Search Results for: JPMorgan

JPMorgan’s Creepy Patent: Why You Should Be Worried

Stephen Colbert Suggested This Christmas Card for Jamie Dimon

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 31, 2018 ~ Less than seven months after a unit of JPMorgan Chase settled with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) for $410 million in penalties and disgorgement over allegations that it had manipulated electricity markets in California and the Midwest, one of its employees, Shawn Wesley Alexander, submitted a really creepy patent request to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on February 10, 2014. The patent might not be creepy for the owner of a video game arcade but JPMorgan Chase is the largest bank in America – with a global footprint and an unprecedented three Federal felony counts to which it has pleaded guilty in the past four years. The first two counts came in 2014 for looking the other way at Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme as the bank watched hundreds of billions of dollars come and go through his business … Continue reading →

Could Technology Doom Facebook, Koch Industries and JPMorgan Chase?

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Testifies Before Congress on April 10, 2018 on His Company's Technology Failings

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 26, 2018 ~ Remember the late 90s when the Masters of the Universe on Wall Street were bringing to market anything that smelled of technology or had a dot com after its name. That all ended  badly with the Nasdaq stock index losing 78 percent of its value from 2000 to 2002. This is how Ron Chernow correctly described what was happening for New York Times’ readers on March 15, 2001: “Let us be clear about the magnitude of the Nasdaq collapse. The tumble has been so steep and so bloody — close to $4 trillion in market value erased in one year —  that it amounts to nearly four times the carnage recorded in the October 1987 crash.” Chernow characterized the Nasdaq stock market as a “lunatic control tower that directed most incoming planes to a bustling, congested airport known as the … Continue reading →

Did JPMorgan Rat Out Fellow Bankers in a Criminal Cartel Case in Australia?

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 5, 2018 ~ Australia is showing its muscle in an area where the U.S. has tip-toed around for almost two decades. We’re talking about Wall Street’s brazen antitrust activity in securities offerings. Last month the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) announced that “criminal cartel offences” had been brought against Citigroup Global Markets Australia and Deutsche Bank over a share offering for Australia and New Zealand Banking Group (ANZ) that had been conducted in 2015. ANZ was also criminally charged in the matter as were three executives of Citigroup Australia, two executives at Deutsche Bank and one at ANZ. Although JPMorgan had been part of that underwriting syndicate, it wasn’t charged. The Financial Times reported at the time that “JPMorgan, which jointly underwrote the share placement with Citi and Deutsche, has not been charged by prosecutors and has reportedly been granted immunity after … Continue reading →

How Did JPMorgan Reverse an Arrest Warrant for its Mexico Bank Chief?

JPMorgan Chase Building

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 15, 2018 ~  On Monday Reuters reported that “a judge in Mexico has issued an arrest warrant for the country head of U.S. investment bank JPMorgan for alleged fraud….” Details about the arrest warrant were provided the same day in a lawsuit filed in the Federal District Court for the Southern District of New York. The lawsuit explained that “…a prosecutor has conducted a criminal investigation into fraud by J.P. Morgan. Based on the preliminary evidence collected, the prosecutor recently (in June 2018) requested that a judge detain Eduardo Cepeda, the chairman of the board and chief executive officer of Defendant’s Mexican unit, and former J.P. Morgan managing director Miguel Barbosa. Upon review of the evidence presented by the prosecutor, a criminal court judge has found the elements of felony fraud in the amount of $100 million, and issued a detention order for … Continue reading →

Citigroup Faces Criminal Charges in Australia: 3x Felon JPMorgan Is Said to be Cooperating

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 4, 2018 ~ The largest bank in the United States, JPMorgan Chase, is already a 3-time felon. It received two felony counts in 2014 for its role in the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme and pleaded guilty to an additional felony count in 2015 for its role in a bank cartel that was rigging foreign currency trading. One more felony count and its Chairman and CEO, Jamie Dimon, might have finally been sacked by the bank’s timid Board for placing the bank’s global reputation under yet another scandal. So, it appears this morning, based on an avalanche of reporting from Australia, that JPMorgan Chase has ratted out U.S. behemoth, Citigroup; the troubled German bank, Deutsche Bank; and Australian bank ANZ, in order to save its own skin. The Australian Financial Review politely writes that “JPMorgan blew the whistle” on the other banks over a … Continue reading →

Facebook Hearings Will Miss the Point, Just Like the JPMorgan Chase Hearings

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 9, 2018 Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, will testify before a joint session of the Senate Judiciary Committee and Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee tomorrow afternoon. He’ll head to the Hill again on Wednesday morning to testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Zuckerberg’s testimony comes as a result of the stunning testimony that Cambridge Analytica whistleblower, Christopher Wylie, gave to the British Parliament on March 27 of this year on how tens of millions of Facebook users had their private information obtained without their permission by Cambridge Analytica, a company deeply involved in the presidential campaign of Donald Trump. Zuckerberg conceded in a public statement on April 4 that the privacy breach by Cambridge Analytica could have affected as many as 87 million Facebook users. Zuckerberg also acknowledged that “most” of its 2 billion worldwide users may have had their profiles scraped … Continue reading →

Facebook and JPMorgan Chase: Case Studies in Exploitive Monetization

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 5, 2018 Last week the CEO of Apple, Tim Cook, gave a harsh critique on how Facebook is making its money. Cook told an MSNBC Town Hall: “The truth is we could make a ton of money if we monetized our customer, if our customer was our product. We’ve elected not to do that.” Cook has good reason to believe that Facebook has “monetized” its customers. After a whistleblower from the data mining company, Cambridge Analytica, exposed that Facebook had allowed the private information on 50 million Facebook users to be exploited for micro-targeting on behalf of the Trump presidential campaign, the company has come under withering criticism. Yesterday, in a press conference, Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, conceded to reporters that the privacy breach by Cambridge Analytica could have affected as many as 87 million Facebook users. The company also announced … Continue reading →

JPMorgan Paid a Board Member $532,500 in 2016; Now the Board is Getting a 25 Percent Cash Pay Hike

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 12, 2018 The illusions of the Trump era – spun as making America great again, while sluicing more and more wealth to the one percent – has revived citizen interest in what it would actually take to restore fairness and integrity to the nation. The first place to look is how to restructure the American corporation so that it is no longer poisoning our campaign finance system, our election outcomes, and perverting the legislative process in Washington. The majority of Congress now works for its corporate paymasters. That has resulted in perverse economic outcomes across the national landscape that have, in turn, created the greatest wealth inequality in America since the late 1920s. While reforming the way political campaigns are financed in America has received a great deal of attention, far too little attention has been given to the grotesque disfiguration of far … Continue reading →

What Was JPMorgan Doing in its Dark Pools During the 2,000-Point Plunge Week?

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 →

JPMorgan’s Most Admired Bank Award: General Public Had No Say

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 →