Search Results for: newest legislator

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: June 24, 2022 ~ Add JPMorgan Chase, the biggest bank in the United States with an unprecedented five criminal felony counts since 2014, to the growing list of debacles of which the Fed has lost control. The Fed has its bank examiners pouring over the books of JPMorgan Chase on an ongoing basis, but somehow the bank’s dangerous book of derivatives has been allowed to spike by $14.42 trillion in the first quarter of this year, soaring from $45.84 trillion on December 31, 2021 to $60.26 trillion on March 31, 2022. That’s an increase of 24 percent in a three-month span. That information comes from page 18 of the newly-released report on derivatives in the banking system from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC). The Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 was supposed to stop the insanity of unfathomable amounts of risky derivatives being … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 4, 2021 ~ Following the stock market crash in 1929, more than 9,000 banks in the United States failed over the next four years. In just the one year of 1933, more than 4,000 banks closed their doors permanently as a result of insolvency. The 1930s banking crisis came to a head on March 6, 1933, just one day after President Franklin D. Roosevelt was inaugurated. Following a month-long run on the banks, Roosevelt declared a nationwide banking holiday that closed all banks in the United States. On March 9, 1933 Congress passed the Emergency Banking Act which allowed regulators to evaluate each bank before it was permitted to reopen. Thousands of banks were deemed insolvent and permanently closed. It is estimated by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) that depositors lost $1.3 billion to failed banks in that era. That would be … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 21, 2020 ~ On November 27, Wall Street On Parade reported that U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin had failed to turn over to the Federal Reserve 75 percent of the $454 billion that Congress had earmarked in the CARES Act for the Fed’s emergency lending programs. We wrote at the time: “…for months now, the Federal Reserve’s weekly financial statements known as the H.4.1 have indicated that all the Fed received from Treasury for its emergency lending facilities was $114 billion, leaving $340 billion unaccounted for.” We also took the time to send an email to the Federal Reserve’s press office to confirm that the Fed had received only the $114 billion from the Treasury for its emergency lending programs. They directed us to Fed public documents confirming this. Now the Congressional Research Service (CRS), a century old nonpartisan agency that provides legal … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 12, 2020 ~ On May 30, with little mainstream media attention, four European academics published a report on how some of the largest Wall Street banks (all of whom received massive amounts of secret Federal Reserve bailout money during the 2007 to 2010 financial crash) were shamelessly gaming the system again. Rather than complying with the derivatives regulations imposed under the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation of 2010, the Wall Street mega banks had simply moved much of their interest rate derivatives trading to their foreign subsidiaries that fall outside of U.S. regulatory reach. This is known as regulatory arbitrage: seeking the most lightly regulated jurisdiction to ply your dangerous trading activity. (Think JPMorgan’s London Whale fiasco.) The European academics are Pauline Gandré, Mike Mariathasan, Ouarda Merrouche and Steven Ongena. The paper is titled: “Regulatory Arbitrage and the G20’s Global Derivatives Market Reform.” The researchers discovered … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 21, 2020 ~ Today marks the 10th Anniversary of the enactment of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, named after its two sponsors, former Senator Christopher Dodd (D-CT) and former Congressman Barney Frank (D-MA). The massive piece of legislation was signed into law on July 21, 2010 by President Barack Obama at a time when Democrats controlled both houses of Congress – meaning there was no excuse not to put tough Wall Street reform legislation in place. While the progressive wing of the Democrats was demanding the restoration of the Glass-Steagall Act, which would have completely separated the federally-insured, deposit-taking banks from the Wall Street casino (the trading firms known as investment banks and broker-dealers), the Wall Street wing of the Democrats didn’t want to upset their big political campaign donors on Wall Street. The result was that the Wall … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 31, 2020 ~ From December 2007 to November 10, 2011, the Federal Reserve, secretly and without the awareness of Congress, funneled $19.6 trillion in cumulative loans to bail out the trading houses on Wall Street. Just 14 global financial institutions received 83.9 percent of those loans or $16.41 trillion. (See chart above.) A number of those banks were insolvent at the time and did not, under the law, qualify for these Fed loans. Significant amounts of these loans were collateralized with junk bonds and stocks, at a time when both markets were in freefall. Under the law, the Fed is only allowed to make loans against “good” collateral. Six of the institutions receiving massive loans from the Fed were not even U.S. banks but global foreign banks that had to be saved because they were heavily interconnected to the Wall Street banks through … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 24, 2020 ~ The chart that tells you how all of today’s economic troubles are going to end is not the bar graph of new deaths from coronavirus in Italy versus deaths in the U.S. It’s the chart that shows the number of potential deaths among the banks and insurance companies that have gorged themselves on risky derivatives and serve as counterparties to each other in a daisy chain of financial contagion. The chart above is why the Federal Reserve is throwing unprecedented sums of money in all directions on Wall Street. Because despite being a primary regulator to these massive bank holding companies, the Fed has no idea who is actually in trouble on derivative trades, other than looking at a chart like the one above. The chart above also justifies the Democrats refusing to sign off on the fiscal stimulus legislation … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 23, 2020 ~ The head of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas (Robert S. Kaplan), the head of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis (Neel Kashkari), the Secretary of the U.S. Treasury (Steve Mnuchin), the President of the European Central Bank (Mario Draghi) and the head of the Bank of England (Mark Carney) all have two things in common: they sit atop vast amounts of money and they are all alums of Goldman Sachs. In addition, the immediate past President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, William Dudley, which secretly sluiced over $29 trillion to bail out Wall Street banks during the financial crisis and has now opened its money spigot for trillions of dollars more, worked at Goldman Sachs for more than two decades, rising to the rank of partner and U.S. Chief Economist. Goldman Sachs has been variously depicted … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 3, 2020 ~ Lily Tomlin is credited with the quote: “No matter how cynical you get, it is impossible to keep up.” Wall Street regularly brings that message home. According to the latest derivatives report from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), Citibank, the federally-insured, taxpayer-backstopped bank owned by Citigroup, has sold protection to other banks, hedge funds, insurance companies or corporations on a staggering $858 billion of Credit Default Swaps. When a federally-insured bank sells protection to others on Credit Default Swaps, it is effectively taking on the risk of a default event. At a time of unprecedented levels of debt in the system and growing warnings about leveraged loans, that seems like a very unwise move by Citigroup. The OCC notes that Citibank has bought protection via a larger amount of Credit Default Swaps – a total of … Continue reading →