Search Results for: JPMorgan

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 1, 2017 Back in 2014 New York Times columnist Paul Krugman embarked on a mission to defend President Obama’s reform of Wall Street’s biggest banks that had brought the country to the brink of financial collapse just six years earlier. In August of 2014 Krugman wrote that the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation that Obama had signed into law in 2010 “is a success story.” Krugman’s rubber stamp of Dodd-Frank came despite the fact that JPMorgan Chase, the country’s largest bank, had just two years earlier – long after the passage of Dodd-Frank – used hundreds of billions of dollars of its depositors’ money in its commercial bank, Chase, to make wild gambles in derivatives in London, losing at least $6.2 billion along the way. This so-called “London Whale” debacle correctly convinced millions of Americans that the only way to truly reform Wall Street … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 17, 2017 There are a few important things to know about Gary Cohn. Until Donald Trump tapped him to be the Director of the National Economic Council, he had worked at Goldman Sachs for a quarter century, rising to the position of President of the firm and second only to its CEO, Lloyd Blankfein. Cohn walked out of Goldman in December with approximately $285 million, comprised mainly of Goldman stock, some of which had been granted early vesting. Since his exit from Goldman, Cohn has wasted no time in selling large chunks of his Goldman shares according to his financial disclosures. While this serves to reduce his conflicts of interest with Goldman, it also provides a face-saving means of exiting a massive position in a Wall Street bank without the appearance of panic or disloyalty. Against this backdrop comes the widely reported news … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 10, 2017 It is not a promising development for changing the culture of Wall Street when today’s newswires are reporting the sordid details of how the big Wall Street player, Barclays, engaged U.S. law enforcement in an attempt to hunt down the identity of an internal whistleblower. More on that in a moment, but first some background. After discovering that Wall Street’s mandate to fairly and efficiently allocate capital had morphed into the manufacture of fraudulent securities with triple-A ratings that blew up the U.S. economy in 2008 with the impact of a flamethrower at a fireworks factory, Congress passed the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation in 2010 to, ostensibly, put Wall Street back on a straight and narrow path.  One of Dodd-Frank’s sections expressly prohibits retaliation against whistleblowers and provides whistleblowers legal remedies if they are discharged or retaliated against. Another section provides … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 3, 2017 Citigroup was back in the news again last Tuesday when the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) reported that its banking unit, Citibank, was among the three banks with the highest average monthly complaints filed against it alleging credit card abuses. (The other two banks were Capital One and JPMorgan Chase.) This is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Citigroup and its haloed Citibank. On May 20, 2015, Citigroup’s banking division pleaded guilty to a criminal felony charge for foreign currency rigging following a decade of serial charges against the global behemoth. (See rap sheet below.) Instead of putting this incorrigible recidivist out of business, the Federal government has continued to allow its shady proclivities to be perpetuated against an unsuspecting public. The U.S. central bank, the Federal Reserve, which incompetently oversees Citigroup as it takes on massive derivative … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 20, 2017 Last Wednesday Janet Yellen, the Chair of the Federal Reserve (the central bank of the United States) regurgitated the notoriously fake information that has been spewing from columnists at the New York Times since 2012 on the causes of the epic Wall Street financial crash of 2007 to 2010. Yellen was taking questions during her press conference on the Fed’s announcement of a rate hike. John Heltman, a reporter for American Banker, posed the following question to Yellen: Heltman: “The administration recently reiterated its support for reinstatement of Glass-Steagall. Treasury Secretary Mnuchin has called for a 21st Century Glass-Steagall. Keeping in mind that there’s no specifics on this proposal, is the fundamental idea of separating commercial banking from investment banking a fruitful line of inquiry. Is this the right path to be pursuing?” Yellen answered as follows: Yellen: “So, I’ve not … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 15, 2017 Following the Wall Street crash of 1929, thousands of banks failed in the United States. More than 3,000 banks went under in 1931 followed by more than 1400 the following year. There was no Federal insurance on bank deposits in those days so both depositors and shareholders were wiped out or received pennies on the dollar when the banks went bust. This deepened the panic and deepened the Great Depression. Many of the bank failures stemmed from the banks using depositors’ money to speculate in the stock market, sometimes to manipulate the price of their own stock. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was sworn in as President of the United States on March 4, 1933. Two days later he declared a national banking holiday, meaning that he closed all the banks and sent in the examiners to determine which ones were sound and … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 14, 2017 The narrative of Preet Bharara as a crusading crime fighter has gotten a big boost from the Editorial Board of the New York Times in a glowing editorial in today’s print edition. Bharara was, until this past weekend, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Wall Street’s stomping ground. Bharara Tweeted on Saturday that he had been “fired” by the Trump administration. The Times’ editorial headline in its digital edition has to be bringing howls this morning from Wall Street veterans and corporate crime watchers. The Times is asking its readers to believe that Bharara was a “Prosecutor Who Knew How to Drain a Swamp.” That’s fake news at its finest. Despite Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, and Michael Corbat, CEO of Citigroup, presiding over an unprecedented series of frauds upon … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 7, 2017 Yesterday, the German global bank, Deutsche Bank, fell by 3.82 percent by the close of trading on the New York Stock Exchange on news of a capital raising and revamp in strategy. That price action took down every major Wall Street bank stock and, interestingly, MetLife, which closed down 1.64 percent, beating out even Citigroup which closed down 1.18 percent. The rest of the major derivatives players fared as follows: JPMorgan Chase closed with a loss of 0.95 percent; Bank of America was off by 0.75 percent; Morgan Stanley closed down 0.56 percent; with Goldman Sachs down a meager 0.35 percent after infusing itself throughout the Trump administration’s corridors of power in Washington. Last June, Deutsche Bank found itself the subject of unwanted attention in a report issued by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The report looked at the “Financial System … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 27, 2017 Warren Buffett, the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, authors an annual letter to shareholders that receives wide media coverage for the nuggets of wisdom dispersed to the masses. His latest letter, released on Saturday, trumpets American exceptionalism, the miraculous market system Americans have created, while it blithely dismisses the greatest wealth and income inequality in America since the 1920s. Buffett preposterously observes that “Babies born in America today are the luckiest crop in history.” Let’s start with that last statement. According to our own Central Intelligence Agency, there are 55 countries that have a lower infant mortality rate than the United States. Even debt-strapped Greece beats the United States. Much of what Buffett has to say in this letter sounds like unadulterated propaganda to reassure the 99 percent that his amassing of a net worth of $76.3 billion was a result of … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 24, 2017  The biggest banks on Wall Street, both foreign and domestic, have been repeatedly charged with rigging and colluding in markets from New York to London to Japan. Thus, it is natural to ask, have the big banks formed a cartel to rig the prices of their own stocks? This time last year, Wall Street banks were in a slow, endless bleed. The Federal Reserve had raised interest rates for the first time since the 2008 financial crisis on December 16, 2015 with strong hints that more rate hikes would be coming in 2016. Bank stocks never do well in a rising interest rate environment because their dividend yield has to compete with rising yields on bonds. Money gravitates out of dividend paying stocks into bonds and/or into hard assets like real estate based on the view that it will appreciate from inflationary forces. … Continue reading →