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Recent Posts
- Citigroup Is Having a Helluva Summer: A Protest on Thursday Will Turn Up the Heat
- Nikkei Has Biggest Drop in History: Here’s What’s Causing the Global Market Selloff
- JPMorgan Is Tapping Illiquid Assets in its Global Collateral Program; the New York Fed Is Paying for Its Services
- Bank Regulators Issue Warnings on Fintech and Banking as Disasters Pile Up
- Donald Trump Gives a Speech on Not Letting China Win the Crypto Race – Not Realizing China Banned Crypto Mining and Transactions Four Years Ago
- The New York Fed Has Contracted Out Key Functions to JPMorgan Chase; We Filed a FOIA and Got These Strange Invoices
- On the Eve of Netanyahu’s Address to Congress, Senator Bernie Sanders Delivers a Breathtaking Assessment of His War Crimes
- Trump’s Sit-Down with Netanyahu at Mar-a-Lago Will Cost U.S. Taxpayers Millions While Profiting Trump’s Business
- Protecting Trump and His Jet-Setting Adult Children During His Presidency Cost Taxpayers Over $1 Billion
- A Congressman and a Doctor Reported a Woman Being Shot at Trump Rally: She’s Vanished from Official Reports
- Jamie Dimon Goes Missing from Earnings Call, After Dumping $183 Million of His JPMorgan Chase Stock Earlier this Year
- U.S. Senate Candidate Backed by Hedge Fund Billionaires Was Sitting in Front Row at Trump Rally as the Sniper Fired into the Bleachers
- Project 2025: The Fossil Fuel and Banking Money Behind the Madness
- The Fund Created to Unwind a Failing Megabank Has a Problem: There’s No Money in It
- Joe Biden Versus the New York Times
- Grand Jury Transcript in Jeffrey Epstein Case Is Released, Raising Questions about Epstein’s Darkest Secrets Being Protected in JPMorgan Cases
- The Supreme Court Crowns a King, Immunizing Future Criminal Acts Under Project 2025 – a Right Wing Manifesto
- The Debate Disaster and the Supreme Court’s “Chevron” Repeal Have a Money Trail Leading to Charles Koch
- Congressman Andy Barr Stacks a Hearing on the Fed’s Stress Tests with Lobbyists for Megabanks
- The Fed Posts Historic Operating Losses As It Pays Out 5.40 Percent Interest to Banks
- Goldman Sachs’ Bank Derivatives Have Grown from $40 Trillion to $54 Trillion in Five Years; So How Did Its Credit Exposure Improve by 200 Percent?
- The Fed and FDIC Wake Up Suddenly to the Threat of Derivatives, Flunking the Four Largest Derivative Banks on their Wind-Down Plans
- Is the Stock Market Setting Investors Up for a Tech Bust Similar to the Dot.com Bust?
- Chase Bank Customers Are Reporting a Wave of Wire Fraud in their Accounts; the Bank Won’t Make Good on the Looted Funds
- The Senate Race in Ohio Is the Sickest in U.S. History in Terms of Billionaire Money from Outside the State
- Sullivan & Cromwell’s Legal Work for Sam Bankman-Fried’s Crypto House of Fraud Is Getting a Closer Look in Two Federal Court Cases
- Crypto Tries to Recreate the Koch Money Machine to Pack Congress with Shills
- French Fears Ignite Selloff in U.S. Megabanks and Foreign Peers
- Crypto Just Got Exponentially More Dangerous: Meet Fairshake
- Nvidia Hit a $3 Trillion Market Cap Last Week; Dark Pools Are Making Over 300,000 Trades in the Stock Weekly
- The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Is Making Enemies in All the Right Places
- A Former Exec at Citibank Raises Alarm Bells in Federal Court Over Failed Risk Controls Inside the Bank
- Charles Koch’s Money Is Being Used in Elections in Ways Only Orwell Could Have Imagined
- Freakonomics and Frankenbanks: JPMorgan Chase Sucked Up 18 Percent of All Profits of 4,568 FDIC-Insured Banks in the First Quarter
- Academic Study Provides Hard Numbers to the Sick, Revolving Door Culture at Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Citigroup
- $244 Billion of Treasury Debt to Hit the Market Today and Tomorrow as Interest Rates Spike on Ballooning Supply
- CFTC Fines J.P. Morgan Securities — a Fed Primary Dealer — $100 Million for Failing to Surveil Potential Spoofing and High Frequency Trading for Eight Years
- Another FDIC-Insured Bank Got in Bed with Fintech; It’s Now Got a Dumpster Fire and Desperate Pleas from Customers for their Money
- Citigroup Gets Fined $79 Million Two Years After It Caused a $300 Billion Flash Crash in European Stock Markets
- After Weeks of Howling by MAGA Republicans for the Chair of the FDIC “to Resign,” a Democrat Delivers the Decisive Stab in the Back
