Search Results for: JPMorgan

By Pam Martens: July 1, 2014 You know there is something different in the air when Rand Paul is railing against “fat cats” and a fat cat is worrying aloud about pitchforks in Politico Magazine.  It all harkens back to one of the greatest grassroots awareness campaigns in history, variously called Occupy Wall Street or “We Are the 99 Percent.” In a messy, tarp-filled outpost in Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan, the message of enforced inequality via the 99 percent brand was plastered across posters, hand-made t-shirts, street puppets, and even flashed onto skyscrapers in a creative blend of marketing savvy and social activism. From there, it tweeted around the world. This was creative destruction at its finest: calling out a failed system of crony capitalism that was only working for the 1 percent while creatively protesting for change in the streets – the only method left since the system … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 30, 2014 A man with a long history of keeping big bank secrets safe from the public’s prying eyes has denied the appeal filed by Wall Street On Parade to obtain specifics about the worker deaths upon which JPMorgan Chase pockets the life insurance money each year. According to its financial filings, as of December 31, 2013, JPMorgan held $17.9 billion in Bank-Owned Life Insurance (BOLI) assets, a dark corner of the insurance market that allows banks to take out life insurance policies on their workers, secretly pocket the death benefits, and receive generous tax perks subsidized by the U.S. taxpayer. According to experts, JPMorgan could potentially hold upwards of $179 billion of life insurance in force on its current and former workers, based on the size of its BOLI assets. The man who denied Wall Street On Parade’s appeal is Daniel P. … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 25, 2014 The tabloids in London are having a field day today with headlines calling Bank of England Governor, Mark Carney, an “unreliable boyfriend” – a remark made yesterday by MP Pat McFadden during a hearing of the Treasury Select Committee of Parliament over the mixed signals Carney is sending the market about the timing of interest rate hikes by the BOE. (Carney, a Canadian and former head of the Bank of Canada, where he masterfully steered the Canadian economy through the financial crisis, might be forgiven for alternately thinking he’s on a bad blind date in his current assignment.) Carney suffered a withering grilling yesterday over a speech he delivered on June 12 in which he said “There’s already great speculation about the exact timing of the first rate hike and this decision is becoming more balanced. It could happen sooner than … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: June 16, 2014  After Senator Carl Levin and members of the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations give their opening remarks tomorrow, the next thing you will hear are these words or something akin to them:  “Rule number 6 of the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations requires that all witnesses appearing before the Subcommittee testify under oath.” You might think that would be the rule at every Senate hearing involving Wall Street’s serial malfeasants, but, shockingly, it’s not. When the men on Panel Two finally take their places, there could be some sweating going on when those right hands are raised. This isn’t just any ole subcommittee; it’s the subcommittee that issued a 2013 scathing 307-page report on JPMorgan’s ethical and legal lapses in the London Whale derivatives trading scandal along with 98 exhibits including deeply incriminating emails. Equally sweat-producing, the subcommittee uses its subpoena power … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 12, 2014 Eric Cantor’s campaign may have eaten its way through $168,000 of steak dinners but big players on Wall Street are eating crow. Between 2000 and 2007, Goldman Sachs’ Chairman and CEO, Lloyd Blankfein, personally stuffed $73,500 into the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee to help elect Democrats to Federal office. But by 2012, Blankfein had decided that “Every Republican is Crucial” and gave just defeated Virginia Republican and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s leadership PAC by the same name $5,000 in 2012 and another $5,000 in 2013. In addition, Blankfein gave the Cantor Victory Fund $10,200 on December 6, 2013 according to receipts at the Federal Election Commission. In the 2013-2014 election cycle, Goldman Sachs’ employees and/or their family members gave a total of $88,500 to Cantor’s leadership PAC – which sluices money to Republican candidates around the country – and another … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: June 11, 2014 Wall Street On Parade has been reporting for some time now that much of Wall Street’s past and current history has up and disappeared – either at the hands of high speed shredders on orders from the SEC, or through Courts sealing documents, or Wall Street’s private justice system preventing access to hearings, non-disparagement contracts when you change your job on Wall Street, or critical pieces of Wall Street history just go missing and no one can find out exactly why. Now we learn that a vital book on Wall Street’s history had vanished until an NYU Professor made it his mission to return it to the public’s hands. In 2011, Darcy Flynn, an SEC lawyer, told Congressional investigators and the SEC Inspector General that for at least 18 years, the SEC had been shredding documents and emails related to its investigations — documents … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 3, 2014 On July 17, 1996, the U.S. Justice Department charged the biggest names on Wall Street, names like Merrill Lynch, JPMorgan and predecessor firms to Citigroup, with price fixing on the electronic stock market known as Nasdaq. The Justice Department felt the firms were so untrustworthy to make a fair electronic marketplace that as part of its settlement it required that some traders’ phone calls be tape recorded when making Nasdaq trades and it gave itself the right to randomly show up and listen in on the traders’ calls. The scandal made headlines for years and revealed that the price fixing had been going on under the unwatchful eye of regulators for more than a decade. Now, more than six years after the greatest Wall Street crash since 1929, the public is still learning stomach-churning details about the lingering effects of de-regulating … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 27, 2014 Last week, the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) released a trove of some 4,000 documents it obtained under the Freedom of Information Act showing that the movements of the mostly peaceful participants in the Occupy Wall Street protests were subjected to an “enormous spying and monitoring apparatus” that included coordination between the Pentagon, FBI, Department of Homeland Security, local police, private security contractors and corporate interests. Increasingly, Americans’ time-honored First Amendment rights to peacefully assemble and dissent are playing out as open-season on protesters and mass arrests, followed by years of evidence destruction or tampering in court cases. As Wall Street On Parade perused the new documents from PCJF, one in particular raised red flags. Its subject line referred to the Occupy Wall Street movement as “Friggin Occupy” and it came from a veteran police officer. The PCJF is currently … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 21, 2014 There are lots of reasons to worry about America’s future. But one worry that we seldom hear discussed in any comprehensive way is the growing brand impairment resulting from the loss of Americans’ belief in their country’s sense of decency and the loss of credibility abroad from the too-big-to-discipline CEO – who, for better or worse, is acutely aligned with the corporate brand. Whether we like it or not, great corporate brands create jobs in America and tarnished brands result in job losses. There seems to be an intellectual disconnect in the thinking of the corporate Board of Directors who continue to lavish obscene pay on the discredited CEO and the reality that the corporate brand – the most valuable asset the corporation owns – is being severely diminished in the eyes of the consumer whose trust or distrust in that … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: May 15, 2014 Since Michael Lewis first uttered the immortal words on 60 Minutes on March 30 that “stock market’s rigged” through the willful collusion of exchanges, large broker dealers and high frequency traders, it has become clear that the public relations game plan of the regulators and self-regulators is to pray for a technology-challenged Congress and a gullible public. J. Bradley Bennett, Executive Vice President of Enforcement at FINRA, the industry’s self regulator, suggested that high frequency trading was no different than buying a first class ticket on an airplane. (Wall Street On Parade suggested that this is only true if one has also hijacked the plane and robbed the passengers in coach.) Next up was SEC Chair Mary Jo White who flatly told the House Financial Services Committee on April 29 that “the markets are not rigged” despite three books and dozens of research papers documenting … Continue reading →