Search Results for: JPMorgan

By Pam Martens: December 2, 2014 Yesterday, William Dudley, President of the scandalized Federal Reserve Bank of New York, cast off his Fire Warden’s helmet long enough to enthrall an audience at Bernard M. Baruch College in New York City with his soothsaying ability on economic matters. Dudley sits at the helm of the regional Fed bank that supervises the mega Wall Street banks that collapsed the U.S. economy in 2008. His ability to supervise either the Wall Street banks or his own institution has come into serious question. Recently, he told Senator Elizabeth Warren during a Senate hearing that he viewed his regulatory role over Wall Street not as a cop on the beat but “more as a fire warden,” making sure the banks don’t burn down. (Burning the country down is clearly another matter.) The U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Financial Institutions and Consumer Protection called Dudley to testify … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: November 25, 2014 Last Thursday, the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, chaired by Senator Carl Levin, released an alarming 396-page report that details how Wall Street’s too-big-to-fail banks have quietly, and often stealthily through shell companies, gained ownership of a stunning amount of the nation’s critical industrial commodities like oil, aluminum, copper, natural gas, and even uranium. The report said the scale of these bank holdings “appears to be unprecedented in U.S. history.” Adding to the hubris of the situation, the Wall Street banks’ own regulator, the Federal Reserve, gave its blessing to this unprecedented and dangerous encroachment by banking interests into industrial commodity ownership and has effectively looked the other way as the banks moved into industrial commerce activities like owning pipelines and power plants. For more than a century, Federal law has encouraged the separation of banking and commerce. The role of banks has … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 24, 2014 Last Friday, the Senate Subcommittee on Financial Institutions and Consumer Protection, chaired by Sherrod Brown, effectively put William Dudley, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, in stocks in the village square and engaged in a rather brilliant style of public shaming. With each well-formed question posed by the panel, Dudley’s jaded leadership of a hubristic regulator came into ever sharper focus. There were a number of elephants in the room during the lengthy session that were only briefly touched upon but deserve greater scrutiny by the press. First, Congress knew that the New York Fed was a failed, crony regulator during the lead up to the financial collapse in 2008, but it granted it an even greater supervisory role under the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation in 2010. This Congress has also failed to engage in public shaming of … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 20, 2014 Depending on where and when you got your news yesterday on the tragic death of Shawn D. Miller, a Managing Director of Wall Street mega bank, Citigroup, you were either emphatically told he died of a suicide or you were led to believe he was murdered. By late evening yesterday, the story had disintegrated into wild speculation. The New York Daily News ran this stunning headline, based on anonymous sources, at 9:22 p.m.: “Banker, 42, slashed his own throat in Manhattan bathtub during drug- and booze-filled bender: sources.” It is becoming abundantly clear that if you work for a major Wall Street firm and die a sudden death, it will be shaped, molded, twisted and contorted until it fits with the suicide narrative – no matter how strongly the facts argue otherwise. This is what we can reliably report this morning: … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: November 19, 2014 Every now and then, someone raises the question of Mafia infiltration on Wall Street or suggests that Wall Street has become an Ivy-league educated, better tailored version of the mob. Now, two lawyers, Helen Davis Chaitman and Lance Gotthoffer have dramatically ratcheted up the debate, suggesting boldly in the latest chapter of their free on-line book that there are stark parallels between the Gambino crime family and JPMorgan Chase – the nation’s largest bank. Writer Matt Taibbi had a similar epiphany back in 2012 in an article for Rolling Stone titled The Scam Wall Street Learned from the Mafia – the story of how major Wall Street firms conspired together to rig bidding in the municipal bond market. Taibbi writes: “In fact, stripped of all the camouflaging financial verbiage, the crimes the defendants and their co-conspirators committed were virtually indistinguishable from the kind of … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: November 12, 2014 Two U.S. and three foreign banks have been charged with rigging the foreign exchange market where $5.3 trillion changes hands daily and have settled civil claims for $3.3 billion. (The charges are very similar to those in the rigging of the international interest rate benchmark known as Libor.) Additional charges and settlements by other regulators are expected to follow before the end of the year. The U.S.-based Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) levied a total of over $1.4 billion in fines against JPMorgan, Citigroup, UBS, HSBC and RBS. The same five banks were fined $1.7 billion by the U.K.’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). Swiss regulator FINMA charged only UBS with a fine of $139 million and included rigging of precious metals trading along with rigging foreign exchange. While the details that were released are skimpy and the Financial Conduct Authority is already being criticized … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: November 11, 2014 Apparently, not one of the global regulators pushing the latest plan to prevent another taxpayer bailout of the over-leveraged, globe-trotting banking behemoths that crashed the financial system in 2008 ever worked a day on Wall Street or sat behind a trading terminal during the crisis. If one had, he would have exposed this plan immediately as an exercise in illusory thinking – effectively, the same framework on which global banking currently exists. Yesterday, the Financial Stability Board, established in 2009 to coordinate financial regulatory proposals on behalf of the Group of 20 major economies (G-20), released a proposal that is being promoted as a means of ending taxpayer bailouts of too-big-to-fail banks. These 30 banks are known as G-SIBs, or Global Systemically Important Banks. But the proposal does nothing to address the “systemic” danger of these banks, thus the proposal is nothing more than … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 27, 2014  The contrast between Wall Street’s continuity government in Washington under another Clinton in the White House and the charismatic populist voice of Senator Elizabeth Warren as she stumps for Democrats in the midterms, is awakening millions of Americans to the idea that there may be choices after all in the 2016 presidential election. Columnist Eugene Robinson said it best last Monday in the Washington Post, writing that Senator Warren’s “swing through Colorado, Minnesota and Iowa to rally the faithful displayed something no other potential contender for the 2016 presidential nomination, including Hillary Clinton, seems able to present: a message.” What Robinson really means is “a message of hope” – that Wall Street’s wealth transfer system, institutionalized under a protection racket by members of Congress who keep their seats using Wall Street’s campaign dough, could come under serious challenge with Warren in … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 23, 2014 What the New York Fed attempted to pull off this past Monday with its full-day conference for the execs of wayward Wall Street banks was a public relations stunt to switch the national debate from its culture to Wall Street’s culture. Styled as a “Workshop on Reforming Culture and Behavior in the Financial Services Industry,” the event came less than a month after ProPublica and public radio’s “This American Life” released internal tape recordings made by a former New York Fed bank examiner, Carmen Segarra, revealing a regulator with no bark or bite. ProPublica’s Jake Bernstein wrote that the tapes and a confidential report by an outside consultant demonstrated the New York Fed’s “history of deference to banks.” But there is far more to this story. Wall Street banking executives, who elect two-thirds of the Board of Directors of the New … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 15, 2014  New York City has 8.4 million people living in its boroughs. But when it comes to defending those charged with financial crimes, it’s a very small, clubby world of people who are either related to each other or have worked together in the past. And this clubby group has one more thing in common: most of its members seem to be lavishing huge campaign contributions on U.S. Senator Charles (Chuck) Schumer of New York – a man who is in a position to recommend Federal Judge appointments and the Justice Department’s U.S. Attorney who will prosecute the financial crimes – or not. These are the findings in a new on-line book, JPMadoff: The Unholy Alliance Between America’s Biggest Bank and America’s Biggest Crook, being offered free as a chapter a month by attorneys Helen Davis Chaitman and Lance Gotthoffer. (Chaitman is … Continue reading →