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Recent Posts
- The New York Fed Has Contracted Out Key Functions to JPMorgan Chase; We Filed a FOIA and Got These Strange Invoices
- On the Eve of Netanyahu’s Address to Congress, Senator Bernie Sanders Delivers a Breathtaking Assessment of His War Crimes
- Trump’s Sit-Down with Netanyahu at Mar-a-Lago Will Cost U.S. Taxpayers Millions While Profiting Trump’s Business
- Protecting Trump and His Jet-Setting Adult Children During His Presidency Cost Taxpayers Over $1 Billion
- A Congressman and a Doctor Reported a Woman Being Shot at Trump Rally: She’s Vanished from Official Reports
- Jamie Dimon Goes Missing from Earnings Call, After Dumping $183 Million of His JPMorgan Chase Stock Earlier this Year
- U.S. Senate Candidate Backed by Hedge Fund Billionaires Was Sitting in Front Row at Trump Rally as the Sniper Fired into the Bleachers
- Project 2025: The Fossil Fuel and Banking Money Behind the Madness
- The Fund Created to Unwind a Failing Megabank Has a Problem: There’s No Money in It
- Joe Biden Versus the New York Times
- Grand Jury Transcript in Jeffrey Epstein Case Is Released, Raising Questions about Epstein’s Darkest Secrets Being Protected in JPMorgan Cases
- The Supreme Court Crowns a King, Immunizing Future Criminal Acts Under Project 2025 – a Right Wing Manifesto
- The Debate Disaster and the Supreme Court’s “Chevron” Repeal Have a Money Trail Leading to Charles Koch
- Congressman Andy Barr Stacks a Hearing on the Fed’s Stress Tests with Lobbyists for Megabanks
- The Fed Posts Historic Operating Losses As It Pays Out 5.40 Percent Interest to Banks
- Goldman Sachs’ Bank Derivatives Have Grown from $40 Trillion to $54 Trillion in Five Years; So How Did Its Credit Exposure Improve by 200 Percent?
- The Fed and FDIC Wake Up Suddenly to the Threat of Derivatives, Flunking the Four Largest Derivative Banks on their Wind-Down Plans
- Is the Stock Market Setting Investors Up for a Tech Bust Similar to the Dot.com Bust?
- Chase Bank Customers Are Reporting a Wave of Wire Fraud in their Accounts; the Bank Won’t Make Good on the Looted Funds
- The Senate Race in Ohio Is the Sickest in U.S. History in Terms of Billionaire Money from Outside the State
- Sullivan & Cromwell’s Legal Work for Sam Bankman-Fried’s Crypto House of Fraud Is Getting a Closer Look in Two Federal Court Cases
- Crypto Tries to Recreate the Koch Money Machine to Pack Congress with Shills
- French Fears Ignite Selloff in U.S. Megabanks and Foreign Peers
- Crypto Just Got Exponentially More Dangerous: Meet Fairshake
- Nvidia Hit a $3 Trillion Market Cap Last Week; Dark Pools Are Making Over 300,000 Trades in the Stock Weekly
- The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Is Making Enemies in All the Right Places
- A Former Exec at Citibank Raises Alarm Bells in Federal Court Over Failed Risk Controls Inside the Bank
- Charles Koch’s Money Is Being Used in Elections in Ways Only Orwell Could Have Imagined
- Freakonomics and Frankenbanks: JPMorgan Chase Sucked Up 18 Percent of All Profits of 4,568 FDIC-Insured Banks in the First Quarter
- Academic Study Provides Hard Numbers to the Sick, Revolving Door Culture at Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Citigroup
- $244 Billion of Treasury Debt to Hit the Market Today and Tomorrow as Interest Rates Spike on Ballooning Supply
- CFTC Fines J.P. Morgan Securities — a Fed Primary Dealer — $100 Million for Failing to Surveil Potential Spoofing and High Frequency Trading for Eight Years
- Another FDIC-Insured Bank Got in Bed with Fintech; It’s Now Got a Dumpster Fire and Desperate Pleas from Customers for their Money
- Citigroup Gets Fined $79 Million Two Years After It Caused a $300 Billion Flash Crash in European Stock Markets
- After Weeks of Howling by MAGA Republicans for the Chair of the FDIC “to Resign,” a Democrat Delivers the Decisive Stab in the Back
- The Curious Money Trail Behind the Supreme Court/Clarence Thomas Decision to Rescue a Federal Agency that Wall Street Hates
- Saudi Arabia’s Wealth Fund Dumps Its JPMorgan Chase Stock; Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Did the Same in 2020
- One of Jeffrey Epstein’s Protectors at JPMorgan Chase, Mary Erdoes, Has Sold $29 Million of Her Stock in the Bank Since Just Before Epstein’s Arrest in 2019
- Delinquencies on Office Property Loans at Banks Are at 8 Percent While Office Loans the Banks Sold to Investors Show 31 Percent in Trouble
- Goldman Sachs Shines Up Its Swamp Creature Reputation by Rehiring Robert Kaplan as Vice Chairman – the Guy Who Traded Like a Hedge Fund Kingpin While President of the Dallas Fed
- Cleary Gottlieb – Outside Counsel to Wall Street’s Serially Bailed Out Megabanks – Tarnishes the FDIC Chair in its So-Called “Independent” Report
- JPMorgan Chase and Its Regulators Are Hiding Dark Trading Secrets at the Largest and Riskiest U.S. Bank
- Campus Protests Over Gaza Open a Pandora’s Box for Wall Street Megabanks that Underwrote $8 Billion of Israel’s Bonds in March
- Wall Street’s Megabanks Have Trillions of Dollars Off-Balance Sheet, in a Replay of Accounting Hubris that Led to the 2008 Wall Street Collapse
- JPMorgan Remains the Second Largest Money Market Fund Manager, Despite Needing Billions in Money Market Bailouts from the Fed in 2020
