Search Results for: JPMorgan

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 16, 2016  Since Wall Street’s felony counts last May (see “Related Articles” below) and the unleashing of ever more creative ways to fleece the populace, it’s getting tougher and tougher to find people willing to shill for the Wall Street claptrap that it’s been punished enough and it’s time to put the bashing to rest. It’s getting tougher — but not impossible. Matt Winkler, the Bloomberg News Editor-in-Chief Emeritus, wrote an opinion piece and appeared on Bloomberg TV last week to regurgitate the threadbare “Stop Bashing Wall Street. Times Have Changed” refrain. Winkler starts off with this premise: “One of the reasons the American economy is performing better than any of the largest in Asia and Europe is that its regulators have repaired the damage of the financial crisis and the worst recession since the Great Depression. Led by the Federal Reserve, they … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: March 14, 2016 At Wall Street On Parade we call it continuity government. Michael M. Thomas, in a new book of quasi-fiction, calls it Fixers, the idea that no matter who comes and goes in the Oval Office, Wall Street has a fix in to make sure it is protected. The Thomas book could not come at a more inconvenient time for outgoing President Obama and the next leg of the continuity government that Wall Street hopes to install in the White House – otherwise known as Hillary Clinton. Fixers notes that the characters with speaking parts in the book are “wholly creatures of the author’s imagination and invention” but the securities “transactions and situations” in which those characters are involved are “matters of historical record.” So what you’re getting in Fixers is a spellbinding analysis of the actual dirty deals that toppled Wall Street in 2008 … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 10, 2016 Four days after the Federal Reserve Board of Governors held an open meeting to propose a new rule to contain counterparty risk on Wall Street on a bank by bank basis, researchers at the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Financial Research (OFR) dropped a bombshell on the Fed. The researchers, Jill Cetina, Mark Paddrik, and Sriram Rajan, produced a study which shows, in their opinion, that the Fed’s stress test that measures counterparty risk on a bank by bank basis is all wet. The problem, say the researchers, is not what would happen if the largest counterparty to a specific bank failed but what would happen if that counterparty happened to be the counterparty to other systemically important Wall Street banks. The researchers note that the Fed’s stress test “looks exclusively at the direct loss concentration risk, and does not consider the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 8, 2016  Last Friday, the Obama administration announced that the President would be meeting at the White House with key Wall Street regulators yesterday. In fact, the meeting yesterday included 9 of the 10 voting members of the Financial Stability Oversight Council (F-SOC), the body created under the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation to prevent another catastrophic collapse of the U.S. financial system. The President also brought along a key group of his economic advisers and, interestingly, Neil Eggleston, the White House Counsel. (See full attendee list below.) F-SOC is chaired by U.S. Treasury Secretary, Jack Lew, who likely functions as President Obama’s eyes and ears on the Council and for financial stability issues in general. Lew attended yesterday’s meeting and sat across from the President at the press conference that followed. (See video of full press conference below.)  Lew may have some … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 4, 2016  There are 15 U.S. Senators who are members of the U.S. Senate Banking Committee’s Subcommittee on Securities, Insurance, and Investment that has been investigating the charges that the stock market is rigged by the stock exchanges along with dark pools run by large broker-dealers that are operated as opaque, unregulated quasi stock exchanges, high frequency traders at hedge funds, conflicted payment for order flow, and tricked-up order types – to mention just a few of the ways the public investor is getting fleeced. The Subcommittee held a critically important hearing yesterday to review what progress the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), the self-regulatory Wall Street watchdog, were making to rein in the abuses on Wall Street. Despite the lack of trust the public feels toward Wall Street and the abysmal 14 percent approval rating … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 25, 2016 In a feeble public relations move, Bill Dudley, the President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and FINRA, the self-regulatory body on Wall Street, are making noises about cleaning up the culture on Wall Street. It’s always dangerous to make any predictions when it comes to Wall Street but in this case we can confidently predict that when it comes to the New York Fed and FINRA, the only possible impact they could have on the culture is to make it worse. The New York Fed didn’t see a problem for Bill Dudley’s spouse to collect $190,000 a year in deferred compensation from JPMorgan Chase while the New York Fed served as the bank’s main regulator. The New York Fed didn’t see a problem for Citigroup’s CEO, Sandy Weill, or JPMorgan CEO, Jamie Dimon, to sit on its Board … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 24, 2016 The same phenomenon that’s been playing out for months took center stage yesterday with one notable twist: oil prices dove, the broader stock market swooned, but the mega Wall Street banks took a worse beating than the broader stock market averages. The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 1.14 percent yesterday while Bank of America, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley were off by more than 3 percent. In an unusual twist, JPMorgan Chase, the bank that analyst Mike Mayo has preposterously called the Lebron James of banking, performed the worst among its peers yesterday, down 4.18 percent. What knocked the wind out of JPMorgan’s sails yesterday is at the heart of why the banks keep tanking when oil prices swoon. In a nutshell, the market doesn’t think these banks are coming clean about their exposure to oil – whether it’s in loans to … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 23, 2016  Thanks to the Presidential debates, most Americans have heard of the Glass-Steagall Act which kept the country’s banking system safe for 66 years until it was repealed by President Bill Clinton in 1999, allowing the risky activities of Wall Street trading firms to merge with insured-deposit banks, setting the stage for the Wall Street collapse in 2008. But few Americans have ever heard of the Riegle-Neal Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act of 1994, which Bill Clinton signed into law less than two years after taking office. The Riegle-Neal legislation allowed bank holding companies to acquire banks anywhere in the nation and invalidated the laws of 36 states which had allowed interstate banking only on a reciprocal or regional basis. Put these two pieces of legislation together with the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, also signed into law by Bill … Continue reading →

  By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 22, 2016  Fourteen years before Wall Street blew itself up in 2008, the General Accounting Office (now called the Government Accountability Office), warned Congress that Wall Street was on a dangerous path that could put the taxpayer at risk of bailouts as a result of trillions of dollars of derivatives being held by a handful of interconnected firms. These dangers were heightened according to the GAO by shoddy accounting practices for derivatives, inadequate regulatory reporting, and high leverage. Despite the fact that almost every single warning that the GAO called out in 1994 was ignored by the U.S. Congress, leading to the greatest financial collapse since the Great Depression in 2008, Congress has still not attended to the most dangerous elements highlighted in the report. Back in 1994, the GAO found that: “U.S. bank regulatory data indicate that the top seven domestic … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 12, 2016 Starting last July, the share prices of the biggest banks on Wall Street have been on a steady downward trajectory. That trend heated up yesterday with Citigroup and Bank of America both dropping over 6 percent by the close of trading. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley were down by over 4 percent. All four of the banks set new 12-month lows in intraday trading. A strong argument can be made that much of the public’s lack of confidence in these complex banking and gambling behemoths is a result of the dark curtain that has been drawn around their operations. Evidence is piling up that government regulators of Wall Street no longer see themselves as the protectors of the people but as the protectors of Wall Street’s secrets. The American historian, Henry Steele Commager, once wrote that “The generation that made the … Continue reading →