Search Results for: epstein

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 3, 2023 ~ According to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), there were 4,706 federally-insured banks and savings associations in the U.S. as of December 31, 2022. Of those, according to the quarterly report released last Friday from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), a little less than one-quarter found a reason to engage in derivative trading activities. As of December 31, 2022, just 1,139 FDIC-insured commercial banks and savings associations reported trading of derivatives in the fourth quarter of 2022, according to the OCC. Ostensibly, instead of running a derivatives casino, the other three-quarters of taxpayer-subsidized banks were doing what taxpayers want federally-insured banks to do: make business loans; provide affordable mortgage loans to homebuyers; provide checking accounts devoid of hacking, identity theft and predatory overdraft fees; and not blow up the bank by getting in bed with derivatives, crypto … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 24, 2023 ~ The reassurances of Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell and U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen that the U.S. banking system is sound, stand in sharp contrast to what is happening in markets. This week, the shorts have found another easy new global bank target to try to take down after making a bundle of money betting against Credit Suisse, which was taken over for 82 cents a share on Sunday by its Swiss competitor, UBS. This time the global banking target is Deutsche Bank, a global behemoth we have warned about ad nauseum here at Wall Street On Parade. Deutsche Bank was a $120 dollar stock prior to the financial crisis in 2008. It closed yesterday at $9.65 in New York and is down another 10 percent in early morning trading in Europe. The weakness in Deutsche Bank is spilling over into … Continue reading →

Editor’s Update: California state regulators shut down Silicon Valley Bank during market hours on Friday, creating mayhem in the stock market’s banking sector. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) has been appointed the receiver at the bank. The FDIC issued a statement on Friday indicating that only insured depositors (those with $250,000 or less at the bank) will have full access to their money by Monday. As of December 31, Silicon Valley Bank had $209 billion in assets and $175 billion in total deposits, making it the second largest bank failure in U.S. history, after Washington Mutual which failed in September 2008 during the Wall Street financial crisis. Tragically, according to SEC filings, more than $150 billion of Silicon Valley Bank’s deposits were uninsured, leaving hundreds of the tech startup companies it served unsure of how to make payroll next week. By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 10, 2023 ~ … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 17, 2022 ~ It was one year ago that Wall Street On Parade raised a multitude of red flags about Raphael Bostic, the President of the Atlanta Fed. We have published the entirety of that article below so that our readers can see just how long it took both Bostic and the Atlanta Fed to come clean with the American people about his trading on Wall Street. On Friday, Bostic released a seven-page statement in which he owned up to the following: failing to list a multitude of trades that were conducted on his behalf by trading firms on Wall Street over a period of five years; failing to properly report income on his assets on his financial disclosure forms; trading during blackout periods when trading was barred by the Federal Reserve; providing inaccurate values on his financial disclosure forms. The upshot was that … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 30, 2022 ~ JPMorgan Chase’s stock has lost 27 percent of its market value year-to-date through its June 29 closing price. But more disturbing than that is the above chart showing that the behemoth German lender, Deutsche Bank, has been trading like a clone of JPMorgan Chase for the past two months. Deutsche Bank’s stock price is down just one percentage point more than JPMorgan Chase year-to-date. JPMorgan Chase is the largest federally-insured bank in the United States. Looking like one is tied with an umbilical cord to Deutsche Bank has its perils on Wall Street. Let’s start with the raids on the Deutsche Bank’s headquarters, two of which coincided with dead bodies turning up. On November 29, 2018, Deutsche Bank’s headquarters in Germany were raided by 170 members of law enforcement. Prosecutors explained the action by stating that “Deutsche Bank helped customers found … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 29, 2022 ~ The Financial Times is reporting this morning that “Germany’s federal police office, criminal prosecutors and the country’s financial watchdog BaFin are raiding Deutsche Bank’s headquarters in Frankfurt” this morning, according to a statement from prosecutors. The raid comes just four days after the body of Valentin (Val) Broeksmit, 46, was discovered at about 7 a.m. Monday at Woodrow Wilson High School in El Sereno, just outside of Los Angeles. Val Broeksmit was the son of William Broeksmit who was found hanged in his London home on January 26, 2014. The senior Boreksmit was a senior executive at Deutsche Bank involved in assessing risk on the bank’s balance sheet. (See our report: Documents Emerge in Senate Hearing from William Broeksmit, Deutsche Exec Alleged to Have Hanged Himself in January.) According to a profile of Val Broeksmit written by David Enrich in the New … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 9, 2022 ~ Deutsche Bank (symbol DB on the above chart) closed at $16.50 on the New York Stock Exchange on February 10 of this year. It closed at $10.23 yesterday – a decline of 38 percent in a month’s time. That’s a big problem because Deutsche Bank is heavily interconnected to Wall Street banks via derivatives. According to Deutsche Bank’s most recent annual report, as of December 31, 2020, it held $35.4 trillion in notional derivatives. (Notional means face amount. See the table on page 147 of the 2020 Deutsche Bank Annual Report here.) Deutsche Bank, a large German bank, was among the global banks bailed out by the Fed during the financial crash of 2008 as well as during the (still unexplained) liquidity crash that saw the Fed pump trillions of dollars in cumulative loans into global banks from September 17, 2019 … Continue reading →

Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 18, 2021 ~ Private Banks operated by the mega Wall Street banks have an unseemly reputation. So when we opened Atlanta Fed President Raphael Bostic’s financial disclosure forms and saw that he had a financial relationship with Morgan Stanley’s Private Bank, a red flag went up immediately. Citibank’s Private Bank was previously the subject of an investigation by the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. At a hearing on November 9, 1999, the Chair of the Subcommittee, the late Senator Carl Levin, explained how private banks work. Levin stated: “Once a person becomes a client of a private bank, the bank’s primary goal generally has been to service that client, and servicing a private bank client almost always means using services that are also the tools of money laundering: secret trusts, offshore accounts, secret name accounts, and shell companies called private investment corporations. These private … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 11, 2021 ~ When it comes to prosecuting the serial criminal cases arising out of Wall Street, there are two critical posts: the head of the Criminal Division at the Department of Justice and the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. (The Securities and Exchange Commission has only civil powers and, thus, conveniently, cannot bring criminal charges.) President Biden failed to properly vet his nominee, Kenneth Polite, to head the Criminal Division, “despite screaming red flags on his financial disclosure form.” Polite was confirmed for the job by the U.S. Senate on July 20. Senators asked zero questions about these financial red flags. Yesterday, President Biden announced that he was nominating Damian Williams to become the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, the office that brings (or fails to bring) the majority of criminal cases involving Wall Street … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 10, 2021 ~ On July 21, 2010, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (Dodd-Frank Act) became the law of the United States. Its promise to Americans was that it would reform the corrupt practices on Wall Street that had led to the worst financial collapse in 2008 since the Great Depression and the largest taxpayer bailout of Wall Street in history. But here we are, 11 years later, with every one of those corrupt practices in full display at the Wall Street mega banks today. Losses from wild derivative bets check. Trading for the house (proprietary trading), check. Secret bailouts from the Fed, check. Credit Default swaps, check. The continuance of the private justice system on Wall Street, check. Banks paying rating agencies for ratings, check. Banks giving insanely leveraged loans to hedge funds, check. And if we wanted to find the … Continue reading →