- The First Bank Failure of 2024 Leaves a 1-Cent Stock for Investors and $667 Million in Losses for the FDIC
- Catch and Kill Protection Rackets: Trump, Weinstein, Epstein and Wall Street
- Wall Street’s Judge Shopping Continues: It’s Trying to Stop the FTC’s Ban on Worker Handcuffs Known as Non-Compete Agreements
- The Fed Tallies Up a Big Threat to Financial Stability in the U.S.: “Runnables” at $21.3 Trillion
- Billionaire-Owned Media Has Gone Full Throttle to Save Fellow Billionaire, Jamie Dimon
Search Results for: JPMorgan
Jamie Dimon Has Become the JPMorgan Brand – And That’s a Problem
By Pam Martens: May 24, 2013 For five solid years, the highs and lows of JPMorgan’s Chairman and CEO, Jamie Dimon, have been splashed across the headlines of the business press. First he was the Wall Street hero who came through the 2008 financial crisis unscathed. He sprinkled the phrase “fortress balance sheet” throughout his media interviews. He lectured Washington against over-regulating big banks (despite the fact they had just collapsed the largest economy in the world). He called international plans to require more bank capital reserves “anti-American.” He was the reigning King of Wall Street and he relished the limelight. And then, in an instant, the King’s crown was tarnished. His glib tongue uttered the immortal words “tempest in a teapot” over outsized bets by his derivatives traders in London, only to have to eat back that phrase, letter by letter, billion by billion in reported losses over the … Continue reading
Personal Investing Lessons from JPMorgan’s London Whale Debacle
By Pam Martens: March 22, 2013 One year ago this week, Ina Drew, head of the Chief Investment Office at JPMorgan which oversaw the synthetic credit derivatives portfolio that eventually blew up $6.2 billion of depositors’ money, told her traders “phones down,” signaling that she was halting all trading in those instruments. What Drew should have much earlier told her traders was: “unplug algorithms; plug in brains.” Despite a multitude of formulas for measuring risk, multiple layers of oversight management, 28 members of a risk management team with titles like Managing Director, Executive Director, and Vice President, it somehow didn’t occur to any of these folks that the number one criteria for a trading investment is that you need to be able to get out of it. London Whale was the nickname given to the JPMorgan trader, Bruno Iksil, as a result of the outsized bets he was making on … Continue reading
JPMorgan: Poster Child for the Most Dangerous Financial System Since 1929
By Pam Martens: March 20, 2013 Last Friday, Senator Carl Levin told the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations that JPMorgan “piled on risk, hid losses, disregarded risk limits, manipulated risk models, dodged oversight, and misinformed the public.” And here’s the punch line: that’s not even the worst of what JPMorgan did. Each of the charges leveled by Levin occurred on a regular basis over the past decade at the largest Wall Street investment banks. What has elevated JPMorgan to the top of the Wall Street dung heap is that the long laundry list of violations cited by Levin occurred in the commercial bank, not the investment bank. JPMorgan was gambling with the insured deposits of its customers – not its own capital. Thus far, it has acknowledged $6.2 billion in trading losses using other people’s money. Both Senator Levin, who chairs the Senate Subcommittee, and Senator John McCain, ranking minority … Continue reading
The Other Thing JPMorgan Was Doing in Its Chief Investment Office: Profiting On the Death of Employees
By Pam Martens: March 19, 2013 Gambling on high-risk synthetic credit derivatives is not the only area of interest at JPMorgan’s Chief Investment Office (CIO) – the division that has thus far admitted to losing $6.2 billion in the London Whale debacle. According to Exhibit 81 released by the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Ina Drew, the head of the CIO, was also overseeing the investment of funds in the firm’s Bank Owned Life Insurance (BOLI) and Corporate Owned Life Insurance (COLI) plans – a scheme enshrined by the U.S. Congress in 2006 that allows too-big-to-fail banks as well as many other corporations to reap huge tax benefits by taking out life insurance policies on workers – even low wage workers – and naming the corporation the beneficiary of the death benefit. According to the exhibit, Drew was tasked with “Maximization of tax-advantaged investments of life insurance premiums” for … Continue reading
Senate Censors Part of Report on JPMorgan About Its Stock Trading
By Pam Martens: March 18, 2013 The 307-page report the Senate released last Thursday on JPMorgan’s cowboy culture was deeply unsettling; the testimony under oath at the related Senate hearing on Friday was equally shocking with eyewitness accounts confirming that CEO Jamie Dimon ordered the withholding of financial data to a regulator while both he and the Chief Financial Officer at the time, Douglas Braunstein, presented an Alice in Wonderland version of facts to the public in April 2012. But it now appears that the worst of this story may be so unsettling to the markets and the public perception of Wall Street that it must be censored from public viewing. Throughout the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigation’s 98 exhibits of emails and internal memos on the wild trading schemes at JPMorgan, the word “Redacted” appears. In a high number of the areas where the material is censored, it concerns … Continue reading
