Search Results for: JPMorgan

By Pam Martens: June 5, 2013  It’s not that Congress actually believes that it has passed legislation to rein in the Wall Street frauds and abuses that crashed the largest economy in the world. It’s that Congress desperately wants Americans to think it has Wall Street under control – not the other way around. That’s why there is going to be a lot of screaming and phone slamming on Capitol Hill today. Katy Burne has busted one more Wall Street illusion today with her piece on the front page of the Wall Street Journal that offers up this headline: “One of Wall Street’s Riskiest Bets Returns.”  According to Burne, two of the largest Wall Street firms are assembling Synthetic Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs). Adding to the Congressional angst will be the name of one of the firms involved and the location of the bankers putting the deals together: JPMorgan and London.  That … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: May 13, 2013  Did you just find out your 401(k) is leaking 8 percent in a hodgepodge of Wall Street management fees, transactions costs, sales commissions, and marketing schemes. Maybe you did the math and realized your account value, without your new additions, is still where it was in 2007. Or did you just check BrightScope and find out that your 401(k) is so abysmal that you’ll need 18 additional years of work to make up for the $215,500 in lost retirement savings. Or maybe you tuned in to the April 23 Frontline documentary on PBS to learn that it is quite possible for Wall Street to gobble up two-thirds of your retirement savings in your 401(k) while keeping you in the dark for the next 50 years. If so, there’s no reason to seethe in silence. The U.S. Department of Labor wants to hear from you … Continue reading →

 By Pam Martens: May 7, 2013 Yesterday, New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said his office would bring suit against Bank of America and Wells Fargo for “flagrant” violations of last year’s National Mortgage Settlement – a deal signed onto by 49 state attorneys general which promised to reform the shady mortgage servicing practices of five of the largest mortgage lenders in the U.S. The question that arises is why the Monitor of the National Mortgage Settlement had not already brought a lawsuit in Federal Court to stop the violations. During his press conference yesterday announcing the lawsuit, Schneiderman said his office has logged 210 complaints against Wells Fargo for violations of the settlement and 129 involving Bank of America. Those figures, however, are dwarfed by the findings of Joseph A. Smith, Jr., the man put in charge of monitoring the settlement and bringing enforcement actions to the Federal … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: May 6, 2013  U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, whose loan dealings with New York University and acceptance of $940,000 in bonus money from taxpayer bailout funds paid to the insolvent Citigroup in early 2009 rendered him a scandalous choice for the high treasury post in the Obama administration, is fully living up to his past reputation.  Last Thursday, May 2, the U.S. Treasury released its “Daily Treasury Guidance” which lets the public know what the U.S. Treasury Secretary will be doing each day on behalf of the taxpayer who is paying his salary and on whose behalf he is supposed to be working.  The guidance for last Thursday noted that Secretary Lew would be departing Washington for New York in the afternoon “where he will attend a roundtable with business leaders hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) to discuss the state of the U.S. and global economies. This … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: April 23, 2013 Yesterday, Mary Jo White, the new Chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, announced that a law partner from the firm she just left, Debevoise & Plimpton LLP, would become the new Co-Director of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement – the unit that decides who gets prosecuted and who gets a pass. In making the announcement that Andrew Ceresney of Debevoise & Plimpton will share the post with the Acting Director, George Canellos, White called Ceresney a “former prosecutor.” That hardly does justice to the cozy ties between Ceresney and Wall Street. (Ceresney worked for the U.S. Attorney’s office in the Southern District of New York in a prior career but has been employed at Debevoise since 2003.) This time last year, Ceresney was basking in the glow of a herculean accomplishment for JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Bank of America and Ally. While … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: April 18, 2013 The past week has delivered revelation after revelation suggesting that the foreclosure frauds perpetrated against the American homeowner by the too-big-to-fail (or prosecute) banks, have been deviously matched with a corrupted settlement that has members of Senate hearings shaking their heads in astonishment. Yesterday brought the latest example of Federal bank regulators serving as lapdogs of their charges. The Senate Banking Committee’s Subcommittee on Housing, Transportation and Community Development held a hearing titled: “Helping Homeowners Harmed by Foreclosures: Ensuring Accountability and Transparency in Foreclosure Reviews, Part II.” Senator Merkley delivered the fireworks of the session. Early this year, when the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and Federal Reserve Board (Fed) announced that they were abruptly halting the Independent Foreclosure Reviews they had ordered 13 banks and mortgage servicers to have conducted by independent consultants, the party line was that it was … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: April 12, 2013  There is only one thing more Kafkaesque than the ongoing Wall Street frauds and that is watching a live United States Senate investigation of a diabolical settlement the banks themselves concocted to repay the victims of their own fraud. Such was the case yesterday when Senators Sherrod Brown, Jack Reed, and Elizabeth Warren grilled regulators from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and Federal Reserve along with outside consultants over allowing banks to hand pick the consultants to do their foreclosure reviews, negotiate confidentiality agreements with them and pay them directly. Hundreds of millions of dollars in checks from the Foreclosure Review settlement will start going out today, eventually topping $3.6 billion in the cash portion of the settlement, and yet it was revealed during yesterday’s Senate hearing that it was the actual banks that engaged in the illegal foreclosure actions that tallied up … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: April 11, 2013  If President Obama is trying to make it clear that he reports to the 1 percent, not the average Americans who elected him, he’s earning an A+ on his report card.  At 6:46 p.m. last evening, the White House sent out the President’s schedule for today. One item on the agenda reads as follows: “Later in the morning, the President will meet with members of the Financial Services Forum as part of the organization’s daylong Spring Meeting. This meeting in the Roosevelt Room is closed press.” There is no mention in this press announcement that the President will be meeting with the CEOs of the too-big-to-fail banks – certainly a detail worthy of the public’s attention. Early this morning, the Wall Street Journal’s link on the front page of its web site to its story on the President’s meet-up with members of the Financial Services … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: April 5, 2013  Last evening, the U.S. Senate’s Subcommittee on Financial Institutions and Consumer Protection, part of the Senate Banking Committee, announced the details of its much anticipated hearing slated for next Thursday, April 11, to peel away the multi layers of darkness surrounding the government’s hastily scrapped plan for in-depth, “independent” reviews of bank foreclosure files that were to make victims of foreclosure abuse whole.  The Senate Subcommittee, which includes Elizabeth Warren, Sherrod Brown, and Jeff Merkley – who have sufficiently removed their rose-colored glasses regarding continuing Wall Street corruption to function as useful investigators – will focus on the role of the outside consultants that were hired and paid directly by banks to conduct what were promised to be unbiased reviews. The hearing is titled Outsourcing Accountability? Examining the Role of Independent Consultants and is slated for 10 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. in the Dirksen Senate Office … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: April 2, 2013  In addition to collecting her $250,000 for sitting on the Board of General Electric, former SEC Chair Mary Schapiro, who left the SEC post in December, will be hanging her shingle at Promontory Financial Group LLC as a managing director. The firm has not disclosed the amount of her compensation.  Promontory’s founder, Eugene Ludwig, was formerly the head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) from 1993 to 1998. The OCC is the primary regulator of national banks. Before becoming head of the OCC, Ludwig was a partner at the corporate law firm, Covington & Burling, the firm where former head of the criminal division of the Justice Department, Lanny  Breuer, returned earlier this year. The Justice Department has been heavily criticized for failing to prosecute Wall Street banks or their top executives.  The U.S. Attorney General, Eric Holder, also hails from … Continue reading →