Search Results for: JPMorgan

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 4, 2020 ~ U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell have apparently never walked down a Main Street in America. We make that statement because there is a huge disconnect between what’s really located on a typical Main Street and what’s in the bailout program they’ve designed and are calling the Main Street Lending Program (MSLP). Americans need to sit up and pay attention to what’s going on here because the U.S. Treasury has committed $75 billion of taxpayers’ money to support this program under the illusion that it’s going to mom and pop operations on a typical Main Street in America. That initial $75 billion will be levered up to $750 billion under the Fed’s ability to create money out of thin air, with taxpayers eating the first $75 billion of losses. Once the loans are originated by … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 22, 2020 ~ When the history books of this era are finally written, this will go down as a time when regulators allowed a no-law zone to be drawn around Wall Street. As the Federal Reserve Bank of New York is using taxpayer money to buy up junk bonds to shore up the sagging balance sheets of the behemoth banks on Wall Street and making ¼ of one percent interest loans to those banks against tanking stocks as collateral, those same Wall Street banks are trading their own bank’s stock in their own thinly-regulated internal stock exchanges known as Dark Pools. It simply can’t get any crazier than this — and yet somehow it always does in this unprecedented era. On June 2, 2014, to stem public outrage over claims of rigged markets, FINRA, the self-regulator and good buddy of Wall Street that … Continue reading →

“This begs the question: did the U.S. have a Wall Street banking crisis similar to 2008 long before there was a pandemic crisis?”  By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 15, 2020 ~  From 3 to 4 p.m. on Wednesday, February 19 of this year, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome (Jay) Powell met in the anteroom to his office in Washington, D.C. with Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase. Adding to the unusual nature of this meeting, the Chief Financial Officer of JPMorgan Chase, Jennifer Piepszak, had traveled with Dimon from New York to Washington, D.C. to attend this meeting. During the entire month of February, Powell met with no other CEO or CFO of any other Wall Street mega bank. We obtained this information from a review of the Fed Chairman’s daily calendar. The meeting came one day after Reuters reported a “sweeping reshuffle” at JPMorgan’s investment bank … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 5, 2020 ~ According to the Uniform Bank Performance Report for December 31, 2019 at the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC), JPMorgan Chase, whose Chairman and CEO, Jamie Dimon, has perpetually bragged about its “fortress balance sheet,” has $2.3 trillion in exposure on its balance sheet and $2.9 trillion in off-balance sheet exposure. The off-balance sheet exposure includes things like credit card lines of credit that have been issued but not tapped as of December 31, 2019; corporate standby letters of credits that have been issued but not yet tapped; securitized assets that have been sold with recourse back to JPMorgan Chase’s balance sheet; real estate loans committed but not yet funded; and a staggering $1.2 trillion in credit derivatives – the same instruments that brought on an FBI probe and congressional investigations of the bank in 2012 and cost the bank … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 29, 2020 ~ Warren Buffett is credited with the quote: “Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.” Friday’s closing prices among some of the heavily interconnected mega Wall Street banks and insurance companies known to be counterparties to Wall Street’s derivatives appeared to show who’s swimming naked in the realm of derivatives – naked meaning who has sold derivative protection (gone short the risk) on something that is blowing up. As the chart above shows, the S&P 500 stock index (SPX) closed with a loss of 3.37 percent while the following three stocks closed with more than double that percentage of loss: Deutsche Bank was down by 7.44 percent; JPMorgan shed 7.12 percent while AIG was off by 7.27 percent. When the Federal Reserve needs to create a hodgepodge of  secretive Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs) and run … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 22, 2020 ~ According to the most recent report from the regulator of national banks, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), JPMorgan Chase has exposure to $1.2 trillion in Credit Default Swaps while Citibank has exposure to $1.76 trillion for a combined total of $2.96 trillion as of September 30, 2019. According to the same report, the total exposure to Credit Default Swaps among all national banks in the U.S. is $3.7 trillion – meaning that just these two banks are responsible for 80 percent of that exposure. As of this past Friday, JPMorgan Chase had lost 39.3 percent of its common equity capital in the past five weeks while Citigroup, parent of Citibank, had lost 51.7 percent. That left JPMorgan Chase with just $256.68 billion in market cap versus Citigroup’s meager $79.86 billion. One of our readers emailed us … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 13, 2020 ~ The Federal Reserve Board of Governors has acknowledged to Wall Street On Parade that it has 233 documents that might shed some light on why JPMorgan Chase was allowed by the Fed to draw down $158 billion of the reserves it held at the Fed last year, creating a liquidity crisis in the overnight loan market according to sources on Wall Street. After taking four months to respond to what should have been a 20-business day turnaround on our Freedom of Information Act request, the Federal Reserve denied our FOIA in its entirety. (Our earlier request to the New York Fed resulted in the same kind of stonewalling. See The New York Fed Is Keeping JPMorgan’s Secrets Close to Its Chest.) The Wall Street liquidity crisis forced the Federal Reserve, beginning on September 17 of last year, to begin making … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 6, 2020 ~ Yesterday, Bloomberg News reporters Tom Schoenberg and Liam Vaughan broke the story that JPMorgan Chase is under a criminal probe by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) over charges of rigging gold, silver and other precious metals markets. Six traders who worked on the precious metals desk at JPMorgan Chase have been indicted thus far but this is the first report that the bank itself is also under a criminal investigation. This marks the fourth criminal probe of the bank in the past 8 years by the U.S. Department of Justice with the bank pleading guilty to three felony counts in two of the prior criminal investigations. Throughout this serial crime wave, the Board of Directors of JPMorgan Chase has kept Jamie Dimon in his seat as Chairman and CEO. Despite knowing that three of the bank’s traders had been … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 15, 2020 ~ The New York Fed is back to subsidizing billions of dollars in profits at Wall Street’s trading houses, just as it did during the financial crisis. Yesterday, JPMorgan Chase reported that its profits for the quarter ending December 31, 2019 hit an all-time record. (The bank has been around for more than a century, so that’s saying something.) The quarterly profits were $8.52 billion – for the same three-month period in which the New York Fed has been flooding unnamed Wall Street trading houses with hundreds of billions of dollars each week in super cheap loans. The so-called “repo loans” by the New York Fed are being made at a fraction of where the free market would price loans to these Wall Street trading houses. On September 17, 2019, the first day the Fed began this open money spigot to … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 7, 2020 ~ Federally-insured banks are not supposed to be making large speculations in the stock market. They are supposed to be using bank deposits to make loans to worthy businesses and consumers to help grow the U.S. economy and keep the United States competitive on the global stage. But according to the official reports from the federal regulator of national banks, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), since December 31, 2010 the federally-insured bank owned by the monster trading house of JPMorgan Chase (JPMorgan Chase Bank NA) has increased its equity (stock) derivative bets from $337 billion to $2.4 trillion as of its latest report for the quarter ending September 30, 2019. (The data is found in a graph titled “Table 10” in the appendix of each of the quarterly reports published by the OCC.)  During the period that … Continue reading →