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Recent Posts
- JPMorgan Chase and Its Regulators Are Hiding Dark Trading Secrets at the Largest and Riskiest U.S. Bank
- Campus Protests Over Gaza Open a Pandora’s Box for Wall Street Megabanks that Underwrote $8 Billion of Israel’s Bonds in March
- Wall Street’s Megabanks Have Trillions of Dollars Off-Balance Sheet, in a Replay of Accounting Hubris that Led to the 2008 Wall Street Collapse
- JPMorgan Remains the Second Largest Money Market Fund Manager, Despite Needing Billions in Money Market Bailouts from the Fed in 2020
- The First Bank Failure of 2024 Leaves a 1-Cent Stock for Investors and $667 Million in Losses for the FDIC
- Catch and Kill Protection Rackets: Trump, Weinstein, Epstein and Wall Street
- Wall Street’s Judge Shopping Continues: It’s Trying to Stop the FTC’s Ban on Worker Handcuffs Known as Non-Compete Agreements
- The Fed Tallies Up a Big Threat to Financial Stability in the U.S.: “Runnables” at $21.3 Trillion
- Billionaire-Owned Media Has Gone Full Throttle to Save Fellow Billionaire, Jamie Dimon
- The Professor Who Wrote the Seminal Book on Wall Street Megabanks Calls Today’s Financial System “Dangerously Unstable”
- Gold Has Set Historic Highs this Year as the Federal Reserve Has Reported Historic Losses
- Stanford Finance Professor Anat Admati Is Making Jamie Dimon Very Nervous – Again Calling His Bank “Dangerous”
- Jamie Dimon Dumped $150 Million of His JPMorgan Stock in February; Now He Says His Regulators Want 25 Percent More Capital at his Bank
- The Black Swan Rears Its Head: The Fed Has Negative Capital Using GAAP Accounting
- New York Fed Will Not Confirm or Deny that 5-Count Felon JPMorgan Chase Is Custodian of $2.4 Trillion of Its Securities
- For the First Time in History, the Fed Is Reporting Billions in Losses Weekly; It’s Still Paying High Interest Income to the Mega Banks on Wall Street
- There’s a Revival of the Dotcom-esque Froth in Today’s Markets; Cathie Wood Is Standing in for Henry Blodget and Jack Grubman; Nasdaq Is Playing Nasdaq
- Study Finds Wall Street Mega Banks Have Overstated Income for Years on Commercial Real Estate Loans They Sell to Investors
- Jamie Dimon Huddles in Private with Biden Bigwigs as His Bank Faces More Crime Charges
- Report: Five Banks Have a Combined Half Trillion Dollars in Commercial Real Estate Loans; Number 1 is JPMorgan Chase
- Billionaire Larry Fink of BlackRock, Which Grabbed Fed Bailouts in 2020-2021, Lectures Struggling Seniors on Making More Sacrifices
- Almost 10,000 U.S. Banks Have Disappeared Since 1985, Leaving 4 Mega Banks Controlling 39 Percent of Bank Assets
- Wall Street’s Go-To Law Firm, Sullivan & Cromwell, Got in Bed with Crypto; Now Its Reputation Is Being Hammered
- More Failed Banks and Office Building Demolitions Likely Before Real Estate Problems End, Warn Two Federal Agencies
- During Spring Bank Panic of 2023, Liquidity Advances from FHLBs Topped Those of Q4 2008, when Wall Street Was in Collapse
- JPMorgan’s Federally-Insured Bank Is Fined $348 Million for Losing Track of “Billions” of Trades
- Hedge Fund Titan John Paulson Made $1 Billion in an Illegal Goldman Sachs Deal; Trump Is Now Floating Him for Treasury Secretary
- Wall Street Mega Banks Have Drawn a Law-Free Zone Around Themselves – The Media Is Complicit
- A Financial Writer at New York Times Admits He’s Been Misrepresenting Bank Capital for 14 Years
- FDIC Data Contradicts Fed Chair Powell: Shows Real Estate Problems Have Skyrocketed at Largest U.S. Banks, Not the Smaller Regionals
- Senator Elizabeth Warren Calls Fed Chair Powell “Weak-Kneed”; Says He Is “Driving Efforts Inside the Fed” to Gut Higher Capital Requirements
- Steve Mnuchin, Trump’s Treasury Secretary/Foreclosure Kingpin, Joins with Hedge Fund Guys to Grab a Teetering, Federally-Insured Bank for $2 a Share
- Wall Street Mega Banks Have Created a Circular Firing Squad with Credit Derivatives and Capital Relief Trades – with the Fed’s Blessing
- New York Community Bancorp Was JPMorgan’s Top Regional Bank Pick for 2024; It’s Lost 73 Percent Y-T-D and Had Its Deposit Rating Downgraded to Junk
