Search Results for: Jamie Dimon

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 23, 2021 ~ The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the regulator of national banks that operate across state lines, released a report on Monday that details the quantity and variety of derivatives held by commercial banks, savings associations and trust companies as of September 30. (According to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, there were 4,914 commercial banks, savings associations and trust companies operating in the U.S. with FDIC insurance as of September 30.) The striking detail in the OCC report is that one taxpayer-backstopped, federally-insured bank, JPMorgan Chase Bank N.A., is for some unfathomable reason sitting on 62 percent of all stock (equity) derivatives held at all 4,914 federally-insured banks in the United States. The second striking detail is that this federally-insured bank’s holdings of stock derivatives come to a notional amount (face amount) of $3.3 trillion. (Yes, trillion with a … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: December 22, 2021 ~ Two interesting things happened this week just one day apart. On Monday, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the regulator of national banks, released its quarterly report on “Bank Trading and Derivatives Activities” which documented insane levels of risk at four federally-insured banks, which have merged themselves with Wall Street’s trading casinos to form Frankenbanks. The very next day, an opinion columnist at Bloomberg News, Jared Dillian, wrote a column lamenting the “loss of risk-taking” on Wall Street which he appears to blame on “excessive compliance and regulation.” The column was given the pity-party title: “The Wall Street That I Once Knew No Longer Exists.” Compare these two very disparate views of the reality on Wall Street today. The OCC’s report shares this: “The total notional amount of derivative contracts held by banks in the third quarter increased by $978.0 billion (0.5 … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 20, 2021 ~ JPMorgan Chase is the largest bank in the United States. It also has the scandalous distinction of having admitted to five criminal felony counts brought by the U.S. Department of Justice since 2014 and a breathtaking series of additional charges from other regulators. (See its Rap Sheet here.) On Friday, the Securities and Exchange Commission fined the securities unit of JPMorgan Chase $125 million for evading the ability of the SEC to adequately conduct its investigations of the bank because there was “firmwide” use by traders, supervisors and other personnel of non-official communications devices to conduct its business, while the firm failed to record and retain these messages as required by law. These new violations occurred despite similar conduct during the bank’s participation in the rigging of the foreign exchange market, which brought a criminal felony charge against the bank by … Continue reading →

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 →