Search Results for: Federal Reserve

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 29, 2024 ~ When Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell held his press conference on May 1 to explain the Fed’s latest policy actions, more than a dozen reporters showed up to ask questions. Those reporters came from every major business news outlet. (See transcript here.) But on the same date, when the U.S. Treasury’s Assistant Secretary for Financial Markets, Josh Frost, conducted a press conference to announce the details of the Treasury’s plans to issue $125 billion in Treasury debt securities (quarterly refunding), only one reporter from Bloomberg News showed up to ask questions. (See the awkward video at this link.) Perhaps the U.S. Treasury needs to hire a strong arm like Michelle Smith, Director of Communications at the Fed for the past 23 years, to oversee its press conferences. Or, perhaps a lighter touch would be more welcome. Then again, maybe the U.S. … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 28, 2024 ~ How does a Wall Street trading firm gain competitive advantage to entice spoofers and high-frequency trading firms to use its trading platforms instead of those of its competitors? How about having its trading compliance personnel wear a blindfold as billions of trades occur over the span of 8 or 9 years? That is essentially what three of JPMorgan Chase’s federal regulators have suggested is behind the $448 million in fines they’ve leveled against three separate units of the largest bank in the United States. When JPMorgan Chase filed its quarterly report with the Securities and Exchange Commission on May 1, it sheepishly admitted that the $348 million it had already paid out to two of its regulators for trading violations was not the end of this saga. It said that it “expects to enter into a resolution with a third U.S. … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 22, 2024 ~ Two U.K. regulators, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA), announced this morning that they have leveled fines totaling $78.5 million against Citigroup’s European trading arm, Citigroup Global Markets Ltd. (CGML). See here and here. The fines relate to a $300 billion flash crash in European stock markets on May 2, 2022. Citigroup is the parent of the fourth largest federally-insured bank in the United States, Citibank.  During the 2008 financial crisis, Citigroup imploded and became a 99-cent stock because of its high-risk market activities. It received over $2.5 trillion in bailouts and cumulative loans – the largest bailouts in global banking history. The U.K. regulators have today put the blame for that May 2, 2022 flash crash on a trader on Citigroup Global Markets’ Delta One trading desk, who, according to the regulators’ scenario, entered a … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 21, 2024 ~ Yesterday, at 10:08 a.m., Senator Sherrod Brown, a Democrat from Ohio and the Chair of the Senate Banking Committee, sent out a shocking emailed statement to the press indicating that Brown was “calling on the President to immediately nominate a new Chair who can lead the FDIC at this challenging time and for the Senate to act on that nomination without delay.” By 6:27 p.m. the Associated Press was reporting that Martin Gruenberg would step down as Chair of the FDIC and President Joe Biden would announce his nomination to replace him “soon.” The Brown statement was a gut punch to every engaged American and journalist who actually understands what’s at stake here. It was not only a back stab to Gruenberg, it was a back stab to Brown’s highly-respected colleague on the Senate Banking Committee, Senator Elizabeth Warren, who has … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 13, 2024 ~ On Friday, the Federal Reserve released its semiannual Supervision and Regulation Report on banks. Commercial real estate loans at banks – particularly on office properties – continued to rank high on the Fed’s list of concerns. The Fed included the chart above showing that delinquency rates on office property loans held by the banks had skyrocketed from just over 1 percent at the end of 2022 to over 8 percent as of December 31, 2023. (The red text and arrow have been added by Wall Street On Parade.) Banks are major lenders to the commercial real estate (CRE) market, providing almost $3 trillion in financing. According to a February 27 report from S&P Global, as of the end of the fourth quarter of 2023, two megabanks dwarfed all others in their commercial real estate loan exposure. JPMorgan Chase Bank NA, the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 9, 2024 ~ The swampiest trading house on Wall Street, Goldman Sachs, issued a press release on Tuesday which was revolting – even to Wall Street veterans who are familiar with its scandalous history. (See Related Articles below.) The press release stated that “Rob Kaplan will rejoin the firm as Vice Chairman of Goldman Sachs and a member of the Management Committee. He will be a member of the Executive Office and will be based in Dallas.” Robert (Rob) Kaplan is the man who scandalized the Dallas Fed and the Federal Reserve (the central bank of the United States) by flagrantly serving his own trading interests and violating financial reporting rules while trading like a hedge fund kingpin in S&P 500 futures for his own account during a declared National Emergency in 2020 (from the COVID-19 pandemic) while he was President of the Dallas … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 8, 2024 ~ Yesterday, the Big Law firm Cleary Gottlieb released its so-called “independent review” of charges of sexual harassment at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). Although no employee is charging Martin Gruenberg, the Chair of the FDIC, with sexual harassment, Cleary Gottlieb seems to go out of its way to paint Gruenberg in a negative light in the report – 108 times in fact. Gruenberg held the deciding vote at the FDIC last July when the bank regulator approved moving forward with proposed new rules to significantly raise the capital levels at the megabanks on Wall Street, particularly those holding trillions of dollars in derivatives off their balance sheet. These include the same banks that secretly received $16 trillion in cumulative emergency loans from the Federal Reserve from December 2007 to July 2010 because they were undercapitalized and teetering on insolvency, as … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 7, 2024 ~ Last Wednesday, JPMorgan Chase, the publicly-traded parent of the largest federally-insured bank in the United States as well as a five-count felon, revealed in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that on top of the $348 million it paid out in March to two of its banking regulators for sketchy trading violations involving “billions” of trades on 30 global trading venues, it “expects to enter into a resolution with a third U.S. regulator that will require the Firm to, among other things, pay a civil penalty of $100 million….” (See “Trading Venues Investigations” on page 168 of the SEC filing at this link.) JPMorgan Chase did not name this third regulator but Bloomberg News reported that it is the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The two federal banking regulators that imposed the trading fines in March are the Office of the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 30, 2024 ~ The Office of Financial Research (OFR), the federal agency created after the financial crash of 2008 to keep federal banking regulators on top of threats to financial stability, has posted an interactive chart showing the largest managers of Money Market Mutual Funds in the U.S. Alarmingly, the parent of the largest and riskiest bank in the United States – JPMorgan Chase – is also the second largest Money Market Mutual Fund manager. According to the OFR, as of March 31, 2024, JPMorgan was managing $657.9 billion in money market funds, second only to Fidelity, which on the same date was managing $1.3 trillion in money market funds. The data comes from Securities and Exchange Commission Form N-MFP2. JPMorgan’s federal regulators have failed to stem the bank’s growth despite the fact that JPMorgan Chase has been tapping massive bailouts from the Federal … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 26, 2024 ~ Editor’s Note: This article has been edited and updated from an earlier version, published in 2020. Trump and Catch and Kill: Yesterday, David Pecker, the former Chairman and CEO of American Media Inc. (AMI), the parent company of the National Enquirer tabloid, testified for a third day in the 34-count criminal trial of former President Donald Trump in New York. Pecker continued to expand on the sordid details of a catch and kill operation he had agreed to operate with the active involvement of Trump and his then attorney, Michael Cohen. The operation involved buying up stories about Trump’s salacious affairs with women and then killing them from publication in order to help Trump’s campaign for the presidency in 2016. There was also an understanding that Pecker would run negative articles about Trump’s political opponents in the National Enquirer. During opening … Continue reading →