Search Results for: JPMorgan

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 7, 2014 The U.S. Senate has been holding hearings since June which show a clear rethinking on what type of legislation it must enact going forward to achieve meaningful reforms of Wall Street and protect the economy from its excesses. The 849-page Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation, enacted four years ago in 2010, mandated 398 new rules; just 208 of those rules, or 52 percent, have been enacted and none of them seem to be reining in excesses on Wall Street. To understand why Dodd-Frank has been such a failure in reforming Wall Street conduct, one need only read the following sentence and think about it for a moment: Public Law 73-66, 73d Congress, H.R. 5661: An Act to provide for the safer and more effective use of the assets of banks, to regulate interbank control, to prevent the undue diversion of funds into … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 6, 2014 Getting what should already be public domain information from Wall Street’s regulators using the public records law known as the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) has become next to impossible; and it’s fueling contempt for the Obama administration. Yesterday, a new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found that a majority of Americans, 54 percent, now believe the President is unable to “lead the country and get the job done.” That poll follows another one from NBC and the Wall Street Journal that was released on September 13 of last year which found that only 14 percent of Americans held a favorable view of Wall Street. Another Gallup poll released in May found that stock ownership among U.S. adults is at a 16-year low, reflecting a growing distrust of a level playing field on Wall Street after bestselling author of “Flash Boys,” Michael … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: August 5, 2014 For years now, Paul Krugman, the esteemed Professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton University, has been using his columns at the New York Times to defend President Obama on multiple fronts. Until yesterday’s column, Krugman, who is typically spot on in the arena of monetary and economic issues, could be forgiven for his self-imposed myopia of a President who ran not once, but twice, on a populist message and then enabled the greatest wealth inequality in our nation’s history through his obsequious servility to Wall Street. Krugman cannot be forgiven for his latest missive, however. There is simply too much at stake for our nation to allow Krugman’s misguided musings to stand. Krugman starts off with the subtitle “Dodd-Frank Financial Reform Is Working” and ends with this stunning pronouncement: “For all its limitations, financial reform is a success story.” Judging by the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: August 4, 2014 It’s so crazy that one’s first instinct is that it must be a spoof web site. It reads: “A Citibank International Personal Bank FX Leveraged Loan Account can help you maximize the most of what you have. It allows you to borrow up to 5 times your deposit balance to trade in foreign currencies, so you may increase your potential investment power.” (The italics on deposit balance are ours.) It turns out that this is a real Citibank offering, a real Citibank web site, and there is a similar deal being offered in Hong Kong by Citibank – one of Wall Street’s largest banks – a bank that appears hell bent on setting a Guinness World Record for the most screw ups in one decade. Putting aside the fact that Citigroup, parent of Citibank, is under investigation for potentially helping to rig foreign currency … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 29, 2014 In 2012, Wall Street Journal reporter, Scott Patterson, released his 354-page prescient overview of U.S. market structure titled, Dark Pools: High Speed Traders, A.I. Bandits, and the Threat to the Global Financial System. (For those whose computer prowess is limited to turning on a laptop, like millions of fellow Americans, “A.I.” means artificial intelligence – machines teaching themselves to think like humans, but faster.) Patterson comes to an epiphany on page 339 of his book, writing in the notes section: “The title of this book doesn’t entirely refer to what is technically known in the financial industry as a ‘dark pool.’ Narrowly defined, dark pool refers to a trading venue that masks buy and sell orders from the public market. Rather, I argue in this book that the entire United States stock market has become one vast dark pool. Orders are … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: July 17, 2014 Wall Street On Parade has been reporting for the past six months on a series of tragic, sudden deaths of Information Technology workers at JPMorgan. Now coming to the fore are stories of relentless prosecutions of Wall Street’s IT workers by Manhattan District Attorney, Cyrus Vance. Bloomberg News reports today that Vance is engaged in at least four prosecutions of Wall Street workers over theft of computer code or other intellectual property. Bestselling author, Michael Lewis, devoted a significant part of his latest book, Flash Boys, to the prosecution of Sergey Aleynikov over alleged stolen computer code. Aleynikov had been working for Goldman Sachs when he received an offer to move to a hedge fund and build a system from scratch. Aleynikov accepted the offer but agreed to stay at Goldman for six weeks to train his colleagues. (That does not seem like the action … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: July 16, 2014 Yesterday, Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen delivered her Semiannual Monetary Policy Report to the Senate Banking Committee. Yellen deftly maneuvered questions on slack in the job market, asset bubbles on Wall Street, and assorted digs at the explosion of the Fed’s balance sheet to over $4 trillion as a result of quantitative easing. When it finally came to the turn of the last Senator on the docket to quiz Yellen, Senator Elizabeth Warren, the Fed Chair gave her a big, warm smile at the beginning of the questioning, likely figuring she was about to steal home and get big kudos for her performance back at the Fed. Things didn’t go as planned. Senator Warren has apparently been looking at the bare bones 35-pages released to the public for the various “living wills” or wind-down plans if a systemically important (too-big-to-fail) bank gets into trouble … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: July 15, 2014  Yesterday, the U.S. Department of Justice announced its long anticipated $7 billion settlement with Wall Street mega bank, Citigroup, over its sale of toxic mortgage-backed bonds to investors, which included pensions, charities, cities, states, hospitals and FDIC-insured banks and others. The Justice Department informed us that it had collected “nearly 25 million documents” for this one investigation. The material facts the Department of Justice released to the public in its skimpy 9-page Statement of Facts (SOF) set a new low for bare bones disclosures. Instead of Appendix 1 being filled with incriminating emails or whistleblower letters proving Citigroup’s intent to defraud, it was instead a meaningless listing of deal names which tell the public absolutely nothing. Why would a serious law enforcement agency release such a worthless document to the public? To grasp exactly what is going on here, one need look no further … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 8, 2014 Serious observers of Wall Street are increasingly asking this question: could a group of trading venues with giant pools of capital, operating in the dark, using high-speed algorithms and artificial intelligence that has a massive historical database and gets smarter with each micro-second trade — effectively own the stock market. Today, we take a look at the massive trading control exercised by just five Wall Street firms. JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup jointly control trillions of dollars in commercial bank deposits with thousands of branch bank buildings stretching across the United States scooping up the life savings of everyday Joes who have no clue these are also the Masters of the Universe on Wall Street. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley also own FDIC insured banks. Goldman Sachs Bank USA, as of March 31, 2014, has $104.7 billion in assets; … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: July 7, 2014 On June 2 of this year, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), a self-regulator of Wall Street’s broker-dealers, dropped a bombshell. For the first time, FINRA released trading data for Wall Street’s dark pools – unregistered stock exchanges that the SEC recklessly allows to trade stocks without making the bids and offers public, along with many other details. The bombshell, that mainstream business media has yet to comprehend, was that the same mega Wall Street banks whose share prices crashed in the 2008 financial crisis are today not only running dark pools for stock trading but they’re trading the stock of their own corporate parents – to the tune of tens of millions of shares a week. Those Wall Street banks include JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America Merrill Lynch and Citigroup. What could possibly go wrong in this arrangement? Two days after Franklin D. … Continue reading →