Search Results for: JPMorgan

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 21, 2016 Americans have painful recollections of how allowing ratings agencies to take Wall Street money and dole out bogus triple-A ratings on subprime mortgages tanked the U.S. housing market in the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression. They fully understand that the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision that opened the floodgates to pay-to-play corporate financing of elections has grotesquely disfigured participatory democracy in America. Now they’re about to learn how America’s “free press” is able to be bought – literally. This past Friday, March 18, Laurence Kotlikoff, a Forbes contributor, Professor of Economics at Boston University and bestselling co-author of Get What’s Yours: The Secrets To Maxing Out Your Social Security, tweeted the headline of an article he had just posted at Forbes: “JPMorgan Chase – The True Story of America’s Most Corrupt Bank.” The Tweet linked to a two-page article … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 2, 2016 Two interesting things happened this week in Jamie Dimon’s world: two gutsy attorneys, Helen Davis Chaitman and Lance Gotthoffer, published a book comparing JPMorgan Chase to the Gambino crime family, explaining how the bank could and should be prosecuted under RICO statutes for serial frauds against the investing public. Taking a diametrically different tack, Bloomberg Markets magazine editor, Joel Weber, fawned over Dimon in a Bloomberg TV interview, repeatedly asserting that Jamie Dimon is all about the customer. This Bloomberg video is so hilarious we had to watch it several times to make sure it wasn’t satire.  As Weber makes his case that Dimon is all about the customer, his Bloomberg colleague, Stephanie Ruhle, is having none of it, reminding the obviously star-struck Weber that the big banks are hated in this country for good reason. Instead of acknowledging the serial frauds … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 29, 2016  There is quite a bit of inchoate dissonance as to whether JPMorgan Chase is a good investment. Recently, banking analyst Mike Mayo called JPMorgan Chase the “Lebron James of banking.” Lebron James is a famous basketball player who has won a lot of great awards for doing great things, including Olympic Gold. JPMorgan Chase is a bank that has, since Jamie Dimon took the helm as CEO on January 1, 2006, received a deferred prosecution agreement for two felony counts from the U.S. Justice Department for facilitating the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme and just last May agreed to a felony count for rigging foreign currency markets. In addition to the felony counts, there has been a serial stream of settlements for everything from rigging electricity markets to ripping off members of the U.S. military. We don’t know why Mike Mayo would … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 1, 2015  JPMorgan Asset Management is running “sponsored content” at Barron’s, the financial publication, with today’s date and a remarkably rosy economic outlook given last week’s market rout and this morning’s Dow futures plunging to down 396 points at 9:02 a.m. – just 28 minutes before the market was set to open in New York. There used to be a time when advertising in newspapers was called advertising and you knew money was changing hands. All Barron’s is saying about JPMorgan’s “sponsored content” is this: “Barron’s news organization was not involved in the creation of this content.” Here’s the curious part of what JPMorgan Asset Management has to say about the U.S. economy: “…we find little to indicate that a slowdown is imminent. In any event, historically there’s been a long lag between signals of a downturn and the onset of recession. In … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 25, 2015  America’s largest bank, JPMorgan Chase, has lost 10.87 percent of its market capitalization in the past three trading sessions. That’s $27.18 billion in three days, raising serious questions about the Federal Reserve’s theory that beefed up equity capital would buffer the mega banks in a market downturn. While the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 3.57 percent yesterday, JPMorgan lost 5.27 percent, despite its rich dividend yield of 2.92 percent.  The indefatigable Eric Hunsader, owner of the market data firm Nanex, was Tweeting the abominations occurring in the stock market yesterday as the opening bell set off a bungee dive to a loss of 1,089 points in the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA). The Dow ended the day down 588 points to close at 15,871.35, a three day loss of 1,477 points. One of Hunsader’s Tweets remarked on the bizarre price action … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 23, 2015  From the looks of JPMorgan’s share price, one would think the financial world is bathing in a sea of tranquility rather than experiencing crashing commodity prices, tremors in the Eurozone, Canada acknowledging two quarters of contraction, ruptures in China’s stock markets, and energy and mining junk bonds losing 20 to 30 percent in a month. JPMorgan’s share price hit an all-time closing high of $70.08 yesterday. The scary thing is, JPMorgan’s stock had a run from $32 to $42 just one month before Lehman Brothers blew up in 2008, marking the beginning of the biggest financial crash since the Great Depression; and there had been a year of financial warnings prior to that. (So much for global bank share prices being a bellwether on global financial stability.) Once the 2008 crash was clearly underway, JPMorgan shareholders saw 70 percent of their … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 15, 2015 The U.S. Treasury’s Office of Financial Research (OFR), the body created under the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation to make sure another 2008 epic crash never happened again, quietly released a report last week which not only suggests another 2008-style crash is possible but that regulators will likely be blindsided again. The report, written by Jill Cetina, John McDonough, and Sriram Rajan, reveals that the big Wall Street banks are ginning up their capital measures by engaging in opaque and potentially dangerous “capital relief trades.” To illustrate how dangerous this kind of capital relief arbitrage can be, the report says that JPMorgan’s London Whale trades (which blew a $6.2 billion hole in the insured bank) was a capital relief trade. Here’s the precise language from the report: “JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s losses in the 2012 London Whale case were the result of … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 1, 2015 Since December 2013 there have been a rash of unusual deaths among workers at JPMorgan Chase, including alleged leaps from buildings and two separate alleged murder-suicides in New Jersey. A noteworthy number of the deaths have been among technology workers. With the exception of Julian Knott, who was a high level technology expert for JPMorgan in both London and later at the firm’s high tech Global Network Operations Center in Whippany, New Jersey, all of the individuals were under 40. (See names and incidents below.) Last Thursday, 29-year old Thomas Hughes allegedly took his life by jumping from a luxury apartment building at 1 West Street in Manhattan. According to Hughes’ resume at the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), he had previously interned at JPMorgan Chase, as well as held jobs at Citigroup and UBS after graduation from Northwestern University. Hughes … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 26, 2015 As the U.S. Department of Labor deliberates giving JPMorgan Chase a waiver to continue business as usual after it pleaded guilty to a felony charge for engaging in a multi-bank conspiracy to rig foreign currency trading, a letter the bank sent to its foreign currency customers should become Exhibit A in the deliberations. The letter effectively tells JPMorgan’s customers, here’s how we’re going to continue to rip your face off. Two sections of the letter stand out in particular. One section reads: “As a market maker that manages a portfolio of positions for multiple counterparties’ competing interests, as well as JPMorgan’s own interests, JPMorgan acts as principal and may trade prior to or alongside a counterparty’s transaction to execute transactions for JPMorgan…” (Italic emphasis added.) Most of the general public believes that proprietary trading (trading for the house) was outlawed by … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 21, 2015 After more than 200 years of operation, yesterday JPMorgan Chase became an admitted felon. That action for foreign currency rigging came less than two years after the bank was charged with two felony counts and given a deferred prosecution agreement for aiding and abetting Bernie Madoff in the largest Ponzi fraud in history. The felony counts came amid three years of non-stop charges against JPMorgan Chase for unthinkable frauds: from rigging electric markets to ripping off veterans to charging credit card customers for fictitious credit monitoring and manipulating the Libor interest rate benchmark. Against this backdrop of a serial crime spree on the part of employees on multiple continents and coast to coast in the United States, JPMorgan released a statement yesterday regarding the bank pleading guilty to a felony charge for engaging in the rigging of foreign currency trading, calling … Continue reading →