Search Results for: JPMorgan

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 11, 2015 It is clear to most Americans that Wall Street’s financing of presidential and congressional campaigns is creating too many pals wearing blindfolds about epic corruption on Wall Street. The President, subject to Senate confirmation, selects the U.S. Treasury Secretary, the Chair of the Federal Reserve, the Chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission – all of whom regulate Wall Street, for better or worse. Given that Wall Street collapsed the U.S. financial system in 2008 and has been perpetually charged with new crimes ever since, there is the strong suggestion that regulation isn’t strong enough. The President also selects the U.S. Attorney General at the Justice Department, the office that can bring criminal charges against Wall Street. But according to a January 2013 report by the PBS program, Frontline, in the years following the 2008 collapse there was no serious effort … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 7, 2015 As the Wall Street Journal reports this week that two of the serially charged Wall Street banks, Citigroup and JPMorgan, along with two foreign banks, Barclays and RBS, are expected to plead guilty as early as next week to criminal charges of massive fraud in the foreign exchange markets, some of the most powerful women in the field of finance and economics were speaking at a conference in Washington D.C. and taking on the system that allows this corruption to continue unchecked – six years after it collapsed the U.S. economy and blew up Wall Street. The conference was titled “Finance & Society” and featured luminaries like Fed Chair Janet Yellen, Senator Elizabeth Warren, Christine Lagarde, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and Esther George, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, along with other important voices. … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 30, 2015 The Justice Department’s case against the 36 year old lone bedroom trader in the U.K., Navinder Singh Sarao, has now been thoroughly discredited by every Wall Street veteran who has studied it, most pointing out that what Sarao did is happening every second that Wall Street is open for business. Business writers at the New York Times, Financial Times, Newsweek, and Bloomberg View have given the charges an unequivocal thumbs down. The Justice Department’s complaint itself is unusual. It consists of a one page complaint cover sheet followed not by a detailed breakdown of the counts but by an affidavit from an FBI agent. The case is filed in the Federal District Court in the Northern District of Illinois but no U.S. Attorney or Assistant U.S. Attorney from that district has signed this complaint. The names listed at the top of … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 9, 2015 You know times are weird on Wall Street when JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon devotes a good chunk of his shareholder letter, released yesterday, to fretting about whether there will be enough Treasury notes to go around in a safe haven stampede during the next crisis. Dimon writes that “In a crisis, everyone rushes into Treasuries to protect themselves. In the last crisis, many investors sold risky assets and added more than $2 trillion to their ownership of Treasuries (by buying Treasuries or government money market funds). This will be even more true in the next crisis. But it seems to us that there is a greatly reduced supply of Treasuries to go around – in effect, there may be a shortage of all forms of good collateral.” To underscore his point, Dimon invoked the tumult in the Treasury market on October … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 8, 2015  Having defeated the Crown in a bloody revolution some two centuries ago, Americans don’t like living under a patriarchy, oligarchy or kleptocracy. Unfortunately, the U.S. central bank, the Federal Reserve, is a little of all three. On Monday of this week, the President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York stated in a speech that “the Federal Reserve already is very transparent and accountable to Congress and to the public.” Two days later, Wall Street On Parade attempted to get one piece of very basic information from the Fed and got the royal runaround. We wanted to know if JPMorgan Chase, a bank operating under a deferred prosecution agreement for two felony counts and under a criminal investigation for potential currency rigging, was still the custodian of $1.7 trillion of mortgage backed securities owned by the Federal Reserve, as we … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 7, 2015  Thanks to the Federal Reserve feeding its habit for six years, the U.S. stock market now reacts like a junkie who needs a constant fix from the reassurance of zero, or extremely low, interest rates. William (Bill) Dudley, the President of the New York Fed, was peculiarly on hand yesterday morning to feed the addiction with a speech to members of the Business Partners Roundtable at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark, New Jersey. Anytime a President of a regional Fed Bank makes a public statement on the timing of interest rate hikes or the pace of economic activity that influences that timing, it is well established that it moves stock, bond and currency markets. But yesterday was not just any routine day – it was a particularly odd day for any Fed President to speak before the stock … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 6, 2015 “Wall Street Democrats” is a political phrase gaining traction. It encapsulates a growing realization that Bill Clinton’s two terms as President and Barack Obama’s eight years in office have been a great boon to enriching the one percent on Wall Street and an economic disaster for mostly everyone else. It was the Bill Clinton administration that deregulated the financial markets through the repeal of the Depression era Glass-Steagall Act and it was the Obama administration that created the masquerade that strict regulation of Wall Street was put back into place under the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. Instead of reform, Wall Street banks have become larger, more dangerous and an increasing threat to the economic stability of the U.S., if not the globe. There is a serious and growing chorus calling for an expulsion of the Wall Street … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 1, 2015 Barron’s should have published its gushing cover story on Jamie Dimon’s stewardship of JPMorgan today – as an April Fool’s joke. The nation’s largest bank is operating under a deferred prosecution agreement until at least next January for two felony counts it received in the Madoff swindle, the largest Ponzi scheme in history.  It’s under a current criminal investigation over potential rigging of the foreign exchange markets with the New York Times reporting on February 10 that federal prosecutors had informed JPMorgan and three other banks “that they must enter guilty pleas to settle the cases.” Barron’s sister publication, the Wall Street Journal, reported on February 24 that JPMorgan is one of the 10 banks being investigated by the U.S. Justice Department for potential rigging of gold and other precious metals. Against that backdrop, Barron’s comes up with this: JPMorgan is … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 31, 2015 Last Friday and again yesterday, the Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Stanley Fischer, delivered speeches that attempted to refocus his audience away from the systemic global risk posed by behemoth Wall Street banks and redirect their gaze to dangers lurking in the nonbank sector: things like mutual funds and hedge funds. Reading the speeches, we had an epiphany here at Wall Street On Parade: if something does blow up in the nonbank sector it is highly likely to be caused by an interaction with a Wall Street bank. The insurance company, AIG, would not have failed during the last financial crisis had it not agreed to engage in Credit Default Swaps (CDS) with Wall Street mega banks. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would not have failed had they not been seduced into buying dodgy mortgages,  mortgage-backed securities, and derivatives from … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: March 19, 2015 Hillary Clinton just can’t catch a break. As her self-inflicted imbroglio over erasing 30,000 emails involving her time as Secretary of State continues to command press attention, the April issue of Harper’s Magazine is focusing gasp-worthy attention on the “loan-sharking” business that Bill Clinton, as President, assisted in transforming into the too-big-to-fail Citigroup that played a leading role in bringing the country to the brink of financial collapse in 2008. Janet Yellen’s Fed can’t be too happy either about the revelations. The Fed just gave Citigroup a clean bill of health last week under its so-called rigorous stress tests and is allowing the bank to spend like a drunken sailor, raising its dividend 400 percent with permission to buy back as much as $7.8 billion of its own stock. The Fed’s qualitative portion of the stress test is said to look at both risk … Continue reading →