- The Curious Money Trail Behind the Supreme Court/Clarence Thomas Decision to Rescue a Federal Agency that Wall Street Hates
- Saudi Arabia’s Wealth Fund Dumps Its JPMorgan Chase Stock; Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Did the Same in 2020
- One of Jeffrey Epstein’s Protectors at JPMorgan Chase, Mary Erdoes, Has Sold $29 Million of Her Stock in the Bank Since Just Before Epstein’s Arrest in 2019
- Delinquencies on Office Property Loans at Banks Are at 8 Percent While Office Loans the Banks Sold to Investors Show 31 Percent in Trouble
- Goldman Sachs Shines Up Its Swamp Creature Reputation by Rehiring Robert Kaplan as Vice Chairman – the Guy Who Traded Like a Hedge Fund Kingpin While President of the Dallas Fed
- Cleary Gottlieb – Outside Counsel to Wall Street’s Serially Bailed Out Megabanks – Tarnishes the FDIC Chair in its So-Called “Independent” Report
- JPMorgan Chase and Its Regulators Are Hiding Dark Trading Secrets at the Largest and Riskiest U.S. Bank
- Campus Protests Over Gaza Open a Pandora’s Box for Wall Street Megabanks that Underwrote $8 Billion of Israel’s Bonds in March
- Wall Street’s Megabanks Have Trillions of Dollars Off-Balance Sheet, in a Replay of Accounting Hubris that Led to the 2008 Wall Street Collapse
- JPMorgan Remains the Second Largest Money Market Fund Manager, Despite Needing Billions in Money Market Bailouts from the Fed in 2020
Search Results for: JPMorgan
Who Was the Mysterious ‘Bank 2’ That Turned In Madoff – To No Avail
By Pam Martens: January 9, 2014 According to the settlement documents released Tuesday by Preet Bharara, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Bernie Madoff was not content to simply engineer the largest Ponzi scheme under the very noses of the largest squad of regulators in the history of finance, he was simultaneously running a brazen check-kiting scheme under the same noses. Irving Picard, the Trustee of the Madoff victims’ fund set up by the Securities Investor Protection Corporation (SIPC), provided a great amount of detail on this operation in a court filing against JPMorgan in 2011. This week, U.S. Attorney Bharara added additional details. According to Bharara, Madoff was writing checks from an account at “Madoff Bank 2” – a bank other than JPMorgan – to Norman F. Levy, a mutual customer of both Madoff’s firm and JPMorgan. Later the same day, Madoff would transfer money … Continue reading
The Madoff Trustee Makes the Case; the Justice Department Collects the Money
By Pam Martens: January 8, 2014 A sense of déjà vu overwhelmed me yesterday reading the U.S. Justice Department’s settlement documents with JPMorgan in the Madoff case. I knew I had read most of this before. As it turns out, Irving Picard, the trustee for victims of the Madoff fraud had exquisitely presented all of this evidence in an amended complaint that he filed in court on June 24, 2011 – two and one-half years ago. There is one huge difference between what Picard entered into the public court record and what the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Preet Bharara, entered into the public record yesterday: Picard named names – at JPMorgan and at the feeder funds that blindly shoveled billions to Madoff. All of that explosive naming detail is missing in Bharara’s neat settlement, suggesting that is how the U.S. Attorney’s office wrung such an … Continue reading
The Untold Story of the Wall Street Crash of 2007
By Pam Martens: January 6, 2014 The conventional wisdom is that the crash on Wall Street that continues to devastate the U.S. economy and job growth began in earnest in 2008. That’s likely because marquee Wall Street firms, in business for 75 to more than 100 years, did not blow up until 2008. Bear Stearns imploded in March of 2008 and was taken over by JPMorgan. On the same day, September 15, 2008, that Lehman Brothers filed bankruptcy, Merrill Lynch was taken over by Bank of America. Other major Wall Street firms were propped up with the largest taxpayer bailout in the history of U.S. financial markets. A careful review of the report from the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC), Federal Reserve documents, Fed appointment calendars, and news archives indicate clearly that the financial system began “unraveling,” (as the FCIC phrased it) in 2007. More importantly, a number of events … Continue reading
Is the New York Fed Too Deeply Conflicted to Regulate Wall Street?
