By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 16, 2023 ~ Yesterday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average took a tumble of 361 points by the closing bell. Numerous headlines attributed the big decline to a weakening economy in China. But the actual trigger for angst among traders was a headline at 5:30 a.m. EDT yesterday at CNBC. The headline read: “Fitch warns it may be forced to downgrade dozens of banks, including JPMorgan Chase.” JPMorgan Chase is not just the biggest bank in the United States in terms of assets and deposits. It is the biggest bank in terms of its derivative exposure. According to the federal regulator of national banks (those operating across state lines), the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), as of March 31, 2023, JPMorgan Chase Bank had assets of $3.2 trillion and derivative exposure of more than $59 trillion notional (face amount). The OCC report also … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 15, 2023 ~ The Bill Clinton administration’s repeal in 1999 of the 1933 Banking Act, commonly known as the Glass-Steagall Act, ushered in the greatest kleptocracy America has ever known. The Cambridge dictionary defines “kleptocracy” as: “a society whose leaders make themselves rich and powerful by stealing from the rest of the people.” In fact, the actual goal of repealing Glass-Steagall was to do just that. The momentum for the repeal of Glass-Steagall came from the announcement in 1998 that Wall Street veteran, Sandy Weill, wanted to merge his trading firms, Salomon Brothers and Smith Barney (under the Travelers Group umbrella), with Citicorp, parent of the federally-insured Citibank commercial bank. Because of the Glass-Steagall Act, such a merger was illegal at the time. The 1933 Congress that passed the Glass-Steagall Act had watched the stock market lose 89 percent of its value over the years … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 14, 2023 ~ In 2017, Simon & Schuster released the book, The Chickenshit Club, by the Pulitzer-prize winning public interest writer, Jesse Eisinger. The title derives from the premise that the prosecutors at the U.S. Department of Justice are too worried about losing a case or harming their ability to get those seven-figure pay packages at the big Wall Street law firms to do their jobs properly as prosecutors. Aside from that narrative, which is brilliantly analyzed by Eisinger, the book reveals a stunning fact about Manhattan federal district court Judge Jed Rakoff – a man who has gone out of his way to portray himself with the media as the protector of the public interest. Eisinger writes this: “Karp, sixteen years younger, and Rakoff began having dinner every several months, often with their wives and other lawyers, at restaurants around Manhattan: Il Gattopardo, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 10, 2023 ~ That office space company we warned our readers about so extensively in 2019, WeWork, collapsed to 13 cents a share yesterday. Its bonds were trading at about 13 cents on the dollar. WeWork’s stock has been on a steady decline since the company began to trade publicly on October 21, 2021. The chart above shows how investors would have fared in WeWork stock versus a 10-year U.S. Treasury note since WeWork started trading in 2021. The collapse in the share price this week came as a result of an 8-K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday in which the company uttered these discomforting words: “…as a result of the Company’s losses and projected cash needs, combined with increased member churn and current liquidity levels, substantial doubt exists about the Company’s ability to continue as a going concern.” The … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 9, 2023 ~ Jamie Dimon is between a rock and a hard place. He is either going to have to convince a jury come October that he was left in the dark by the bank’s general counsel, his compliance and money laundering executives, and the heads of his investment bank and asset and wealth division about the fact that notorious child molester Jeffrey Epstein was a client at the bank for more than a decade – which would make Dimon sound so isolated as to be unfit to be running the bank – or Dimon is going to have to admit that he lied under oath in his federal court deposition. Neither is a comfortable proposition to be facing for a jury trial currently scheduled for October 23. JPMorgan Chase is currently facing off against three federal lawsuits before Judge Jed Rakoff in the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 8, 2023 ~ Brace yourself for some tremors in the stock prices of banks today — especially those that have counterparty risk to the biggest U.S. banks. In a move that sent Dow futures on a steady downward plunge beginning at 5 a.m. EDT this morning (clocking in at down 268 points by 8:14 a.m.), last evening the credit ratings agency, Moody’s Investors Service, took more sweeping actions in the U.S. banking sector. Moody’s cut the ratings of 10 banks by one notch, placed six banks on review for potential downgrade, and changed its outlook to negative on 11 other banks. Causing particular alarm on Wall Street was the fact that four of the six banks that Moody’s put on review for potential downgrade rank among the 15 largest banks in the United States. They are: U.S. Bancorp, the 5th largest bank in the U.S. with … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 7, 2023 ~ Deposits at the 25-largest domestically-chartered U.S. commercial banks peaked at $11.680 trillion on April 13, 2022, according to the updated H.8 data maintained at the Federal Reserve Economic Database (FRED). As of the most current H.8 data for the week ending on Wednesday, July 26, 2023, deposits stood at $10.709 trillion at those 25 commercial banks, a dollar decline of $970 billion and a percentage decline of 8.3 percent. Equally noteworthy, the decline shows no signs of letting up. According to the FRED data, between July 5 and the most current reading on July 26, the 25 largest U.S. banks shed $174 billion in deposits. Despite all of the misleading news reports about depositors seeking out the perceived safety of the largest banks since the banking crisis in the spring, it’s actually been the smaller banks that have staged a comeback … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 3, 2023 ~ At 5:13 p.m. ET on Tuesday, after the stock market closed, Fitch downgraded the U.S. credit rating from AAA to AA+. Fitch is now the second of the three major credit rating agencies to have taken the historic step of removing the triple-A rating from the U.S. S&P made its first-ever downgrade to the U.S. credit rating on August 5, 2011, also from AAA to AA+, and has kept it there ever since. Moody’s is now the only member of the Big Three credit rating agencies that has maintained a triple-A rating on the U.S. As the chart above indicates, the stock market responded negatively to this development yesterday, particularly over the fact that it came at a time when the U.S. Treasury is boosting the amount of debt it is issuing. Yesterday, the U.S. Treasury announced its plans to increase … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 2, 2023 ~ On July 24th and 25th, the Attorney General’s Office for the U.S. Virgin Islands filed dozens of documents in the court case it has launched against the largest federally-insured bank in the United States – JPMorgan Chase – in a U.S. district court in Manhattan. A quick glance at the giant blur of filings indicated that the vast majority had been filed under seal. (See a partial screen shot here.) The U.S. Virgin Islands is credibly alleging in its lawsuit that JPMorgan Chase “actively participated in Epstein’s sex trafficking venture” where dozens of underage girls were sexually assaulted by Epstein or his rich pals. Wall Street On Parade has learned over the years to deeply scrutinize anything that is happening in the federal district court in the Southern District of New York, where Wall Street has kept critical information about its … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 31, 2023 ~ The chart above compares the stock price performance of the kidney dialysis company, DaVita (ticker DVA), with the Standard and Poor’s 500 Index since 1996. Right away, something looks very wrong. Why should a healthcare company delivering dialysis treatment to people with kidney failure make the kind of profits that would generate this outsized stock price return? Investigative reporter and author, Tom Mueller, has dedicated his latest book to pulling back the curtain on the dirty underbelly of this industry. The book, How to Make a Killing: Blood, Death and Dollars in American Medicine, will be available for sale in bookstores tomorrow. If you have a loved one receiving kidney dialysis at centers run by either DaVita or Fresenius, we urge you to stop what you’re doing, buy this book, and read it from cover to cover. The book presents nothing … Continue reading →