Search Results for: JPMorgan

By Pam Martens: September 30, 2013 On September 15, 2013, CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press to reminisce on the five-year anniversary of the Wall Street crash. After host David Gregory remarked that only 14 percent of Americans had a positive view of Wall Street, Bartiromo donned her vintage Wall Street p.r. hat and reframed the problem: Bartiromo: “We need to get beyond the conversation of is Wall Street evil, are the bankers evil and causing pain; and toward the conversation of, how do you create sustainable economic growth? That will answer the issue of inequality. Because with growth comes jobs.” There are three structural reasons we can’t get past the conversation that Wall Street is evil — the first being that it is evil under its current form and the public is reminded of just how evil on a weekly basis with the revelation of its … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: September 25, 2013 The September 23, 2013 cover of Time Magazine was adorned with the iconic Wall Street bull in a party hat, with celebratory confetti floating from the sky. In sleek bold type, Time declared, “How Wall Street Won – Five Years After the Crash, It Could Happen All Over Again.” President Obama was so nonplused with the cover and the dire prophecy that he took to the airwaves, challenging the assertion with George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s This Week. Here’s the exchange from the official ABC transcript: GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: This– this weekend, fifth anniversary of the collapse of Lehman.  A lot of people say that was the acceleration. PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Yeah. GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: Accelerated the financial crisis.  Five years out, let’s take stock.  You know, I’m lookin’ at the cover of Time Magazine this week.  It says, “How Wall Street Won.”  And we’ve got polls … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: September 24, 2013 Yesterday, the National Credit Union Administration (NCUA) filed suit in U.S. District Court for the District of Kansas against 13 foreign banks and U.S. based JPMorgan Chase, charging the group with violating federal and state anti-trust laws through their manipulation of interest rates in the setting of the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR), a benchmark used to set rates on everything from student loans to interest rate swaps to adjustable rate mortgages. NCUA, the regulator of U.S. credit unions, alleges the defendants conspired to achieve multiple benefits for themselves to the detriment of their customers and investors. According to the complaint, the motives were to suppress LIBOR in order to benefit their trades that were tied to LIBOR, to reduce their borrowing costs, to deceive the market as to the true state of the banks’ creditworthiness, and to deprive their counterparties of the level … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: August 29, 2013  The Public Banking Institute has released a new video making serious claims, backed by graphs and government documents, that the largest Wall Street banks are an unsafe choice for the savings of moms, pops and public payrolls. Citing a December 10, 2012 jointly approved plan between the U.S. Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and the Bank of England, which resides on the FDIC’s federal web site, the organization says depositors in the U.S. could see portions of their deposits confiscated, similar to what happened in Cyprus, should there be another Wall Street collapse as occurred in 2008.  The first question, of course, is why the U.S. government is negotiating its banking policy with the United Kingdom instead of the U.S. Congress. The obvious answer is that global banks, now allowed to troll the planet in search of the next high-flying derivatives trade, must harmonize … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: August 28, 2013  One day after terrorists set off a bomb at the Boston Marathon leaving a tragic trail of senseless human suffering, the U.S. House of Representatives held a scheduled hearing to debate another form of terrorism – the kind of economic terrorism that gripped the United States from 2008 to 2010 and lingers today in the form of 46 million Americans living in poverty, mass underemployment, stagnating wages, a shaky housing market, tepid GDP growth and ballooning national debt. The House was debating the “grave threat” to the Nation posed by the too-big-to-fail banks. You likely didn’t hear about the hearing because the media was focused on the Boston Marathon and its more easily understood, visually shocking form of terrorism.  On April 16, 2013, members of the House Oversight and Investigation Subcommittee of the Financial Services Committee wanted to learn more about two words, “grave … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: August 27, 2013  George Melloan has done a deep disservice to the ever-shrinking pool of ethical investigative writers covering Wall Street, civic-minded prosecutors, and to the underpaid but dedicated career regulators overseeing the financial markets. (No, the revolving door from Wall Street to Washington hasn’t quite killed off all that is good.)  Yesterday, Melloan penned an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal that was so Koch-esque, so preposterously skewed, and so utterly lacking in factual basis that it must be called out. Melloan makes the claim that the big banks aren’t doing anything more egregious than they have done in the past and the growing charges of fraud are the product of overly zealous regulators, “encouraged by the Obama administration” to blame the nation’s economic ills “on the rich, Wall Street, moneybags bankers, deal makers like Mitt Romney or almost anyone else who still wears a suit … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: August 21, 2013 The last 30 days have been pretty much the summer from hell for the Obama administration’s efforts to shore up confidence that its policing of Wall Street is producing results. Still under multiple investigations for rigging the interest rate benchmark known as Libor, we learned late last month that Wall Street’s largest firms have also gained effective control of the London Metal Exchange and are causing financial damage to the economy by hoarding aluminum in metal warehouses. On top of that, JPMorgan recently paid a $410 million fine for rigging electricity markets in California and the Midwest while two of JPMorgan’s traders were just criminally indicted for their role in the infamous London Whale matter where $6.2 billion of bank deposits were lost in a wild trading scheme. Certainly no slouch, Goldman Sachs is holding up its end in the busting of public confidence … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: August 20, 2013 The White House issued a statement yesterday on the President’s meeting with the federal agencies that regulate Wall Street. Curiously, the phrase used to describe the agencies was “independent regulators.” The President’s Deputy Press Secretary, Josh Earnest, held a press briefing with reporters yesterday, taking questions on the meeting. In that briefing, Earnest referred to the regulators as “independent” seven times. If the President now finds it necessary to attempt to brainwash the American public through endless repetition of the word “independent” to shore up sagging public doubt that there are any real cops on the beat when it comes to policing Wall Street, he has no one to blame but himself. When President Obama appointed Mary Jo White to head the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Jack Lew for U.S. Treasury Secretary, and has floated the idea for weeks that Larry Summers could … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: August 19, 2013  On January 16 of this year, Richard Fisher, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, delivered a speech on the continuing threat to the U.S. economy posed by the too-big-to-fail banks. Fisher said: “I submit that these institutions, as a result of their privileged status, exact an unfair tax upon the American people. Moreover, they interfere with the transmission of monetary policy and inhibit the advancement of our nation’s economic prosperity.”  As part of his talk, Fisher presented a chart showing the Frankenbank nature of the five largest banks in the U.S. – JPMorgan, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and Morgan Stanley. Cumulatively, these five banks are the parent to 19,654 subsidiaries or affiliates while their nondeposit liabilities total over $4.1 trillion – a figure equal to 26.3 percent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the country.  On July 23, 2013, the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: August 13, 2013  Qu’est-ce que c’est? Frenchmen?  In the quintessentially American male testosterone epicenter known as Wall Street, Frenchmen are dropping like flies. Not so much the American CEOs in Wall Street’s corner offices. The only handcuffs these guys are seeing are the golden ones.  Fabrice Tourre, the 34-year old Goldman Sachs salesman from an elite educational background in France, was found guilty of six counts of securities fraud in a Manhattan jury trial that ended 12 days ago. The case was a civil suit brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission. One of those counts was for “aiding and abetting” Goldman Sachs in the fraud. Goldman Sachs did not stand trial, in the technical sense although it certainly has in the court of public opinion, because it settled its charges with a payment of $550 million. Not only did the corporation not stand trial, but neither … Continue reading →