Search Results for: JPMorgan

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 26, 2018 On Monday, February 5 and again on Thursday, February 8, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed the day with more than 1,000-point losses. We decided it might be instructive to see what JPMorgan’s Dark Pools were up to that week now that the three-week old data has been released by the self-regulator FINRA. We’ll get to that shortly, but first some necessary background. Dark Pools are effectively unregulated stock exchanges that operate in darkness inside Wall Street’s largest firms. If you have been following the past decade of criminal felony counts for colluding in market rigging and multi-billion dollar fines for abusing the public against these same firms, you might be forgiven for thinking that Federal regulators have lost their minds to allow these same firms to operate Dark Pools. But it’s actually worse than it first appears: not only are … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 29, 2018 Someone really needs to send the good folks at Fortune Magazine a heads up that naming a bank that has admitted to three criminal felony counts in 2014-15 and lost more than $6 billion gambling with its depositors’ money does not have the makings for a most-admired anything, unless possibly most-admired for dodging jail time. JPMorgan Chase has decided to spin the award as follows on its website: “JPMorgan Chase was given the top industry ranking the second year in a row on Fortune magazine’s list of ‘The World’s Most Admired Companies of 2018.’ Fortune also ranked the firm as the tenth most-admired company in the world.” One might suspect from the above that the industry in which JPMorgan Chase was ranked was the overall financial services industry or overall banking industry. But it wasn’t. JPMorgan Chase achieved its top award … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 6, 2017 Headline writers at the New York Times need to sharpen their pencils. Yesterday’s New York edition carried a front page article that links two of the biggest Wall Street banks, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase, to the Jared Kushner affair with the Russian banker, Sergey Gorkov, Chairman of the state-owned Russian bank Vnesheconombank (VEB) which has been under U.S. sanctions since 2014.  But readers would have missed that completely if they only read the softball headline, which failed to mention either bank. Everyone on Wall Street has been waiting for the next shoe to drop in the Jared Kushner episode. Kushner is under FBI and Congressional probes over allegations that he met in December with Gorkov while simultaneously attempting to set up a secret channel to communicate with Russia using its equipment inside its own embassy – ostensibly to thwart U.S. intelligence … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 23, 2017 On September 8, 2016, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) fined Wells Fargo $185 million following an investigation that found that its employees had engaged in a widespread practice of “secretly opening unauthorized deposit and credit card accounts” in order to meet sales quotas or qualify for bonuses. An estimated 2 million accounts were involved. One month later, the Chairman and CEO of Wells Fargo, John Stumpf, was gone. Consider that swift action to acknowledge and punish egregious abuse of clients with how the Boards of Directors of JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup have responded to criminal felony charges and seemingly endless regulatory fines for abusing clients’ trust. The Boards have kept their CEOs in place, paid the monster fines and moved on to the next settlement. Jamie Dimon became the CEO of JPMorgan Chase on January 1, 2006. At that point, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 29, 2016 Last Thursday, September 22, 2016, the body of Ann Korkki, a Senior Administrative Assistant in the Wealth Management division of JPMorgan Chase in Denver, Colorado was found with the body of her sister, Robin Korkki, inside their luxury vacation villa at the Maia Resort on Seychelles, an island in the Indian Ocean off the East African coast. Ann Korkki was 37; her sister Robin was 42. According to the local Seychelles newspaper, there was no sign of violence on the bodies of the women who were on a one week vacation at the resort. The mother and brother of the sisters are currently in Seychelles “pressing U.S. and local officials for details” and making arrangements to bring the sisters back to the U.S. according to a news report in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, which covered the story because the sisters had … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 6, 2016  Yesterday, Wall Street mega bank, JPMorgan Chase, was the biggest percentage decliner in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, losing 2.79 percent. Goldman Sachs, another Dow stock, was third in line after Caterpillar, losing 2.56 percent. But that performance was absolutely mild compared to how other global bank stocks that aren’t in the Dow performed. Morgan Stanley lost 3.55 percent; Citigroup shed 3.30 percent; while Deutsche Bank, a German bank heavily interconnected with Wall Street banks, that trades on the New York Stock Exchange, touched $13.34 intraday – its lowest share price in more than 30 years. Deutsche Bank closed the day at $13.40, down 3.67 percent. A U.S. unit of Deutsche Bank, which is designated a global systemically important bank (G-SIB), recently failed its stress test according to the Federal Reserve. Wall Street’s global banks have now resumed a selloff that … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 22, 2016  Buried in a report released yesterday by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) was a stunning piece of news. Customers of JPMorgan Chase, the bank that Wall Street analyst Mike Mayo has preposterously called the “Lebron James of banking,” were major victims of Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme – to the tune of $5.4 billion – because of negligence on the part of the bank. The report states the following: “In 2014, DOJ [Department of Justice] assessed a $1.7 billion forfeiture – the largest penalty related to a BSA [Bank Secrecy Act] violation – against JPMorgan Chase Bank. DOJ cited the bank for its failure to detect and report the suspicious activities of Bernard Madoff. The bank failed to maintain an effective anti-money-laundering program and report suspicious transactions in 2008, which contributed to their customers losing about $5.4 billion in Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 14, 2016  Yesterday the Federal Reserve released a 19-page letter that it and the FDIC had issued to Jamie Dimon, the Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, on April 12 as a result of its failure to present a credible plan for winding itself down if the bank failed. The letter carried frightening passages and large blocks of redacted material in critical areas, instilling in any careful reader a sense of panic about the U.S. financial system. A rational observer of Wall Street’s serial hubris might have expected some key segments of this letter to make it into the business press. A mere eight years ago the United States experienced a complete meltdown of its financial system, leading to the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression. President Obama and regulators have been assuring us over these intervening eight years that things are … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 13, 2016  The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that two Federal regulators, the Federal Reserve and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), are set to “reject” the living wills of potentially four systemically important banks, including the largest bank in the U.S., JPMorgan Chase. The three other banks named are Bank of New York Mellon, State Street and Bank of America. Under Section 165 of the financial reform legislation known as Dodd-Frank, banks designated as systemically important must submit living wills to the Fed and FDIC explaining how they can be “rapidly” liquidated if they fail without bringing down the rest of the financial system – as occurred in 2008. A serious dust-up occurred on July 15, 2014 during a Senate Banking hearing between Senator Elizabeth Warren and Fed Chair Janet Yellen on the matter of these living wills. Warren told Yellen that at … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 24, 2016 Presidential candidate Donald Trump and the mega Wall Street bank JPMorgan Chase share a common trait: they can conduct themselves in a manner that insults the values of a civilized society and instead of losing ground, their star rises – or so it appears. Trump’s public vulgarity and anti-Presidential demeanor are perpetually on display at his Twitter page and in the Republican debates.  In just the past month, Trump has called Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly “crazy”; boasted of the size of his “manhood” during a Republican debate; and promised to ramp up the use of torture – illegal under both domestic and international law. The typically staid Senator Elizabeth Warren even lost her cool with Trump on March 21, Tweeting that “his insecurities are on parade: petty bullying, attacks on women, cheap racism, flagrant narcissism.” In a new CBS News/New York … Continue reading →