Search Results for: JPMorgan

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 22, 2014  Yesterday the Inspector General of the Federal Reserve System released a highly abbreviated report on the New York Fed’s supervision of JPMorgan’s Chief Investment Office (CIO) that spawned the $6.2 billion in exotic derivative losses in 2012 – using hundreds of billions of dollars in FDIC insured deposits to make those wild bets. The debacle became known as the London Whale since the outsized trades were conducted in London. The four page summary report that was sanitized for the public includes two bombshells for those who took the time to read the report carefully. First, the Inspector General specifically notes that “we selected July 2004 through April 2012 as the time period for our evaluation. July 2004 marked JPMC’s merger with Bank One Corporation (Bank One), and JPMC created the CIO in 2005.” What is the relevance of that nugget? We … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 10, 2014 Sparks were flying yesterday in what is typically a snooze-worthy Senate session. It felt like alien body snatchers had decided to remove the zombies and return the real U.S. Senators to their chairs on the Senate Banking Committee. Senators, right and left, asked tough, probing questions of the nation’s banking regulators, leaving many squirming in their chairs. The session was so unusual that Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat from Massachusetts, and Senator Richard Shelby, a Republican from Alabama, closed out the session in complete agreement that there is something seriously broken about the justice system in America. Senator Warren told the hearing that in the past year, three of the nation’s largest banks — JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and Bank of America — have admitted breaking the law and settled the claims for $35 billion. The Senator continued: “As Judge Rakoff of … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 13, 2014 Helen Davis Chaitman is a nationally recognized litigator and author of The Law of Lender Liability. And she is two other things as well – a Bernie Madoff victim who lost a large part of her life savings to his Ponzi scheme and the tenacious lawyer who represented other victims of his fraud in district and appellate courts.  Now, together with attorney Lance Gotthoffer, Chaitman has written a book titled JPMadoff: The Unholy Alliance Between America’s Biggest Bank and America’s Biggest Crook. The book is being made available to readers on a new web site which will provide a chapter each month. The first chapter is currently available and Chaitman says that the second chapter, to be posted on September 12, will detail what JPMorgan knew and when it knew it.  The web site also provides a quick means of contacting your … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 30, 2014  As Wall Street On Parade reported last week, Jeffrey Kleintop, Chief Market Strategist for LPL Financial, reports that corporations are now the single largest buying source for U.S. stocks – authorizing buybacks of their own stocks to the tune of $754.8 billion in 2013 alone. And it’s a long-term trend. According to Birinyi Associates, for calendar years 2006 through 2013, corporations authorized $4.14 trillion in buybacks of their own publicly traded stock in the U.S. — raising the question, just what kind of a bull market is this? JPMorgan Chase, the largest U.S. bank by assets, has turned share buybacks into an art form, buying back a whopping $17,945,000,000 of shares from 2010 through 2013. In just the calendar year of 2011, JPMorgan spent a stunning $8,827,000,000 on stock buybacks. According to JPMorgan’s most recent quarterly report filed with the Securities … Continue reading →

By Russ Martens and Pam Martens: July 14, 2014 Since December of last year, JPMorgan Chase has been experiencing tragic, sudden deaths of workers on a scale which sets it alarmingly apart from other Wall Street mega banks. Adding to the concern generated by the deaths is the recent revelation that JPMorgan has an estimated $180 billion of life insurance in force on its current and former workers. Making worldwide news last week was the violent deaths of JPMorgan technology executive Julian Knott and his wife, Alita, ages 45 and 47, respectively, in Jefferson Township, New Jersey. However, two other recent, sudden deaths of technology workers at JPMorgan have gone unreported by the media. The bodies of the Knott couple, who have a teenage daughter and two teenage sons, were discovered by police on July 6, 2014 at approximately 1:12 a.m. According to a press release issued by the Morris … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 20, 2014 If it’s at all possible, don’t die on the premises of a too-big-to-fail bank like JPMorgan. That’s because if you do your otherwise meritorious life and career is likely to be turned into a circus of slanderous tidbits in order to promote the reputation of the global banking behemoth as the benevolent guardian of all things noble and saintly. A coroner’s inquest began at 10 a.m. in London this morning to investigate how 39 year old Gabriel Magee, a technology Vice President who worked in JPMorgan’s European headquarters at 25 Bank Street in London, came to be found dead on a 9th level rooftop at approximately 8:02 a.m. on the morning of January 28 of this year. The inquest had barely begun when the wire service, Reuters, ran this headline: “JP Morgan Executive Had High Alcohol Level Before Skyscraper Plunge, London … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 19, 2014 In the past six months, five current workers and two former workers of JPMorgan Chase have died under unusual circumstances. Adding to the tragedy, all seven were in their late 20s or 30s and three of the deaths involved alleged falls from buildings – a rare form of death even during the height of the financial crisis in 2008. According to the New York City Department of Health, there were just 93 deaths resulting from leaps from buildings in Manhattan and boroughs during 2008 – a time when century old iconic Wall Street firms collapsed and terminated tens of thousands of workers. Those 93 deaths represented just .000011625 of the City’s population of 8 million. JPMorgan’s global workforce population is just 260,000. No other major Wall Street bank comes close in terms of young worker deaths over the past six months. … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: April 22, 2014 There is now overwhelming evidence that Wall Street firms have entered a race to the bottom in high-tech trading wars. To grab the best programming talent, Wall Street firms are paying top dollar for the best and brightest coders and developers and potentially sapping the ability of other U.S. industries – those that make real products – to compete. Just this month, Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan, told the firm’s shareholders in his annual letter that JPMorgan employs “nearly 30,000 programmers, application developers and information technology employees who keep our 7,200 applications, 32 data centers, 58,000 servers, 300,000 desk-tops and global network operating smoothly for all our clients.” According to Anish Bhimani, Chief Information Risk Officer at JPMorgan Chase, in an interview published at the Information Networking Institute (INI) at Carnegie Mellon, JPMorgan has “more software developers than Google, and more technologists than Microsoft…we get … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: April 10, 2014 Too-big-to-fail Wall Street mega banks are now one part bank, one part legal defense and one part confidence-game. JPMorgan’s Chairman and CEO, Jamie Dimon, whose career has now survived more scandals in the past two years than most business titans ever see in a lifetime, has penned a masterful 32-page head-fake to shareholders. Dimon tells shareholders that the company has “consistently shown good financial performance” while distancing himself from the $30 billion the company has paid out in fines and settlements for a rash of misdeeds since January 2013. The word “fortress” appears five times in the letter with the oft-expressed “fortress balance sheet” morphing additionally into the “fortress control system” and the “fortress company.” Dimon’s photo appears alongside the letter, clad in a navy jacket and blue shirt. Next year he might want to complete the fortress analogy by donning a Knight’s metal … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 24, 2014 Families of young JPMorgan Chase workers who have experienced tragic deaths over the past four months, have been kept in the dark on many details, including the fact that the bank most likely held a life insurance policy on their loved one – payable to itself. Banks in the U.S., as well as other corporations, are allowed to make multi-billion dollar wagers that their profits from life insurance policies on employees will outstrip the cost of paying premiums and other fees. Early deaths help those wagers pay off. According to the December 31, 2013 financial filing known as the Call Report that JPMorgan made with Federal regulators, it has tied up $10.4 billion in illiquid, long term bets on the death of a large segment of its employees. The program is known among regulators as Bank Owned Life Insurance or BOLI. … Continue reading →