By Pam Martens: December 30, 2013 The Federal Reserve System that is charged with setting monetary policy in the United States consists of a Board of Governors in Washington, D.C. and 12 regional Federal Reserve Banks. The Board of Governors functions as an independent government agency – its Board is appointed by the President of the United States but its funding comes from the regional Federal Reserve Banks. Slowly, like a tiny Goldfish in a large tank of water that grows over time into a monster fish capable of clobbering anything else placed in the tank, one of the 12 regional Federal Reserve Banks has obtained unique powers not shared by the 11 other regional Federal Reserve Banks. This is just a partial list of how the New York Fed is unique among its peers: The President of the New York Fed sits permanently on the Federal Open Market Committee … Continue reading
What Dodd-Frank Didn’t Fix: The Most Dangerous Aspects of Wall Street
By Pam Martens: December 13, 2013 For those being lulled into a sense of comfort or complacency by the announcement that the Volcker Rule was approved this week (it won’t take full effect until 2015 and maybe not even then), here’s a reminder of what the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation and the Volcker Rule have not fixed. The corrupt structure of Wall Street is thriving and continues to perpetuate its wealth transfer system. Over 40 black pools are still in existence; the biggest Wall Street firms are still able to dodge putting their customers’ trades on a stock exchange and, instead, match the orders in the darkness inside their own house. Wall Street has given this the benign sounding name of “internalization.” We call it dark markets. Nothing has stopped the high frequency traders from fleecing the little guy who is trying to sell his 100 shares at a fair … Continue reading
The Volcker Rule That Isn’t: The Velvet Rope Approach to Criminal Behavior
By Pam Martens: December 11, 2013 If you were a fan of the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation that did absolutely nothing to rein in Wall Street’s ability to plunder the life savings of the little guy, you will absolutely love the Volcker Rule that was approved, but not instituted, yesterday by five regulators. Just like Dodd-Frank, it’s voluminous, running over 800 pages, postpones the actual enactment into the distant future, and is chock full of loopholes and slippery passages. The so-called Volcker Rule is Section 619 of the Dodd-Frank legislation. Its original intent was to quickly stop banks holding insured deposits from speculative trading for their own account (proprietary trading). It was also meant to prevent banks from owning hedge funds and private equity funds which could potentially blow up an insured depository institution and require the kind of taxpayer bailouts that occurred in 2008. We can now emphatically tell … Continue reading
Intelligence Gathering Plays Key Role at New York Fed’s Trading Desk
By Pam Martens: December 2, 2013 On any given business day, you can take a taxi ride into lower Manhattan in the wee hours of the morning and see lights and the glow of Bloomberg trading terminals eerily illuminating the 9th floor of the historic Federal Reserve Bank of New York at 33 Liberty Street. A securities trader working at 4:30 a.m. in any other trading location in Manhattan might be concerned about personal safety. Not here. Quietly, without Congressional hearings, and lost in the tragedy and turmoil of September 11, the USA Patriot Act in 2001 bestowed private domestic policing powers on the 12 Federal Reserve Banks, including the New York Fed. On top of its own police force armed with Glock 22s and assault weapons, the building itself is a 22-story fortress with 18 floors above ground and four below. The building, completed in 1924, constitutes the block … Continue reading
The Official Video from the Federal Reserve on How It Creates Electronic Money
By Pam Martens: November 26, 2013 Unless you’ve been lost at sea since 2008, you’ve likely heard time and again that the Federal Reserve is creating money out of thin air. Type the words “Federal Reserve creates money AND thin air” into the Google search engine and you’ll find about 2.4 million people weighing in on the subject, including folks at PBS. There’s no reason for the debate. The Federal Reserve has put out its very own video explaining how it creates money. It prefers the phrase “newly created electronic funds” to the colloquial “out of thin air.” The video is narrated by Steve Meyer, a Senior Advisor to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, who explains how the Fed has been paying for those trillions in bond purchases since the 2008 crash. Meyer says on the video: “You may wonder how the Federal Reserve pays for the securities it … Continue reading
New York Fed’s Strange New Role: Big Bank Equity Analyst
By Pam Martens: November 25, 2013 For more than two decades, financial columnist John Crudele has been hypothesizing on whether the Federal Reserve has its fingers in the stock market – directly or indirectly. Tampering with stocks is off limits to the Federal Reserve, as far as the public is aware. Its stated function is to serve as the central bank of the United States, focusing on achieving monetary policy through its open market activities in the bond markets and foreign exchange area. But the New York Fed itself is helping to fuel suspicions about what’s going on within its cloistered walls at 33 Liberty Street in lower Manhattan. Of the 12 regional Federal Reserve Banks, the New York Fed is the only institution with a trading floor and highly sophisticated trading platforms. But despite multiple requests, the New York Fed will not provide a photo of the full trading … Continue reading
Fed Minutes Reveal a Dangerous Power Grab by New York Fed
By Pam Martens: November 21, 2013 Just when it seemed one could no longer be shocked by the corruption, hubris and lack of accountability in the American financial system, along comes yesterday’s release of the Federal Reserve’s minutes for the October 29-30 meeting of its Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC). While mainstream media focuses on what the minutes revealed about when the Fed might begin to reduce its monthly $85 billion in bond purchases, receiving scant attention is a brazen power grab boldly stated on page two of the eleven pages of minutes. Back on October 31, wire services reported that the temporary dollar and foreign currency swap lines that had been put in place between central banks on a temporary basis during the financial crisis had been turned into standing arrangements. The Associated Press explained the action as follows: “Six of the world’s leading central banks, including the U.S. … Continue reading