lost the trust of a majority of Americans. This feels to many like having Wall Street’s one percent at the rudder for the past two decades has finally steered the ship of state into a toxic sink hole that is devouring the credibility of the United States at home and abroad. Wall Street’s image has fallen so low that the Federal Reserve Bank of New York is holding an annual “Reforming Culture and Behavior in the Financial Services Industry” conference. That New York Fed President Bill Dudley is heading up this conference shows … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 25, 2016  Yesterday, former SEC Chair Arthur Levitt penned an OpEd for the Wall Street Journal, effectively telling Senator Elizabeth Warren to stop criticizing Mary Jo White in public. White is the current Chair of the SEC that Senator Warren publicly asked President Obama to fire this month for her bad leadership. Senator Warren is a genuine champion of the investing public and understands how the SEC has become a lapdog to Wall Street under White’s inept leadership. Levitt is part of the Bill Clinton machine that de-regulated Wall Street and turned it into a massive looting racket in the 1990s through today. It’s important to take note of Levitt’s effort to muzzle Warren in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. Expect to see more of this coming from a lot more of Wall Street’s cronies. Arthur Levitt was appointed as SEC … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: October 23, 2016  Julian Assange, founder and Editor-in-Chief of WikiLeaks, is the man responsible for the daily release of emails showing the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign to be an unprecedented machine whose tentacles and snitches reach into Wall Street, big corporations and big media. Earlier this year, WikiLeaks released emails showing that the Democratic National Committee had maliciously conspired to undermine the presidential campaign of Clinton challenger, Senator Bernie Sanders, in order to elevate Hillary Clinton to the top of the ticket. Now it has emerged that two of the top lawyers representing Assange, John Jones in London and Michael Ratner in New York, died within less than a month of each other this year. And, Assange’s closest confidant in London and a Director of WikiLeaks, Gavin Macfadyen, died just yesterday. Wall Street On Parade has carefully investigated the similarly unprecedented banker deaths over the past two … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 20, 2016 There’s a new mantra making the rounds of Washington and Wall Street. No matter how big the lie you’re caught in, no matter how much documented evidence exists against you, just deny, deny, deny. That’s how Democratic National Committee Interim Chair Donna Brazile handled the email released by WikiLeaks showing that she leaked a debate question to Hillary Clinton; that’s how Hillary Clinton handled revelations about sending classified government material over an unclassified server in the basement of her home; and that’s how Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein is handling the widespread public perception that there’s a banking cabal meeting in secret to plot its continued dominance over the interests of the average U.S. citizen. Yesterday, CNBC’s David Faber interviewed Blankfein and asked about the suggestion that Donald Trump had made on October 13 in a speech in West Palm Beach, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 4, 2016 Yesterday, building on the momentum afforded her by a series of articles in the New York Times, Hillary Clinton asked the audience at a campaign stop in Toledo, Ohio: “What kind of genius loses a billion dollars in one year.” Clinton was referring to the New York Times revelation on Sunday that Donald Trump’s 1995 tax return showed a loss of $916 million. (See video clip below.) If Hillary really wants to know what kind of genius can lose a billion dollars in one year or $6.2 billion in the case of traders at JPMorgan Chase, she should ask the bank’s CEO Jamie Dimon. The $6.2 billion London Whale loss at JPMorgan Chase is far more scintillating a feat since it involved wild derivative gambles in London in 2012 using the taxpayer-backstopped, insured savings deposits at the largest bank in the U.S. The … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 30, 2016 One day after Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen failed to reassure the House Financial Services Committee that too-big-to-fail banks no longer pose a threat to the U.S. financial system, the stock market settled the debate. Germany’s largest bank had a dizzy spell and Wall Street banks swooned under a collective anxiety attack. The writing has been on the wall for a very long time that this scenario was going to eventually play out given the lack of serious reform of Wall Street. What was notable about yesterday’s market activity is that among the major Wall Street banks, Goldman Sachs fared worst, falling 2.75 percent, followed by Morgan Stanley which shed 2.30 percent and Citigroup, which lost 2.28 percent. All of the major Wall Street banks were dragged down by the 6.67 percent decline in the shares of Deutsche Bank by the … Continue reading →