Search Results for: JPMorgan

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 2, 2019 ~ Two notable things happened on Monday, September 16, 2019. Rates started to spike in the overnight loan (repo) market, reaching a high of 10 percent the next day and forcing the Federal Reserve to step in as a lender of last resort for the first time since the financial crisis. The Fed has had to intervene every business day since then with overnight loans, funneling hundreds of billions of dollars to its primary dealers, while also providing $150 billion in 14-day term loans to unnamed banks. The other notable thing to occur on September 16 was this: The largest bank in the United States, JPMorgan Chase, had its precious metals desk charged by the U.S. Department of Justice with being a criminal enterprise for approximately eight years as it rigged the prices of gold, silver and other precious metals. The … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 23, 2019 ~  WeWork’s business model isn’t workable. Everybody understands that except the Wall Street bank that has the most to lose if WeWork’s initial public offering (IPO) of its stock doesn’t move forward. That bank is JPMorgan Chase, one of the two main underwriters of the IPO, along with Goldman Sachs. WeWork’s business model is to take long-term leases in commercial office buildings and then sub-lease that space under short leases to small businesses, start-ups and freelancers – none of which are particularly known for their ability to pay rent in a downturn. WeWork is currently on the hook for more than $47 billion in long term leases while it has yet to figure out how to make a dime of profits. JPMorgan Chase is so interconnected with WeWork that to a number of minds WeWork looks like little more than a … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 16, 2019 ~ According to the amended prospectus filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission to alert the public to the thousands of warts with malignant possibilities sprouting out of the office rental company, WeWork, which plans to offer its shares to the public for the first time, JPMorgan Chase will receive something no other underwriter is getting in this deal: a cool $50 million extra as a “structuring fee.” On top of that, of course, the bank will also get the fat underwriting fees that the other banks involved in the IPO get. That’s just one of the many curious ways that JPMorgan Chase stands out in its relationship with WeWork. (The parent of WeWork, The We Company, is actually offering the shares to the public.) As it turns out, quite a few of JPMorgan Chase’s commercial real estate clients who have … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 5, 2019 ~ If your bank is under a criminal probe for potentially rigging gold and silver markets, it doesn’t help your case to have $50 million in fake gold bars sitting in your vaults. Nonetheless, this is what Reuters reported last week: “In the last three years, bars worth at least $50 million stamped with Swiss refinery logos, but not actually produced by those facilities, have been identified by all four of Switzerland’s leading gold refiners and found in the vaults of JPMorgan Chase & Co., one of the major banks at the heart of the market in bullion, said senior executives at gold refineries, banks and other industry sources.” Last month there was another bizarre story making the wires about JPMorgan Chase owning a ship that was raided and found to contain 20 tons of cocaine. (See With Three Felony Counts … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 20, 2019 ~ Two of Wall Street’s crony regulators announced today that they are going to “simplify” the Volcker Rule’s ban on proprietary trading at Wall Street banks, providing another big win for Wall Street and another big nightmare for Main Street. The financial crash on Wall Street in 2008 was the deepest economic upheaval in the U.S. since the Great Depression. Millions of honest, hardworking Americans lost their jobs, and then their homes, as a result of the economic collapse. Many of these Americans have yet to fully recover financially after more than a decade has passed. The promise of the Obama administration was that its Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act that was signed into law in 2010 would put an end to the reckless gambling casino on Wall Street that had brought on the collapse. One of the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 12, 2019 ~ Jeffrey Epstein, the accused pedophile and sex trafficker of underage women to powerful men around the world according to allegations in court documents, was found dead in his jail cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan on Saturday morning. The Justice Department is reporting the death as a suicide, despite the fact that Epstein should have been monitored by police around the clock because of an earlier attack or attempted suicide just weeks before in his jail cell. Epstein had close ties to JPMorgan Chase. He now joins a dizzying roster of suspicious deaths connected to JPMorgan Chase – particularly among its technology executives, who allegedly jumped to their death from JPMorgan buildings; died in two separate cases of murder-suicides in seven months; died of alcohol poisoning or, in the most recent case of Doug Carucci in March of … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 29, 2019 ~ Jeffrey Epstein, the accused sex trafficker of underage school girls, presided over a $6.7 billion offshore company as its Chairman from November 9, 2001 to at least March 19, 2007, a period during which he is accused of committing his sex trafficking crimes against minors. The company is Liquid Funding Ltd. and it had two offshore connections: it was incorporated in Bermuda on October 19, 2000 by the Appleby law firm, known for setting up offshore companies in secrecy jurisdictions like the Isle of Man, Guernsey, Cayman Islands, and Jersey. Liquid Funding’s investment manager was Bear Stearns Bank Plc in Dublin, Ireland – a non-U.S. regulated institution, which was later merged into JPMorgan Bank Dublin. A Securities and Exchange Commission filing by Bear Stearns, prior to its epic collapse in 2008, indicated that Bear Stearns owned 40 percent of Liquid … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 23, 2019 ~ Yesterday afternoon, Jamie Dimon had his world rocked. And not in a good way. Dimon is the Chairman and CEO of the largest bank in the United States, JPMorgan Chase, which has over 5,000 retail branches blanketing the U.S. and has scooped up $1.6 trillion in deposits, much of it from moms and pops who have no idea that the bank is a three-time felon. When you’re a 3-count felony bank and still on probation until January of 2020, you really don’t want to see your name appear in the New York Times connected to the most radioactive felon in the United States right now, Jeffrey Epstein, the man newly indicted on July 6 on charges of sex trafficking of underage girls and sexually assaulting dozens of them. But that’s what happened yesterday afternoon. The New York Times published a … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 10, 2019 ~ Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO of the Wall Street mega bank, JPMorgan Chase, has weathered one scandal after another during his tenure, including the bank pleading guilty to an unprecedented three criminal felony counts in the past five years. Now the bank is back in the news for owning a massive container ship which was seized last week in the Philadelphia seaport by U.S. Customs and Border Protection following the discovery of 20 tons of cocaine located in containers on the ship on June 17. The cocaine is estimated to have a street value of $1.3 billion. The container vessel is the MSC Gayane and was being operated by the global shipping firm, Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC). The vessel is the largest ever to be seized in the 230-year history of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, according to the CBP’s … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 8, 2019 ~ Yesterday, Deutsche Bank announced it would be cutting its payroll by approximately 18,000 jobs over the next three years and exiting its stock trading business, along with other restructuring moves like creating a “bad bank” to hold toxic assets. What could possibly force a global bank to shed stock trading? According to the most recent report from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the regulator of national banks in the United States, four U.S. commercial banks made $8.79 billion in trading revenues in the first quarter of this year. Of that amount, JPMorgan Chase Bank NA represented 60 percent or $5.29 billion. (The other three banks were Citibank, Goldman Sachs Bank USA and Bank of America.) Just to be clear, this is not how much each bank made from trading in all their divisions, this is just … Continue reading →