Search Results for: JPMorgan

By Pam Martens: May 13, 2014 Variety reports that Sony Pictures is close to snagging the movie rights to the new book by Michael Lewis, “Flash Boys,” which builds the case that high frequency trading firms and Wall Street mega banks are conspiring with U.S. stock exchanges to rig the market against the average investor and the pension funds holding their meager retirement benefits. If Sony is smart, it will delay release of the film until it can replicate some real-life courtroom drama from the epic battle that is likely to ensue from a class-action lawsuit in the matter that was filed last month on April 18 in Federal Court in the Southern District of New York. The plaintiff in the lawsuit has elicited snickers from the moneyed crowd on Wall Street. It was filed on behalf of the city of Providence, Rhode Island, an area founded in 1636 that … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: May 7, 2014 There is one key thing you need to know from the get-go about bank examiner Carmen Segarra’s Federal whistleblower lawsuit over being fired for her finding that Goldman Sach’s had no firm wide conflict of interests policy and landing in a Federal courtroom with even worse conflicts: this kind of McJustice has been tolerated in the Federal Court for the Southern District of New York for at least the past 20 years. Segarra was a bank examiner with a law degree at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, one of Wall Street’s key regulators, who charged in a Federal lawsuit filed in October 2013 that she was told to change her negative examination of Goldman Sachs by colleagues, who also obstructed and interfered with her investigation. When she refused to alter her findings, she was terminated in retaliation and escorted from the Fed … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: May 6, 2014 It appears that U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder would like to change the subject from “stock market’s rigged” by our own U.S. stock exchanges and U.S. banks as asserted by bestselling author Michael Lewis on 60 Minutes on March 30 to a different subject involving “tax evasion” by Swiss and other foreign banks. In a clear sign that the Department of Justice and Holder plan to launch a public relations offensive with a trail of crumbs leading away from U.S. banks, yesterday the DOJ released a video of Holder asserting that no bank is too big to jail. That comes on the heels in the past few days of multiple media outlets reporting that Holder may be close to a guilty plea and more than a $1 billion fine against the large Swiss bank, Credit Suisse, over facilitating tax evasion by Americans. That Holder … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: April 29, 2014 Mary Jo White, the Chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, will appear before the House Financial Services Committee this morning at 10 a.m. to boast about the past year’s accomplishments at the SEC and possibly handle a few queries about the growing public perception that stock markets are rigged.  White’s appearance before a Congressional panel comes at a time when the SEC is undergoing a serious discrediting of its oversight of Wall Street. Earlier this month, James Kidney, an SEC trial attorney who retired at the end of March, unleashed a firestorm of negative attention on morale inside the SEC. In a March 27 retirement speech, Kidney criticized upper management for policing “the broken windows on the street level” while ignoring the “penthouse floors.” Kidney blamed the demoralization at the agency on its revolving door to Wall Street as the best and brightest … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 28, 2014 It doesn’t get any more Orwellian than this: Wall Street mega banks crash the U.S. financial system in 2008. Hundreds of thousands of financial industry workers lose their jobs. Then, beginning late last year, a rash of suspicious deaths start to occur among current and former bank employees.  Next we learn that four of the Wall Street mega banks likely hold over $680 billion face amount of life insurance on their workers, payable to the banks, not the families. We ask their Federal regulator for the details of this life insurance under a Freedom of Information Act request and we’re told the information constitutes “trade secrets.” According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the life expectancy of a 25 year old male with a Bachelor’s degree or higher as of 2006 was 81 years of age. But in the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: April 24, 2014 If one tallies up the members of President Obama’s cabinet who played a role in crashing a bank before coming to help him govern the country or worked for a major law firm serving Wall Street before being hand-picked by the President to head up the bodies charged with investigating Wall Street, the Executive Branch begins to feel a lot like Wall Street West. That might explain why so many fellow Americans feel like Wall Street is running (and ruining and rigging) the country. Is the President naïve or being maneuvered by the invisible hand? We were asking the same kind of question on May 6, 2008 during the President’s first campaign for the Presidency: “We are asked to believe that those kindly white executives at all the biggest Wall Street firms, which rank in the top 20 donors to the Obama presidential campaign, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: April 16, 2014 As far as we can tell from his online bio, George Melloan has never worked a day inside a Wall Street firm – at least not in the past half century since that time has been spent writing or editing for the Wall Street Journal. But that small detail does not in any way inhibit Melloan from telling those of us who had long careers inside the belly of the beast how we should revise our thinking about what we saw and heard with our own eyes and ears. Michael Lewis, Yves Smith, Frank Partnoy, Gretchen Morgenson, Greg Smith, Nomi Prins (all with a strong foundational basis for their writings from having worked on Wall Street) apparently need to be set straight by Melloan’s outsider views. Nomi Prins has just come under the sharp pen of Melloan in a  Wall Street Journal review of … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: April 15, 2014 In the past two years, two of the most senior, long-tenured and talented women at JPMorgan, Ina Drew and Blythe Masters, have bid adieu to the bank and its CEO, Jamie Dimon, under less than ideal circumstances. Questions are now emerging as to whether Dimon required that these senior supervisors hold proper industry licenses for the work they performed for the bank. Ina Drew, the former head of the Chief Investment Office, who supervised the traders responsible for losing $6.2 billion of the bank’s deposits in exotic derivatives trading in London, resigned from the firm over that firestorm on May 14, 2012. Drew had been with JPMorgan and its predecessor banks for 30 years. In Drew’s testimony before the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations on March 15, 2013, Drew told the hearing panel that beginning in 1999, she “oversaw the management of the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: April 14, 2014 Since bestselling author Michael Lewis appeared on 60 Minutes on March 30 to promote his new book, “Flash Boys,” and explained how the U.S. stock market is rigged; and Brad Katsuyama, the head of IEX, an electronic trading platform who plays a central role in the Lewis book, did the same on CNBC a few days later, the debate has gone viral. But Lewis and Katsuyama were not the first to blow the whistle on rigged U.S. stock markets. Sal Arnuk and Joseph Saluzzi, Wall Street insiders and co-founders of Themis Trading LLC literally wrote the book on “Broken Markets” in 2012 and have been exposing details of the rigging  on their blog ever since. Wall Street Journal reporter, Scott Patterson, mapped out the exotic and corrupt order types permitted by the stock exchanges to fleece the little guy in his 2012 book, “Dark … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: April 3, 2014 Michael Lewis is getting a dose of the backlash typically reserved for Wall Street whistleblowers. To judge from the reaction to his new book, “Flash Boys,” which lays out how the stock market is rigged by high frequency traders, you’d think that his charge that the U.S. stock market has been corrupted is the fanciful musing of an unhinged mind. Lewis underwent a prosecutorial style interview on CNBC; Tweeters charged him with assorted evils; the Wall Street Journal quickly ran an OpEd titled “High-Frequency Hyperbole” in which Clifford Asness and Michael Mendelson from hedge fund AQR Capital – the ultimate in trustworthy sources — attempted to move folks along, nothing to see here, with the emphatic proclamation that “The stock market isn’t rigged…” The cold, hard facts backed by 80 years of copious documentation, like cancelled checks from the 1930s’ Senate hearings, where business … Continue reading →