Search Results for: JPMorgan

By Pam Martens: May 13, 2015 There has been a seismic shift in thinking among global investors when it comes to sovereign debt and it’s not about what you’re reading in the business press. In the past three weeks, yields have spiked on sovereign debt which has caused an estimated loss of over $400 billion globally – and counting. (Bond prices move inversely to interest rates.) This has effectively been a rapid, unanticipated tightening of monetary policy by the markets themselves – leaving central banks in Europe, China and Japan, which are trying to effectuate an easing of rates, nervously fingering their worry beads. The business media has attributed the spike in rates to everything from the rise in oil prices refocusing attention on the potential for inflation, rather than deflation, to the unwinding of crowded trades as investors prepare for a Fed rate hike. Those factors may be at … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 12, 2015 Senator Richard Shelby, Chair of the Senate Banking Committee, is set to release details of his proposed financial reform legislation today which Wall Street hopes will have so much smoke and mirrors to appease the liberal and conservative factions on the Committee that no one will notice that it’s another big sellout to Wall Street. The bill will hold out the promise of reforming the Federal Reserve while failing to do anything material to reform it. It will promise to remove unnecessary regulatory burdens on community banks so that they can survive and compete while leaving intact the very financial structure that is killing off community banks faster than you can say Dodd-Frank. The biggest joke in the proposed legislation is that the Fed will somehow be tamed by allowing the President of the United States to nominate, with Senate confirmation, … Continue reading →

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 →