- Watchdog, Better Markets, Investigates the Bank that Has Lost 65 Percent of Its Market Value in Two Months and Was Downgraded to Junk by Moody’s
- The Fed Pretends to Send a Warning to Wall Street’s Mega Banks on Derivatives and Counterparty Risk
- $87 Million Buys This for Jamie Dimon: David Boies Can’t Utter the Words “JPMorgan Chase” in a Jeffrey Epstein Sex Trafficking Case
- Jamie Dimon and Nine of His Top Executives at JPMorgan Chase Have Dumped Over $150 Million of their JPMorgan Stock in Last Two Months
- These Charts Reveal Why the Fed Is Frightened about Capital Levels at the Wall Street Mega Banks
- Wall Street Law Firm Sullivan & Cromwell Gets Sued Over Allegations It Aided and Abetted the FTX Crypto Fraud
- JPMorgan Says Its “Trading Venues” Are Under Investigation While It’s Still on Probation for Prior Trading Crimes
- Jamie Dimon Is Desperate to Pin the Jeffrey Epstein Scandal on Jes Staley; Bloomberg News Is Carrying His Water — Again
- Citigroup Is Having a Very Bad Week; Regulators Are Breathing Down Its Neck
- Five Wall Street Banks Hold $223 Trillion in Derivatives — 83 Percent of All Derivatives at 4,600 Banks
- Jamie Dimon’s Statement Last Month that Trump “Was Kind of Right About NATO,” Sounds Even More Unhinged Today
- S&P 500 Sets a Record on Wednesday as Banks Continue Tanking
- NYCB Downgraded to Junk; Shocking Charts for Citigroup, Barclays and Deutsche Bank
- Reporters Who Ask Tough Questions at Fed Press Conferences Have a Habit of Being Disappeared from the Room
- Jamie Dimon Has Spent $117 Billion Propping Up JPMorgan’s Share Price with Buybacks in 10 Years; He’s Counting on Trump’s MAGA Crowd to Rescue Him
- Bank Fraud Enters a New Era: Bank-to-Bank Wire Transfers Loot Customers
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JPMorgan Chase’s Derivatives Spike by $14 Trillion in First Quarter to Six-Year High of $60 Trillion
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
Wall Street’s Casino Banks, Taking Deposits from Savers, in 1929 and Today
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
Research Arm of Congress Confirms that Mnuchin Never Released Bulk of CARES Act Money Earmarked for Fed’s Emergency Loans
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
Wall Street Banks Are Dangerously Evading U.S. Derivatives Rules by Making Trades at Foreign Subsidiaries
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
Dodd-Frank Is 10 Years Old Today and the Fed Is Back to Bailing Out Wall Street
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
The Dark Secrets in the Fed’s Last Wall Street Bailout Are Getting a Devious Makeover in Today’s Bailout
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
This Is the Fear Chart that the Smart Money on Wall Street Is Watching
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
Goldman Sachs: The Vampire Squid’s Alum Control Two Fed Banks, the U.S. Treasury, the European Central Bank and the Bank of England
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
The Doomsday Machine Returns: Citibank Has Sold Protection on $858 Billion of Credit Default Swaps
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
These Charts Show Why the Fed Is Still in a Panic Over the Repo Loan Market
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 31, 2019 ~ After the epic financial crash on Wall Street in 2008 – the worst since the 1929 crash and ensuing Great Depression – two key reforms were put in place in the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 to prevent another catastrophic meltdown on Wall Street. The first key reform was that derivatives were to be moved out of the federally-insured, taxpayer backstopped commercial banks, that had been bought up by Wall Street trading houses, into units that could be wound down in a bankruptcy proceeding. It was called the “Push Out” rule. That reform was also meant to prevent the New York Fed from ever again secretly pumping upwards of $29 trillion into Wall Street trading houses and their derivative counterparties in order to bail out a corrupt casino banking system. (And yet here we are … Continue reading