JPMorgan: The House that Jamie Built Looks Much Like the House That Sandy Built
By Pam Martens: March 15, 2013 Much of the investing public, and I would venture many members of the research team at the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations that compiled the 307 page report on JPMorgan’s $6.2 billion in losses from the London Whale trade, are unaware that the company’s Chairman and CEO, Jamie Dimon, learned at the knee of the mastermind of too-big-to-fail – former Citigroup Chairman and CEO, Sandy Weill. From 1982 to 1998, Dimon was Weill’s first lieutenant, rising to the rank of President of Citigroup. Carl Levin, Chairman of the Subcommittee, released the stunning investigative report yesterday and, throughout, the level of arrogance toward regulators, the dishonesty and dissembling on earnings calls, the hiding of losses, and the specter of the imperial CEO conjured up images of the downfall of Citigroup and Weill’s role in creating the culture than burned down the house. It felt, alarmingly, like … Continue reading
JPMorgan Puts Jamie Dimon Underlings In Charge of Investigating Dimon’s Failures In London Whale Episode
By Pam Martens: January 17, 2013 Wall Street’s thoroughly discredited self-regulation that has blazed a trail of corruption across much of the securities trading landscape of America, has now given birth to a new brand of hubris – self investigation and self reporting. Yesterday, JPMorgan released a report from its Board of Directors that found [drum roll] that the Board was not culpable in the London Whale episode, it just needed to tweak a few things going forward. London Whale refers to the blowing up of $6.2 billion of insured deposits at JPMorgan’s commercial bank through reckless trading in derivatives in London. Likewise, a 132-page Task Force report was released which found CEO Jamie Dimon guilty of no greater sin than being too reliant on information from below. The report said: “As Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Dimon could appropriately rely upon senior managers who directly reported to him to escalate significant … Continue reading
Regulator Says JPMorgan Engaged in Unsafe or Unsound Banking Practices But Preserves Golden Parachutes For Execs
By Pam Martens: January 15, 2013 Yesterday, two of JPMorgan Chase’s regulators, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and the Federal Reserve, released the details of their cease and desist consent orders with the mega bank over its lack of proper risk controls in its Chief Investment Office (CIO). The lapses have led to $6.2 billion in losses thus far. JPMorgan, for its part, made sure its golden parachutes – outsized payments to departing executives –would not be limited by the consent agreement. The debacle, known on Wall Street as the London Whale trades, stem from traders in London, particularly Bruno Iksil who is no longer at the bank, engaging in high risk derivatives trading in a thinly traded corporate bond derivatives index. The nickname, “Whale,” derives from the bank making trades so large that it effectively became the market in that index and could not quickly exit the positions. Congress held … Continue reading
JPMorgan Bought Itself a Boatload of Trouble With Bear Stearns
By Pam Martens: November 20, 2012 If only JPMorgan had been privy to those titillating emails from the Bear Stearns guys packaging the residential mortgage backed securities (RMBS) – the emails calling the bombs they were preparing to unload on investors a “sack of shit,” or “a shit breather,” and urging colleagues to “close this dog.” JPMorgan might not have been so willing to step up to the plate at the beckoning of the New York Fed and acquire Bear Stearns as it teetered toward bankruptcy in March of 2008. But packaging toxic mortgage backed securities and internally calling them disparaging names while failing to share that view with investors is becoming very old news on Wall Street. What is shocking news, even to veterans on Wall Street, is that Bear Stearns is alleged, by both the Securities and Exchange Commission and the New York State Attorney General, Eric Schneiderman, to have engaged in … Continue reading
JPMorgan Has 3-Year Litigation Expense of $16.1 Billion (Enough to Buy 80,500 Families a Home for $200,000)
By Pam Martens: November 19, 2012 Is JPMorgan actually a cartel of lawyers in drag as a bank? You’d think so reading the fine print buried in the firm’s 2011 annual report and the legal disclosures in its hair-raising third quarter report filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on November 5. According to its own figures, JPMorgan has paid the following sums for litigation expense: $3.8 billion for the nine months of 2012 ending September 30; $4.9 billion in 2011; and $7.4 billion in 2010 for the whopping total of $16.1 billion in 33 months. There are more than a dozen small countries that have less than that in annual GDP. How many times have we heard the now enshrined gospel that JPMorgan escaped the 2008 crisis unscathed. Reading the mountain of lawsuits now filed against the firm, it’s clear why: JPMorgan’s role in the housing collapse has … Continue reading