Search Results for: JPMorgan

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 27, 2016 Back in 2010, with the public still numb from the epic financial crash and still in the dark about the trillions of dollars of secret loans the Federal Reserve had pumped into the Wall Street mega banks to resuscitate their sinking carcasses, Matt Taibbi penned his classic profile of Goldman Sachs at Rolling Stone, with this, now legendary, summation: “The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” Historically, what smells like money to Goldman Sachs has been eight-figure money and higher. As recently as 2013, the New York Times reported that Goldman had a $10 million minimum to manage private wealth and was kicking out its own employees’ brokerage accounts if they were less than $1 million. Now, all of a … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 21, 2016  According to a study released by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in March of last year, U.S. taxpayers have already injected $187.5 billion into Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two companies that prior to the 2008 financial crash traded on the New York Stock Exchange, had shareholders and their own Board of Directors while also receiving an implicit taxpayer guarantee on their debt. The U.S. government put the pair into conservatorship on September 6, 2008. The public has been led to believe that the $187.5 billion bailout of the pair was the full extent of the taxpayers’ tab. But in an astonishing acknowledgement on February 25 of this year, the Government Accountability Office, the nonpartisan investigative arm of Congress, issued an audit report of the U.S. government’s finances, revealing that the government’s “remaining contractual commitment to the GSEs, if … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 20, 2016 New York State has the toughest financial fraud law in the country. Under New York’s 1921 Martin Act, the State Attorney General’s office can bring both criminal or civil charges. Despite that important fact, no CEO or CFO or key executive of any major Wall Street bank has been prosecuted by the New York State Attorney General for their role in the 2008 crash — which crippled the U.S. economy and has left the nation with GDP growth of two percent or less ever since. Despite the Martin Act’s unique anti-fraud statutes, Wall Street banks have been churning out serial new crimes since the 2008 crash, proving that both Justice Department prosecutors in Washington and timid prosecutors in New York are failing miserably at their jobs in deterring Wall Street crime. What power brokers in New York do best is flood … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 19, 2016  Eight long years after the greatest Wall Street crash since 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression, U.S. mega banks on Wall Street still pose a systemic risk to the safety and soundness of banking and the overall financial stability of the United States. The public no longer has to guess as to whether the above statement is factual or simply the wild imagining of Wall Street activists. No less than the bank-cozy Federal Reserve confirmed on April 13 that three of the largest Wall Street banks (JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo) did not have credible plans to unwind themselves without taxpayer assistance if they were to fail, raising the specter of another epic taxpayer bailout adding to the already staggering $19 trillion national debt, much of which resulted from the last bailout. In the case of JPMorgan Chase, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 15, 2016  During the series of Democratic debates, including the one last night hosted by CNN, Hillary Clinton has repeatedly trumpeted the record of President Obama in signing tough legislation to rein in Wall Street abuses when questioned on her money spigot flowing from Wall Street. According to her logic, since Obama’s campaign and his Super Pacs took plenty of money from Wall Street and went ahead and enacted tough Dodd-Frank reform legislation, why should her integrity be questioned. Early in last night’s debate, when Sanders raised the fact that she and a Super Pac supporting her have taken $15 million from Wall Street, Clinton had this to say:  “Well, make — make no mistake about it, this is not just an attack on me, it’s an attack on President Obama. President Obama…You know, let me tell you why. You may not like … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 7, 2016  If anyone needs one more reason to break up the mega banks on Wall Street, simply look at what happened following the Federal Reserve’s quarter of a percentage point rate hike on December 16 of last year. On that date, the Fed moved off its seven year zero interest rate policy (ZIRP), which had been a bonanza for the banks and a starvation plan for seniors living on fixed income investments like Treasury notes and CDs, and raised its benchmark rate by a quarter of a percentage point to between 0.25 percent and 0.50 percent from its former 0.0 to 0.25 percent. The following then happened in short order in 2016: By Friday, January 15, Citigroup closed down on the day a gut-churning 6.41 percent, bringing its share price losses to a whopping 30 percent from its July 2015 high. Citigroup … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 4, 2016  Tomorrow the Senate Banking Committee, chaired by Senator Richard Shelby since the Republicans took control of the Senate in the 2014 midterms, will hold a hearing on “Assessing the Effects of Consumer Finance Regulations.” That title can be easily translated into “How to Achieve the Lobbyists’ Dream Wish of Killing Off the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and Its Embarrassing Ability to Perpetually Show How Deregulation of the Financial Services Industry Has Led to Wholesale Looting of the Public.” Senator Shelby does not even make a pretense of presenting a balanced slate of witnesses at these hearings and one has to question why the Ranking Member, Senator Sherrod Brown, a Democrat, is not holding Shelby’s feet to the fire on this issue. Tomorrow’s hearing has three panelists listed: Leonard Chanin, Of Counsel at Morrison and Foerster – a law firm that was … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 31, 2016  On March 7 of this year, President Obama called the full Financial Stability Oversight Council (F-SOC) to the White House for a meeting. F-SOC was created under the 2010 financial reform legislation known as Dodd-Frank to monitor systemic risks building up in the financial system and, ideally, nip them in the bud before they got out of hand. Every major Wall Street bank regulator sits on F-SOC. Immediately following his meeting with F-SOC on March 7, President Obama held a press conference (see video below) with the F-SOC members sitting around him at a large conference table. Sitting two seats away from the President was Mary Jo White, Chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Directly across the table was Thomas Curry, head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) that oversees national banks, and Jack Lew, U.S. … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 30, 2016  Who could blame the researchers at the Government Accountability Office (GAO) for thinking that responding to Congressional requests for studies on how to repair the nation’s ineffective maze of financial regulation is an exercise in futility. GAO has been spending boatloads of taxpayer money for the past two decades to define the problems for Congress as our legislative branch has not only failed to take meaningful corrective measures but actually made the system exponentially worse through the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999. During the 20 years that GAO has been warning about an ineffective financial regulatory system, taxpayers have been looted through a nonstop series of massive Wall Street frauds: the Nasdaq price fixing scandal; the rigged Wall Street research scandal leading to the $4 trillion dot.com bust; the four-decade Ponzi scheme of Bernie Madoff that was defined in … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 29, 2016  There were a lot of sweaty palms on Wall Street yesterday. As the Government Accountability Office released a report suggesting that regulation of Wall Street is a complex maze of inefficiency and fragmentation leaving gaping holes in which crooks can find fertile ground, the U.S. Justice Department was perp-walking a 2002 Harvard Law School graduate (whose family name resides on the student center there) on charges reminiscent of a Bernie Madoff startup. According to the unsealed complaint from the U.S. Justice Department’s regional U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, 39-year old Andrew Caspersen, whose father and grandfather were the former heads of Beneficial Corp.,  is alleged to have defrauded approximately $24.6 million from a charitable foundation by setting up a fake account, transferring $17.6 million of that amount to his “personal brokerage account” at an unnamed brokerage … Continue reading →