Search Results for: Jamie Dimon

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 12, 2020 ~ Every major Wall Street bank tanked yesterday. Citigroup fared the worst, losing 13.37 percent of its market value versus a broader market decline of 5.89 percent on the S&P 500 Index. Bank of America didn’t look like much of a source of strength either, losing 10.04 percent on the day. The largest bank in the country, JPMorgan Chase, whose CEO, Jamie Dimon, perpetually brags about its “fortress balance sheet,” lost 8.34 percent. For a close look at what’s hiding in the tall weeds behind that fortress, see here. Just the afternoon before this bank carnage, this is what the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, had to say in his press conference about the U.S. banking system (which, of course, the Fed has been in charge of supervising in order to prevent another catastrophic blowup as occurred in 2008): … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 10, 2020 ~ The Federal Reserve has authorized 11 financial bailout programs thus far. Despite Fed Chairman Jerome Powell’s reassurances at his press conferences that these programs are to help American families, a full 10 of these programs are actually bailouts of Wall Street banks or their trading units. The latest Wall Street bank bailout to come out of hiding is the Fed’s Secondary Market Corporate Credit Facility (SMCCF). This program was supposed to buy up corporate bonds in the secondary market in order to help corporate bond markets regain liquidity. Thus far, the only thing the SMCCF has bought up are Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) holding investment grade and junk-rated bonds. The SMCCF program began operations on May 12. By May 18 the Fed had spent $1.58 billion buying up ETFs. The ultimate goal of the facility, at this point, is to … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 15, 2020 ~ Following the Wall Street banking collapse in 2008, the then head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) Sheila Bair wrote the book Bull by the Horns. She described how the Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) had ignored the systemic problems at Citigroup and allowed this “sick bank” to continue paying out cash dividends. Bair wrote as follows: “By November [of 2008], the supposedly solvent Citi was back on the ropes, in need of another government handout. The market didn’t buy the OCC’s and NY Fed’s strategy of making it look as though Citi was as healthy as the other commercial banks. Citi had not had a profitable quarter since the second quarter of 2007. Its losses were not attributable to uncontrollable ‘market conditions’; they were attributable to weak management, high levels of … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 14, 2020 ~ In the Federal Reserve’s most recent “Supervision and Regulation Report” on the big bank holding companies it “supervises,” the Fed continued its attempts to perpetuate the narrative that “The banking industry came into 2020 in a healthy financial position” and has simply unraveled as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. That narrative is built on the same flimsy house of cards that the New York Times and Andrew Ross-Sorkin built the narrative that the mega banks on Wall Street were not responsible for the 2008 financial collapse. The Fed is desperate to promote this narrative to stop a new Congress next year from holding hearings on why the Fed, for the second time in 12 years, had to engage in trillions of dollars in Wall Street bank bailouts after reassuring Congress for years that the financial system was fine as … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 11, 2020 ~ The chart above from the November 2019 Federal Reserve report on the condition of the biggest banks in the U.S. shows that almost half were rated unsatisfactory. There have not been any reports since that November report until the latest one from the Fed which was released last week and dated May 2020. The new report carries this headline: “The banking industry came into 2020 in a healthy financial position.” This is part of the Fed’s strategy to lay its abysmal failure to supervise the mega Wall Street banks at the door of the coronavirus pandemic. It’s very easy today to get a totally bogus headline, one that is built completely on magical thinking, flashed across a TV screen in America. As the photo below illustrates, last Friday Steve Liesman of CNBC repeated this magical thinking from the Fed accompanied … Continue reading →

“This begs the question: did the U.S. have a Wall Street banking crisis similar to 2008 long before there was a pandemic crisis?”  By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 15, 2020 ~  From 3 to 4 p.m. on Wednesday, February 19 of this year, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome (Jay) Powell met in the anteroom to his office in Washington, D.C. with Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase. Adding to the unusual nature of this meeting, the Chief Financial Officer of JPMorgan Chase, Jennifer Piepszak, had traveled with Dimon from New York to Washington, D.C. to attend this meeting. During the entire month of February, Powell met with no other CEO or CFO of any other Wall Street mega bank. We obtained this information from a review of the Fed Chairman’s daily calendar. The meeting came one day after Reuters reported a “sweeping reshuffle” at JPMorgan’s investment bank … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 9, 2020 ~ For the first time in the history of the Federal Reserve, it has signed on to a plan with Congress to nationalize the unmanageable debts of global banks and other multinational corporations and put the U.S. taxpayer on the hook for the losses. Conducting the bulk of these programs will be the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, known as the New York Fed, which is a private institution owned by (wait for it) multinational banks. Because the New York Fed is owned by multinational banks and is allowed to create trillions of dollars out of thin air to conduct bailouts of global banks and multinational corporations since it created this precedent in 2008, it is effectively functioning as a multinational central bank with the Federal Reserve in Washington, D.C. and Fed Chairman Jerome Powell little more than titular props … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 7, 2020 ~ It’s become your life or your trading bonus at some Wall Street firms. On November 10 of last year, Lesley Stahl of the CBS investigative news program, 60 Minutes, interviewed Jamie Dimon, the Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase. As part of the interview, Dimon strolled Stahl around one of his trading floors in New York where traders appeared tightly packed in close quarters. Dimon said this: “This is one of six trading floors in the building. There’s like 450 people in this trading floor. An equivalent to this in London, half of this in Hong Kong, and in 23 other countries around the world.” When we went back to re-watch the program to more carefully consider the dystopian work environment of human beings in the 21st century, we took a screen shot of a female trader at JPMorgan Chase. In … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 5, 2020 ~ According to the Uniform Bank Performance Report for December 31, 2019 at the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC), JPMorgan Chase, whose Chairman and CEO, Jamie Dimon, has perpetually bragged about its “fortress balance sheet,” has $2.3 trillion in exposure on its balance sheet and $2.9 trillion in off-balance sheet exposure. The off-balance sheet exposure includes things like credit card lines of credit that have been issued but not tapped as of December 31, 2019; corporate standby letters of credits that have been issued but not yet tapped; securitized assets that have been sold with recourse back to JPMorgan Chase’s balance sheet; real estate loans committed but not yet funded; and a staggering $1.2 trillion in credit derivatives – the same instruments that brought on an FBI probe and congressional investigations of the bank in 2012 and cost the bank … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 1, 2020 ~ On March 26 Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell went on the Today show to deliver one message: “There is nothing fundamentally wrong with our economy.” Recently U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin has appeared on the White House lawn to tell reporters that this is nothing like the last financial crisis. Fed regional bank presidents have appeared on cable news asserting that the Wall Street banks have plenty of capital and today’s economic distress is caused solely by the coronavirus. Even New York Times columnist and perpetual Wall Street cheerleader, Paul Krugman, was on CNBC this week reassuring viewers that today’s problem was not like the last financial crisis. And yet – the facts keep getting in the way of this “official” narrative. The first coronavirus COVID-19 case was discovered in China in December 2019 and didn’t become a major issue … Continue reading →