Search Results for: Jamie Dimon

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 26, 2019 ~ There is one phrase on Wall Street that instills fright like no other – “intra-day bankruptcy” – especially if it’s describing a bankruptcy filing by a highly interconnected Wall Street firm. On July 20, 2008 a Federal Reserve economist, Patrick Parkinson, used that phrase in an email to describe fears that Lehman Brothers might have to make an intra-day bankruptcy filing and to speculate on what was going on in the minds of the folks at JPMorgan Chase, Lehman’s clearing bank, regarding how it might get “stuck” with Lehman’s overnight loans. The email describes perfectly what is highly likely going on in the minds of top executives at JPMorgan Chase today and why the Fed has been pumping hundreds of billions of dollars each week into unnamed trading houses on Wall Street since September 17. The email was contained in … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 25, 2019 ~ The National Information Center is a little-known repository of bank data collected by the Federal Reserve. It is part of the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC), which was created by federal legislation to create uniformity in the examination of U.S. financial institutions by the numerous federal regulators of banks. Quietly, the National Information Center has done something that has likely made Jamie Dimon hopping mad. Dimon is the Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase who has bragged perpetually in his annual letter to shareholders about how the bank he leads has a “fortress balance sheet.” But now the National Information Center has created a graphic profile of JPMorgan Chase versus its peer banks. The graphics crunch a series of important financial metrics at JPMorgan Chase, showing it to be the riskiest bank in the United States. The data used … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 20, 2019 ~ The New York Fed has now pumped out upwards of $3 trillion in a period of 63 days to unnamed trading houses on Wall Street to ease a liquidity crisis that has yet to be credibly explained. In addition, it has launched a new asset purchase program, buying up $60 billion each month in U.S. Treasury bills. Based on the continuing escalation of its plans, it appears to be testing the limits of what the public will tolerate. We thought it was time to answer the question: who exactly owns the New York Fed and its magical money spigot that can pump trillions of dollars into Wall Street at the press of a button. The largest shareowners of the New York Fed are the following five Wall Street banks: JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Bank of New … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 15, 2019 ~ Yesterday, for the second day in a row, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, gave testimony and took questions before a Congressional Committee. On Wednesday it was the Joint Economic Committee; yesterday it was the House Budget Committee. On both days, only one member of the Committee dared to ask a question about the hundreds of billions of dollars the Fed is hurling at Wall Street each week in repo loans. The crisis in the repo loan market, where financial institutions make overnight loans to each other, began on September 17 when the interest rate spiked from the typical range of 2 percent to 10 percent. For the first time since the financial crisis, the Federal Reserve had to step in with lots of cash to ease the liquidity stresses. The Fed has continued to offer that cash … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 13, 2019 ~ JPMorgan Chase is not a bank that federal regulators can simply put on autopilot and hope for the best. When the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations conducted a formal probe into how the bank lost $6.2 billion of its federally-insured bank’s deposits by gambling in derivatives in London in 2012, the Chair of the subcommittee, former Senator Carl Levin, said that the bank had “piled on risk, hid losses, disregarded risk limits, manipulated risk models, dodged oversight, and misinformed the public.” Over the past five years, the bank has admitted to three criminal felony charges brought by the U.S. Department of Justice and is currently under an ongoing criminal probe by federal prosecutors over charges that its traders ran an eight-year criminal enterprise out of its precious metals trading desk in New York. But it seems that the Federal … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 11, 2019 ~ Since September 17 of this year, the central bank of the United States, the Federal Reserve, has been pumping hundreds of billions of dollars each week to unnamed trading firms on Wall Street. We know the loans are going to trading firms because the loans are being made to the 24 primary dealers (see list below) with whom the New York Fed conducts open market operations. (The list includes one foreign bank and 23 stock brokerage houses and investment banks.) The New York Fed has publicly disclosed that the loans are going to primary dealers but will not say which firms are getting the bulk of the money. The Fed did something very similar to this under a facility it called the Primary Dealer Credit Facility (PDCF) during the financial crisis. It kept the names of the firms getting the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 8, 2019 ~ Jelena McWilliams is a Trump appointee who currently serves as the Chairwoman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the federal agency responsible for insuring the deposits of commercial banks and savings associations in the United States. McWilliams also knows her way around Wall Street. Her resume at the FDIC states that “Before entering public service, she practiced corporate and securities law at Morrison & Foerster LLP in Palo Alto, California, and Hogan & Hartson LLP (now Hogan Lovells LLP) in Washington, D.C.” As a corporate lawyer, McWilliams “represented publicly and privately-held companies in mergers and acquisitions, securities offerings, strategic business ventures, venture capital investments, and general corporate matters.” McWilliams put her Wall Street savvy to work from 2012 to 2017 in the positions of deputy staff director, chief counsel and senior counsel to the U.S. Senate Banking Committee where … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 6, 2019 ~ The Federal Reserve Bank of New York (New York Fed) is just one of the 12 regional Federal Reserve banks around the country. But it has amassed enormous powers for itself since the Federal Reserve was created in 1913. Three of those powers dwarf all others: the ability to create money electronically at the push of a button; the accepted right to meddle in the markets; and the supervision of some of the largest bank holding companies in America. After Wall Street blew itself up under the indulging and incompetent supervision of the New York Fed in 2008 and it was exposed that the Fed had secretly created $29 trillion in electronic money to bail out zombie banks – most of that funneled out by the New York Fed – most rational folks would have assumed that Congress would have … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 5, 2019 ~ The Fed is in deep fear, while also in deep denial, about what happened last December. Its fear is that it could happen again this December. Its denial is that its lax supervision of the Wall Street mega banks is largely responsible for the mess. The stock market news on December 24 of last year was not what folks want to be reading about on Christmas Eve. The Dow Jones Industrial Average had plunged 653 points on Christmas Eve and headline writers across major media were declaring the month to have been the worst December for stocks since the Great Depression. But the declines in the broader stock market averages paled in comparison to the December carnage that occurred in the share prices of the mega banks on Wall Street and, to the Fed’s consternation, the insurance companies that are … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 28, 2019 ~  JPMorgan Chase is the largest bank in the United States with $1.6 trillion in deposits from more than 5,000 retail bank branches spread across the country. When it withdraws liquidity from the U.S. financial system, that has a reverberating impact.  According to the filings that JPMorgan Chase makes annually with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), since 2013 JPMorgan Chase has spent $77 billion buying back its own stock. That includes the whopping $17.01 billion it has spent in just the first nine months of this year buying back its stock. But here’s the shocking news. According to its SEC filings, JPMorgan Chase is partly using Federally insured deposits made by moms and pops across the country in its more than 5,000 branches to prop up its share price with buybacks. The wording in the filing is as follows: “In … Continue reading →