Search Results for: JPMorgan

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 21, 2022 ~ The Fed has just raised its benchmark interest rate by a quarter point with a projection of six more rate hikes ahead this year – which is usually the death knell for stocks. Russia has invaded Ukraine, a sovereign country of 44 million people, which has forced NATO countries to provide weapons to Ukraine. This has brought threats of retaliation from Russian President Vladimir Putin, creating the worst military crisis since the beginning of World War II. None of this is the stuff of which bull markets in stocks are made. Despite that, the wizards at JPMorgan Chase are telling its millions of clients around the world that it’s time to buy this stock market. (Before you decide to take advice from JPMorgan Chase, you may want to read this.) Even more interesting, the half of JPMorgan that was split off … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 15, 2022 ~ Traders who feel they were robbed of their profits trading nickel last week at the London Metal Exchange (LME) have taken to Twitter to verbally accuse the LME of favoring their “cronies” and behaving like “slime balls.” Lining up as crony suspect Number 1 are units of JPMorgan Chase who, together, hold the largest number of Class B shares in the London Metal Exchange than any other member. Those units are J.P. Morgan Markets Limited with 25,000 shares; J.P. Morgan Metals Limited with 19,100 shares; and J.P. Morgan Securities with 25,000 shares for a total of 69,100 Class B shares, according to a listing of shareholders on the LME’s website. In addition, the CEO of the Hong Kong Stock Exchanges and Clearing (HKEX), which bought the LME in 2012, is Nicolas Aguzin. He joined the HKEX last May after spending 31 … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 11, 2022 ~ Russia began its brutal invasion of Ukraine on February 24. Two days later the European Commission, U.S., U.K. and Canada announced sweeping sanctions, which have grown in granular details since then. By early this week, hundreds of corporations with the most famous brands in the world had announced that they were closing their stores in Russia, or ceasing to ship their products there, or severing joint business operations in a rebuke to Russia’s illegal war in Ukraine. But it wasn’t until this past Wednesday that anyone heard a peep from the largest U.S. banks on Wall Street about their plans to cease operations in Russia. Citigroup made its ambiguous announcement on Wednesday, March 9, followed by equally vague statements by Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase on Thursday, March 10. A slogan of “The Coalition of the Timid” came to mind. Citigroup’s … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 23, 2022 ~ Yesterday, President Biden announced a roster of sanctions against Russia over its aggression against Ukraine. (A much broader set of sanctions is planned against Russia by the U.S. and its allies if there is a full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia, according to U.S. government officials.) One of the entities sanctioned yesterday was state-owned Russian bank Vnesheconombank (VEB). In a related statement on the sanctions by the U.S. Treasury, it describes VEB as follows: “VEB’s $53 billion asset portfolio makes it large enough to be among Russia’s top five financial institutions. VEB occupies a unique role in Russia’s financial system as the servicer of Russia’s sovereign debt, financier for exports, and a funding source for investment projects with a loan portfolio of over $20 billion. VEB finances Russia’s national economic development, including large-scale projects to develop domestic infrastructure and other industries … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 21, 2022 ~ Yesterday’s headline making the rounds was that JPMorgan Chase’s Board had given its Chairman and CEO, Jamie Dimon, a pay raise to $34.5 million for 2021 that was 10 percent more than 2020. That headline provides an instructive lesson in what passes for breaking news today at mainstream media outlets when it comes to Wall Street’s megabanks. The majority of Americans aren’t outraged and demanding that Congress reform Wall Street because mainstream media has overtly decided to keep the public in the dark. The real breaking news is that despite JPMorgan Chase admitting to five criminal felony counts brought by the U.S. Department of Justice over the past 7 years for rigging markets and laundering money for Bernie Madoff, the financial criminal of the century, the Board of JPMorgan Chase has not sacked Dimon, the man who sat at the helm … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 17, 2022 ~ The Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation of 2010 ordered the Government Accountability Office (GAO), an investigative body for Congress, to audit the Fed’s alphabet soup of emergency lending programs conducted during and after the 2008 financial crisis. The GAO found that a cumulative $16.1 trillion had been pumped out to Wall Street firms by the Fed – at super cheap interest rates. The GAO provided data for the peak amounts outstanding and also a cumulative total. Why is a cumulative total essential and relevant? Because one institution in 2008, Citigroup, was insolvent for much of the time the Fed was flooding it with cheap loans. (Under law, the Fed is not allowed to make loans to an insolvent institution.) And when an insolvent institution is getting loans rolled over and over by the Fed for a span of two and a half … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 12, 2022 ~ On January 6, Senior U.S. District Court Judge Jed Rakoff signed a dangerous Protective Order in the Shaquala Williams v JPMorgan Chase case which resides in the Southern District of New York. Williams is a whistleblower who has critically important information to share with the public regarding this five-count felon bank. The Protective Order may make it impossible for the public to ever learn the essential details of what Williams is alleging. We’ll get to the problematic parts of the Protective Order shortly, but first some necessary background. Williams is an attorney who formerly worked in compliance at JPMorgan Chase. Part of her role was to make sure that the bank adhered to a non-prosecution agreement it had signed with the Justice Department in 2016. In 2016 the Justice Department had charged that JPMorgan’s Asia subsidiary engaged in quid pro quo agreements with … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 31, 2021 ~ Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, likes to perpetually brag about his bank’s “fortress balance sheet.” But in the fall of 2019, that fortress needed to borrow huge sums of money from the Federal Reserve – for still unexplained reasons. The trading units of other Wall Street banks also borrowed large sums from the Fed but they haven’t branded themselves as the “fortress balance sheet.” Yesterday, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York released the names of the banks and the dollar amounts that were borrowed under its emergency repo loan operations for the last quarter of 2019. It had previously released the data for the period of September 17, 2019 through September 30, 2019. The Fed has yet to release the data for the emergency repo loan operations in 2020. Repo loans, short for repurchase agreements, are supposed … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 23, 2021 ~ The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the regulator of national banks that operate across state lines, released a report on Monday that details the quantity and variety of derivatives held by commercial banks, savings associations and trust companies as of September 30. (According to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, there were 4,914 commercial banks, savings associations and trust companies operating in the U.S. with FDIC insurance as of September 30.) The striking detail in the OCC report is that one taxpayer-backstopped, federally-insured bank, JPMorgan Chase Bank N.A., is for some unfathomable reason sitting on 62 percent of all stock (equity) derivatives held at all 4,914 federally-insured banks in the United States. The second striking detail is that this federally-insured bank’s holdings of stock derivatives come to a notional amount (face amount) of $3.3 trillion. (Yes, trillion with a … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 20, 2021 ~ JPMorgan Chase is the largest bank in the United States. It also has the scandalous distinction of having admitted to five criminal felony counts brought by the U.S. Department of Justice since 2014 and a breathtaking series of additional charges from other regulators. (See its Rap Sheet here.) On Friday, the Securities and Exchange Commission fined the securities unit of JPMorgan Chase $125 million for evading the ability of the SEC to adequately conduct its investigations of the bank because there was “firmwide” use by traders, supervisors and other personnel of non-official communications devices to conduct its business, while the firm failed to record and retain these messages as required by law. These new violations occurred despite similar conduct during the bank’s participation in the rigging of the foreign exchange market, which brought a criminal felony charge against the bank by … Continue reading →