Search Results for: JPMorgan

  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 →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 11, 2016  At 8:00 a.m. this morning, futures on the Dow Jones Industrial Average were flashing a 274 point plunge at the open of the stock market at 9:30 a.m. ET, following a selloff of 99.64 points by the close of trading yesterday. There’s plenty of things rattling this market, not the least of which is the continued weakness in the share prices of the mega Wall Street and European banks. Analysts have started asking on business news outlets if there is something going on that the public can’t see. Adding to the market angst was the jumble of questions Fed Chair Janet Yellen received during her semi-annual testimony before the House Financial Services Committee yesterday. One particular line of questioning from multiple members of the Committee was on whether the Federal Reserve has the legal authority to use negative interest rates as … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 9, 2016  Tomorrow, Janet Yellen will scurry over to the Rayburn House Office Building to give her semi-annual testimony to the House Financial Services Committee, now under the control of a deeply paranoid Republican majority when it comes to the Federal Reserve. (Not that some of that paranoia isn’t justified.) There is no question that Yellen will face hostile questioning from Republicans on the Committee, as she has in the past, although the questions tend to venture far afield from the real financial threats to U.S. stability. Most Democrats, on the other hand, are so wedded to holding up the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation as their grand achievement after the 2008 crash that they refuse to look out the window and see the equity capital of the Wall Street mega banks currently in a death spiral as the same banks invent ever more … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 8, 2016  Senator Richard Shelby (R-Alabama), the Chair of the U.S. Senate Banking Committee, has announced a hearing on March 3 at 10:00 a.m. to examine “Regulatory Reforms to Improve Equity Market Structure.” To appropriately conduct that hearing, all the lights should be turned out in the hearing room and the senators and witnesses should have to fumble and stumble their way to their seats in the dark, since that’s what American investors have been forced to do since the 2008 crash – a tortuously long seven years of make-believe financial reform. Following the 1929 crash, whose economic impact was also swift and devastating, the Senate Banking Committee spent the years of 1932 through 1934 holding comprehensive hearings and investigations on the structure of the stock market. The hearings unraveled, day by day, the frauds that the Wall Street titans of that era … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 5, 2016  The Hillary Clinton presidential campaign has a new strategy to get Senator Bernie Sanders to shut up about the unseemly mountains of money Wall Street has showered on her and Bill Clinton throughout their careers: in campaign funds, in speaking fees, in home mortgages, and in donations to their charity, the Clinton Global Initiative. (Details here.) The new strategy is to effectively socialize Sanders to silence by embarrassing him every time he brings up the subject. Before Clinton took the stage last night at the MSNBC Democratic Debate at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, her Press Secretary, Brian Fallon, and Campaign Manager, Robby Mook, met with reporters from Bloomberg News to complain about Sanders’ innuendos that Hillary Clinton can be bought by Wall Street. According to a report at Bloomberg, Fallon stated at a Bloomberg Politics breakfast earlier yesterday … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 3, 2016  Most folks don’t realize that on Monday, September 23, 2013, Goldman Sachs began trading as one of the 30 stocks in the Dow Jones Industrial Average Index (Dow). Because the Dow is stock-price weighted and Goldman sports a very high price, it has an outsized impact on point gains and losses in the index. As of yesterday’s close, Goldman Sachs is the priciest stock in the Dow, despite its plunging price of late. Yesterday, the Dow lost 295.64 points and Goldman Sachs was a major contributor to the decline, losing 4.98 percent of its share price to close at $151.70. If this keeps up, it might not be too long before you see Goldman yanked from the Dow. The percentage loss in Goldman yesterday was notable on multiple fronts. First, its percentage decline was 3.18 percent more than the loss in the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 2, 2016  Billionaires went to bed very cranky last night and are likely awakening to irritable bowel syndrome this morning. What has been working swimmingly well for them since the 2010 Citizens United decision was handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court, allowing the super wealthy to dump unlimited sums of money into Super Pacs to sway the outcome of elections, just had a wrench thrown into the gears. Voters in Iowa gave a resounding thumbs down to Jeb Bush and his massive Super Pac spending, giving him an embarrassingly low 2.8 percent of the Republican vote. According to data made available by BloombergBusiness (see chart below), Bush’s campaign spent $9.8 million in the final three months of last year while his Super Pac spent an astounding $54.3 million in the final six months of 2015. Also embarrassing for the billionaires giving to … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 1, 2016  Wall Street, based in New York City, collapsed the U.S. financial system under the weight of its own corruption in 2008. We’ve just come off another year of unprecedented corruption on Wall Street, topped off with two major U.S. banks, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase, pleading guilty to felony counts for rigging foreign currency trading. Elsewhere in the state of New York, the heads of both legislative branches, Dean Skelos, the Senate Majority Leader, and Sheldon Silver, Speaker of the Assembly, were convicted on corruption charges in the waning days of 2015.  Last evening, the CBS investigative news program, 60 Minutes, produced video evidence that 15 out of 16 lawyers in New York City were willing to discuss strategies with a potential client for laundering dirty money into the U.S. financial system through shell companies. In short, New York State is facing … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 31, 2016 Today’s digital edition of The New York Times captures the essence of the cancer eating away at our democracy: a leading newspaper is endorsing a deeply tarnished candidate for the highest office in America while a major Wall Street bank that has played a key role in her conflicted candidacy runs a banner ad as if to salute the endorsement. The slogan on Citigroup’s ad, “cash back once just isn’t enough,” perfectly epitomizes the frequency with which the Clintons have gone to the Citigroup well. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, among the top five largest lifetime donors to Hillary’s campaigns, Citigroup tops the list, with three other Wall Street banks also making the cut: Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley. (The monies come from employees and/or family members or PACs of the firms, not the corporation itself.) Hillary … Continue reading →