By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 13, 2023 ~ Senator Elizabeth Warren is the Chair of the Senate Banking Committee’s Subcommittee on Economic Policy. She is also the most knowledgeable member of Congress when it comes to the mega banks on Wall Street and the most willing to hold them accountable. (See related articles below.) Yesterday, Warren’s Subcommittee held a hearing on “Bank Mergers and the Economic Impacts of Consolidation.” The urgency of this hearing was heightened by the fact that almost two years after President Joe Biden signed an Executive Order urging members of his administration to take a more aggressive investigation into the harmful impacts of consolidation and monopoly power before approving more mergers in a number of industries, including banking, bank regulators signed off on one of the most egregious mergers of this century. Senator Warren explained it this way: “When First Republic Bank collapsed in April, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 11, 2023 ~ The polling organization, Gallup, conducted a survey between June 1-22 to update its annual poll that measures the confidence that Americans have in key U.S. institutions. Banks, as might be expected, continued their downward trend, registering an abysmal 26 percent of Americans who have “a great deal” or “fair amount” of confidence in the banks. That confidence ranking stood at 27 percent last year and at 33 percent in 2021. It is actually somewhat baffling that confidence in banks only dropped by one percentage point from last year, given that the second, third and fourth largest bank failures in U.S. history occurred in the first half of this year. Measured against a longer time horizon, confidence in U.S. banks looks far worse. In 1979, the Gallup poll showed 60 percent of Americans had confidence in the banks. In the years prior … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 10, 2023 ~ For months now, the largest federally-insured bank in the United States, JPMorgan Chase, represented by WilmerHale, a law firm with more than 1,000 attorneys, has been attempting to bamboozle the American people with the narrative that it engaged in no wrongdoing when it provided millions of dollars in cold, hard cash to child sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein for more than a decade  – without following the legal mandate of reporting this suspicious account activity to law enforcement. Internal emails produced in discovery in two lawsuits against the bank in federal court in Manhattan show that the bank was well aware that Epstein was a known sexual predator of children as it doled out all of this cash – at times reaching $40,000 to $80,000 per month. The legal narrative that the WilmerHale attorneys crafted for the public and the media is this: … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 6, 2023 ~ You may recall reading a burst of headlines during the banking crisis in March of this year about depositors fleeing small banks for the perceived comfort of the largest banks. Unfortunately, those headlines were never put in context or updated to reflect a broader picture. In fact, using deposit data that is updated weekly from the Federal Reserve’s own H.8 releases, it becomes crystal clear that the large banks are bleeding deposits at the fastest pace in 40 years. As the Federal Reserve data in the chart above indicates, deposits at the largest 25 commercial banks in the U.S. peaked at $11,679,758,700,000 on April 13, 2022. The most recent H.8 release shows that the deposits of the 25 largest banks as of June 21 stood at $10,758,977,000,000. That’s a percentage decline of 7.88 percent or $920,781,700. The Fed’s H.8 data defines … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 5, 2023 ~ The top chart above shows one of the most erratic eras in Federal Reserve policy-making history. In the 70s and early 80s, the Fed would slam on the brakes to bring down inflation by raising its benchmark rate (known as the Fed Funds rate), then slam its foot on the gas to revive the economy by cutting the Fed Funds rate. But because the Fed stopped raising rates too soon each time, it had to then raise rates to an ever staggering level to curb runaway inflation, eventually reaching over 20 percent in 1981. Today, the Fed is woefully mindful of these mistakes. It is hoping to signal that it is planning higher interest rates for longer and follow through on that signal without killing the economy, and the markets, and the banks, and consumer confidence in the process. The Fed … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 3, 2023 ~ According to S&P Dow Jones Indices, component companies of the Standard & Poor’s 500 spent $922.7 billion in 2022 buying back their own stock. That was $41 billion more than the S&P 500 companies spent in 2021, which came in at a lofty $881.7 billion. One of the companies leading the stock buyback parade is Apple. Of the $922.7 billion spent on stock buybacks in 2022 by all companies in the S&P 500, Apple represented 10 percent of that spending with $90.2 billion in buybacks of its own stock. On Friday, June 30, 2023, Apple, the iPhone manufacturer, closed the trading day in New York with a market value (market capitalization) of just over $3 trillion, an historic record. Apple’s $3 trillion market value is eight times that of the second largest mobile phone manufacturer, Samsung. We decided to dig into … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 29, 2023 ~ On Sunday, James S. Crown died in an unusual single-car accident, reportedly on a motorsport racetrack at a “member-owned country club” in Aspen, Colorado. The Pitkin County Coroner’s Office said in a statement that “The official cause of death is pending autopsy, although multiple blunt force trauma is evident.” The Sheriff’s Office indicated that the earliest new information would be made available to the public is next week. In August of last year, Wall Street On Parade made a referral to the U.S. Department of Justice involving James S. Crown, who was a long-term member of the Board of Directors of JPMorgan Chase and two predecessor banks, Bank One Corporation (previously Banc One) and First Chicago Corporation. Following mergers between the banks, Crown seamlessly went from First Chicago (1991 to 1996) to Bank One (1996–2004) to JPMorgan Chase (2004 to the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 27, 2023 ~ Between March 10 and May 1 of this year, three of the largest bank failures in U.S. history occurred. On March 10 the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) seized Silicon Valley Bank after $42 billion in deposits had exited the bank the day prior with another $100 billion queued up to leave the next day – meaning it was possible for a federally-insured bank to lose 85 percent of its deposits in the span of 48 hours in the digital age. (For a closer look at what was going on at Silicon Valley Bank, see our report: Silicon Valley Bank Was a Wall Street IPO Pipeline in Drag as a Federally-Insured Bank; FHLB of San Francisco Was Quietly Bailing It Out.) Two more bank failures followed in short order: Signature Bank on March 12 and First Republic Bank on May 1. … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 26, 2023 ~ There are three shocking takeaways from the class action settlement documents that were filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York last week in the Jeffrey Epstein victims’ case against Wall Street megabank, JPMorgan Chase. (See settlement documents linked at the end of this article.) First, the attorneys for the unnamed victims are requesting $87 million in legal fees from the $290 million settlement amount, plus another $2.5 million in expenses. The victims, on the other hand, are guaranteed no minimum monetary payment but must file a release form before they learn if they will get a dime. This language appears in the settlement documents: “All Class Members shall be bound by all determinations and judgments in the Litigation concerning the Settlement (including, but not limited to, the releases provided for therein) whether favorable or unfavorable … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 22, 2023 ~ According to unsealed documents released this week by the U.S. Virgin Islands in its federal lawsuit against JPMorgan Chase over claims it facilitated Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking of underage girls for more than a decade, the largest bank in the United States has a lot of explaining to do to the American people – and potentially to the criminal division of the U.S. Justice Department. After Jeffrey Epstein was arrested by the U.S. Department of Justice on July 6, 2019 on federal sex trafficking charges, JPMorgan Chase – which had been Epstein’s banker from 1998 to 2013 – apparently decided to get a quick look at how much legal liability and reputational damage it might have if its labyrinthine client relationship and intimate and undisclosed business relationship with Epstein came to light. The “top of the house” at JPMorgan Chase ordered … Continue reading →