Search Results for: Jamie Dimon

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 16, 2021 ~ The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) is the agency that prevents financial panics from turning into catastrophic runs on banks by providing taxpayer-backstopped and government guaranteed insurance on deposits, up to $250,000 per depositor. Its leadership and honest governance is thus critically important to every American. So when a nasty public brawl breaks out between the Board of Directors of the FDIC and its Chairwoman, Jelena McWilliams, every American needs to sit up and pay attention. On Tuesday, Rohit Chopra, President Biden’s nominee who has been confirmed to lead the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), which automatically makes him a member of the Board of Directors of the FDIC, posted at the CFPB’s website serious charges against FDIC Chairwoman McWilliams – effectively stating that she was staging a one-woman coup against her Board and usurping their power to govern the FDIC. … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 8, 2021 ~ Yesterday, Cornell Law Professor, Saule Omarova, withdrew from her nomination to become the head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the regulator of national banks. Emily Flitter, reporting for the New York Times, said it was because Omarova had been “painted as a communist.” In terms of the full story on why Omarova had to withdraw, that is like pointing to a single droplet of rain as the cause of a hurricane. In October, the Vanderbilt Law Review published a 69-page paper by Omarova in which she made the following bizarre recommendations to reform the U.S. banking system: (1) Move all commercial bank deposits from commercial banks to so-called FedAccounts at the Federal Reserve; (2) Allow the Fed, in “extreme and rare circumstances, when the Fed is unable to control inflation by raising interest rates,” to confiscate deposits … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: November 29, 2021 ~ For more than two decades, the general counsels of Wall Street’s mega banks have been meeting together secretly once a year at ritzy hotels and resorts around the world. This would appear to be a clear violation of anti-trust law but since Wall Street’s revolving door has compromised the U.S. Department of Justice over much of that time span, there has been no pushback from the Justice Department to shut down these clandestine meetings. Wall Street insiders say that among the top agenda items at this annual confab are strategy sessions on how to keep Congress from enacting legislation that would bring an end to Wall Street’s privatized justice system called mandatory arbitration. This system allows the most serially corrupt industry in America to effectively lock the nation’s courthouse doors to claims of fraud from its workers and customers. This private justice system also … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 18, 2021 ~ Last Thursday, Hannah Levitt of Bloomberg News published a report about a large trader exodus at JPMorgan Chase. She wrote: “…By this fall, many of the team’s heaviest hitters had gone. “The setting wasn’t some struggling investment bank. It was the equity derivatives desk inside the mighty JPMorgan Chase & Co. – one of many pockets of employee turnover that have erupted there in recent months, keeping the company’s recruiters busy.” That article was published at 8:00 a.m. By 11:00 a.m., Bloomberg News was finessing that negative article with another article by Brian Chappatta, which appeared to be an attempt to boost both the bank’s reputation as well as that of its Chairman and CEO, Jamie Dimon. Chappatta wrote: “Even with competitive pay and the bank’s prestige, departure rates in many of its businesses are reportedly up at least a few percentage points from pre-pandemic … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 17, 2021 ~ We recently read the report conducted by the Special Committee of the Board of Directors of Credit Suisse into how the bank had lost $5.5 billion when the Archegos family office hedge fund that was being financed by Credit Suisse and other Wall Street firms blew itself up this past March. One paragraph in particular caught our attention: “The Archegos-related losses sustained by CS are the result of a fundamental failure of management and controls in CS’s Investment Bank and, specifically, in its Prime Services business. The business was focused on maximizing short-term profits and failed to rein in and, indeed, enabled Archegos’s voracious risk-taking. There were numerous warning signals—including large, persistent limit breaches—indicating that Archegos’s concentrated, volatile, and severely under-margined swap positions posed potentially catastrophic risk to CS. Yet the business, from the in-business risk managers to the Global Head … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 15, 2021 ~ The previous time a female lawyer who worked at JPMorgan Chase blew the whistle on frauds occurring inside the bank, the U.S. Department of Justice, along with other federal and state regulators, ended up charging the bank with selling toxic mortgage securities to investors and making JPMorgan Chase pay $13 billion to settle the charges. That female lawyer was Alayne Fleischmann, as Matt Taibbi detailed in a report for Rolling Stone in 2014. Taibbi summarizes the matter as follows: “Back in 2006, as a deal manager at the gigantic bank, Fleischmann first witnessed, then tried to stop, what she describes as ‘massive criminal securities fraud’ in the bank’s mortgage operations.” According to Fleischmann, who worked as a Transaction Manager at JPMorgan, her department was assigned with assuring that only good mortgage loans were securitized but, instead, under pressure from bosses, it waived in improperly … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 4, 2021 ~ On April 5 of this year, Axios ran this headline: “Poll indicates low trust, poor public perception of the Fed.” Axios had commissioned an Ipsos poll which found that 53 percent of Americans didn’t trust the U.S. central bank, the Federal Reserve. An earlier Axios/Ipsos poll released on February 23 had found that a stunning 60 percent of Americans didn’t trust the Fed. Both of those polls were taken before the trading scandal at the Fed further damaged its credibility. Those poll numbers likely explain why Fed Chairman Jerome Powell uses every press conference he conducts as an opportunity to state that the Fed’s priority is to work for the American people. Unfortunately, the facts keep getting in the way of that statement. Powell held another of his press conferences yesterday and did more harm to the Fed’s credibility by making … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: November 3, 2021 ~ Yesterday, President Biden stunned moderates in his party by formally sending his nomination of Cornell Law Professor Saule Omarova to head the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) to the Senate. The OCC regulates national banks, those operating across state lines, which include some of the largest banks in the nation, such as JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Citigroup’s Citibank. Many folks believed that after Omarova’s recent law journal article became widely analyzed, she would remove herself from consideration or Biden would quietly ask her to step aside. As Wall Street On Parade revealed last week, Omarova’s 69-page paper published in the Vanderbilt Law Review in October, proposed the following: (1) Moving all commercial bank deposits from commercial banks to so-called FedAccounts at the Federal Reserve; (2) Allowing the Fed, in “extreme and rare circumstances, when the Fed is unable to … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 2, 2021 ~ The Office of Inspector General (OIG) for the Federal Reserve is conducting an investigation of the trading activities that led to the resignations of Dallas Fed President Robert Kaplan and Boston Fed President Eric Rosengren on September 27. The trading of other Fed officials may also be under the microscope. The OIG investigations are conducted by federal criminal investigators who have the power to “carry firearms, seek and execute search and arrest warrants, and make arrests without a warrant in certain circumstances.” The investigative findings can be referred to the U.S. Department of Justice for criminal or civil prosecution, if warranted. In the case of Kaplan, the matter belongs in the hands of the Department of Justice right now. Despite having ongoing access to market-moving information throughout 2020, Kaplan was trading in and out of S&P 500 futures in individual trades … Continue reading →

Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 18, 2021 ~ Private Banks operated by the mega Wall Street banks have an unseemly reputation. So when we opened Atlanta Fed President Raphael Bostic’s financial disclosure forms and saw that he had a financial relationship with Morgan Stanley’s Private Bank, a red flag went up immediately. Citibank’s Private Bank was previously the subject of an investigation by the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. At a hearing on November 9, 1999, the Chair of the Subcommittee, the late Senator Carl Levin, explained how private banks work. Levin stated: “Once a person becomes a client of a private bank, the bank’s primary goal generally has been to service that client, and servicing a private bank client almost always means using services that are also the tools of money laundering: secret trusts, offshore accounts, secret name accounts, and shell companies called private investment corporations. These private … Continue reading →