Search Results for: JPMorgan

By Pam Martens: October 21, 2009 The financial tsunami unleashed by Wall Street’s esurient alchemy of spinning toxic home mortgages into triple-A bonds, a process known as securitization, has set off its second round of financial tremors. After leaving mortgage investors, bank shareholders, and pension fiduciaries awash in losses and a large chunk of Wall Street feeding at the public trough, the full threat of this vast securitization machine and its unseen masters who push the levers behind a tightly drawn curtain is playing out in courtrooms across America. Three plain talking judges, in state courts in Massachusetts and Kansas, and a Federal Court in Ohio, have drilled down to the “straw man” aspect of securitization. The judges’ decisions have raised serious questions as to the legality of hundreds of thousands of foreclosures that have transpired as well as the legal standing of the subsequent purchasers of those homes, who … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: October 12, 2009 While the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) was receiving gut-wrenching documentation of predatory lending abuses at a unit of Citigroup, the Federal agency mandated to level the playing field for low income homeowners, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), was quietly awarding 19,968 mortgages of homeowners in distress to Citigroup to dispose of as it saw fit.  HUD legally became Citigroup’s joint venture partner in at least two of the deals, retaining a minority interest. On March 6, 2001, the FTC brought suit against Citigroup, CitiFinancial Credit Company and two firms it had acquired (Associates First Capital Corporation and Associates Corporation of North America) charging them with engaging in deceptive and illegal lending practices. The FTC had substantive evidence that a culture of incentivizing an aggressive sales force to pile predatory loans onto unsophisticated borrowers was an enshrined business model at Citigroup’s … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: October 5, 2009 A federal agency tasked with expanding the American dream of home ownership and affordable housing free from discrimination to people of modest means has been quietly moving a chunk of that role to Wall Street since 2002.  In a stealth partial privatization, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) farmed out its mandate of working with single family homeowners in trouble on their mortgages to the industry most responsible for separating people from their savings and creating an unprecedented wealth gap that renders millions unable to pay those mortgages. This industry also ranks as one of the most storied industries in terms of race discrimination.   Rounding out its dubious housing credentials, Wall Street is now on life support courtesy of the public purse known as TARP as a result of issuing trillions of dollars in miss-rated housing bonds and housing-related derivatives, many … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: August 31, 2009 The long-awaited investigative report by the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Inspector General on how the SEC bungled multiple investigations of Bernard Madoff is set for release this week. Unfortunately, according to media reports, the long suffering investing public will not receive the report until the SEC itself has had a chance to review it. The team that produced this report on one of the most long-running and convoluted frauds in the history of Wall Street included Inspector General H. David Kotz who came to the SEC-IG post in December 2007 after five years as Inspector General and Associate General Counsel for the Peace Corps. The Deputy Inspector General, Noelle Frangipane, also came to the SEC from the Peace Corps where she had served as Director of Policy and Public Information. This lack of Wall Street cronyism by the top two in the Inspector General’s … Continue reading →

In-depth research on public interest topics frequently ignored by corporate media. (For most recent reports, scroll to the end.) Maria Bartiromo and the Co-Branding of CNBC and Citigroup: February 2, 2007 The cozy nexus between CNBC and Citigroup, the company on which it is supposed to be providing objective reporting. Madoff and the SEC’s Revolving Door: August 31, 2009 …the background of the member of the team heading up the Inspector General’s Office of Investigations, J. David Fielder, should have sounded alarm bells to Congressional investigators. Wall Street Titans Use Aliases to Foreclose on Families: October 5, 2009 A federal agency tasked with expanding the American dream of home ownership and affordable housing free from discrimination to people of modest means has been quietly moving a chunk of that role to Wall Street since 2002.  In a stealth partial privatization, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) farmed out … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: August 3, 2009 As the newly appointed Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission prioritizes its agenda to investigate how a 200-year old system conceived to establish fair pricing and trading of stocks and bonds morphed into a rigged backroom casino of craps tables piled high with triple-A rated junk that crippled the world’s largest economy, they must place Wall Street’s private justice system at the top of their list for subpoenas. The rationale is as simple as this: —  there is only one industry in America bringing the country to its knees; —  there is only one industry in America which requires its workers to contractually relinquish their access to the courts as a condition of employment; —  look under that rock first for the thousands of industry whistleblowers who walked out of these kangaroo courts with gag orders, leaving behind their documents, placed under seal by colluding lawyers. … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: July 20, 2009 For the past 18 years, a motley mix of corporate law firms, Wall Street powerhouses and private justice providers have been serving up false testimony to the highest court of our land that mandatory arbitration is “inexpensive, fast and fair” and a proper substitute for the public court system.  And for 18 years a majority of the U.S. Supreme Court has been cozying up to these brazenly preposterous statements while gutting our Constitution’s Seventh Amendment guarantee to a jury trial.  In doing so, wittingly or unwittingly, the Supreme Court has aided and abetted the key linchpin of a wealth transfer system that has brought the nation to its knees. Today, everything from Wall Street brokerage accounts, employment contracts, credit cards, mortgages, even cell phone contracts have routinely removed the individual’s constitutional right to file a claim in court to seek redress of a grievance … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: November 13, 2008 Purge your mind for a moment about everything you’ve heard and read in the last decade about investing on Wall Street and think about the following business model: You take your hard earned retirement savings to a Wall Street firm and they tell you that as long as you “stay invested for the long haul” you can expect double digit annual returns. You never really know what your money is invested in because it’s pooled with other investors and comes with incomprehensible but legal looking prospectuses.  The heads of these Wall Street firms have been taking massive payouts for themselves, ranging from $160 million to $1 billion per CEO over a number of years. As long as new money keeps flooding in from newfangled accounts called 401(k)s, Roth IRAs, 529 plans for education savings, and hedge funds (each carrying ever greater restrictions for withdrawing your money and ever greater opacity) everything appears … Continue reading →

This section focuses on the role and secrecy of the Federal Reserve as lender of last resort to failing financial institutions during and after the 2008 crisis. The Fed’s Wall Street Dilemma: March 17, 2008 Americans learned two new truths last week from the Bush Administration’s version of Life’s Little Instruction Book: if you’re a Wall Street miscreant you’re thrown a lifeline; if you’re a Wall Street crime fighter you’re thrown a land mine. In the first effort, the Feds effectively handed a Federal Reserve ATM card to JPMorgan to funnel your tax dollars to the teetering Bear Stearns brokerage firm to address counterparty risks that have been building for at least 4 years as the Feds snoozed. Counterparty risk is the trillions of dollars of insurance contracts (credit default swaps and other derivatives) taken out by Wall Street firms on each other’s (counterparty) bonds, bundled mortgage and commercial debt (collateralized debt obligations). The … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: October 10, 2011 Videos are springing up across the internet showing uniformed members of the New York Police Department in white shirts (as opposed to the typical NYPD blue uniforms) pepper spraying and brutalizing peaceful, nonthreatening protestors attempting to take part in the Occupy Wall Street marches.  Corporate media are reporting that these white shirts are police supervisors.  Recently discovered documents suggest something else may be at work. If you’re a Wall Street behemoth, there are endless opportunities to privatize profits and socialize losses beyond collecting trillions of dollars in bailouts from taxpayers.  One of the ingenious methods that has remained below the public’s radar was started by the Rudy Giuliani administration in New York City in 1998.  It’s called the Paid Detail Unit and it allows the New York Stock Exchange and Wall Street corporations, including those repeatedly charged with crimes, to order up a flank … Continue reading →