Search Results for: JPMorgan

By Pam Martens: October 17, 2008 In 1897, when 8-year old Virginia O’Hanlon posed her Santa Claus query to the New York Sun, she received a heart-warming editorial response reassuring her that “Yes, Virginia…He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist….” Today, we hand our 8 year olds a $13 trillion national debt while our Congress hands Wall Street banksters the national purse without so much as a hearing to determine the cause of the debt collapse.  Worse still, the money is doled out to the very same individuals who leveraged their institutions to casino status. Americans are correctly outraged at the spectacle of U.S. crony capitalism crashing stock and bond markets around the globe while simultaneously watching the poster boys of crony capitalism on Monday, October 13, 2008  march up the granite steps of the United States Treasury building in their Armani shoes and heist a fresh … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: November 16, 2010 On President Obama’s first day in office on January 21, 2009, he issued an Open Government memo promising the American people a new era of transparency. On March 19, 2009, under the President’s orders, the Attorney General’s office issued detailed guidelines on how Federal agencies were to respond going forward to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.  The guidelines instructed the agencies as follows: “The key frame of reference for this new mind set is the purpose behind the FOIA. The statute is designed to open agency activity to the light of day. As the Supreme Court has declared: ‘FOIA is often explained as a means for citizens to know what their Government is up to.’ NARA v. Favish, 541 U.S. 157, 171 (2004) (quoting U.S. Department of Justice v. Reporters Comm. for Freedom of the Press, 489 U.S. 749, 773 (1989)…The President’s FOIA … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: 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 firms have used unregulated over-the-counter contracts to perform this risk transfer alchemy and funded their own company, Markit Group Ltd., to take the place of … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: January 21, 2008 The massive losses by big Wall Street firms, now topping those of the Great Depression in relative terms, have yet to be adequately explained. Wall Street power players are obfuscating and Congress is too embarrassed or frightened to ask, preferring to just throw money at the problem and hope it goes away. But as job losses and foreclosures mount and pensions and 401(k)s shrink, public policy measures to address the economic stresses require a full set of unembellished facts. The proof that Wall Street is giving mainstream media a stage-managed version of what went wrong begins with a strange revelation by Gary Crittenden, CFO of Citigroup, on the November 5, 2007 conference call where he discusses what have now become the largest losses in the firm’s 196-year history. Mr. Crittenden is asked by an analyst why the firm didn’t hedge its risk. Here’s his … Continue reading →