Wall Street Law Firm Sullivan & Cromwell Gets Sued Over Allegations It Aided and Abetted the FTX Crypto Fraud

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 21, 2024 ~ The 144-year old Wall Street go-to law firm, Sullivan & Cromwell, may be getting rich on the FTX bankruptcy legal fees, but it’s also doing a helluva job destroying its reputation as a prudent law firm. Last Friday, a federal lawsuit was filed against the law firm alleging civil conspiracy, aiding and abetting fraud, aiding and abetting breach of fiduciary duty, and violations of civil federal racketeering law in regard to its work for the collapsed crypto exchange, FTX, which looted customer funds to the tune of billions of dollars. We’ll get to the stunning allegations in the lawsuit in a moment, but first some necessary background. Last year, Wall Street On Parade wrote more than 20 articles documenting the labyrinthine and deeply conflicted ways that Sullivan & Cromwell had enmeshed itself in the FTX crypto exchange before the house of cards … Continue reading

JPMorgan Says Its “Trading Venues” Are Under Investigation While It’s Still on Probation for Prior Trading Crimes

Jamie Dimon Sits in Front of Trading Monitor in his Office (Source -- 60 Minutes Interview, November 10, 2019)

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 20, 2024 ~ Last Friday, ahead of a three-day weekend when bad news could be expected to evaporate into the ether by the next news cycle, JPMorgan Chase dropped a bombshell in its 10-K (annual report) filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The bank, which has admitted to an unprecedented five criminal felony counts since 2014, said its “trading venues” were under investigation by three unnamed regulatory bodies. This is a very serious matter for this particular bank because three of its prior felony counts involved rigging markets. The bank admitted to rigging foreign exchange markets in 2015 and to rigging, for more than eight years, the precious metals and U.S. Treasury markets in an agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice in September 2020. Two of the precious metals traders involved in the 2020 case, Gregg Smith and Michael Nowak, are sitting in … Continue reading

Jamie Dimon Is Desperate to Pin the Jeffrey Epstein Scandal on Jes Staley; Bloomberg News Is Carrying His Water — Again

Jeffrey Epstein (left); Jamie Dimon (right).

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 16, 2024 ~ After hurling salacious allegations for months against Jes Staley in a federal lawsuit JPMorgan Chase had brought against its former executive, the bank decided last September to quietly settle the case without disclosing the terms. The bank sued Staley after it had been sued by victims of sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and after it had been sued in a separate lawsuit by the Attorney General of the U.S. Virgin Islands, where Epstein owned a private island compound that was a frequent venue of Epstein’s sex trafficking of minors. Lawyers for the U.S. Virgin Islands charged that JPMorgan Chase had “actively participated in Epstein’s sex-trafficking venture from 2006 until 2019.” (Both cases were settled last year by the bank, with it paying a whopping $290 million to the victims and $75 million to the U.S. Virgin Islands.) The bank’s lawsuit against Staley appeared … Continue reading

Citigroup Is Having a Very Bad Week; Regulators Are Breathing Down Its Neck

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 14, 2024 ~ At the exact moment that the stock market closed on Monday, Reuters dropped a bombshell in Warren Buffett’s lap with news that federal banking regulators are breathing down Citigroup’s neck. Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway owns 55,244,797 shares of Citigroup, according to its last 13F filing with the SEC. The bulk of the stake was acquired in the first quarter of 2022. (See our report: Warren Buffett Is Taking a Flyer on $3 Billion of Citigroup’s Stock — After It Loses 40 Percent in a Year.) While a $3 billion stock holding is chump change for Berkshire (as of its last 13F filing, it owned approximately $33 billion in Bank of America stock), Buffett has a stock-picking reputation to defend and neither the history of Citigroup nor its troubles today are boosting that reputation. On Monday, with the strike of the closing bell, Reuters … Continue reading

Five Wall Street Banks Hold $223 Trillion in Derivatives — 83 Percent of All Derivatives at 4,600 Banks

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 13, 2024 ~ According to the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC), derivatives played a major role in the financial crash of 2007 to 2010 in the United States, the worst financial crisis in the U.S. since the Great Depression of the 1930s.  The FCIC wrote in its final report: “…the existence of millions of derivatives contracts of all types between systemically important financial institutions — unseen and unknown in this unregulated market — added to uncertainty and escalated panic….” Americans believed that the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation of 2010 would fulfill its promise of reining in concentrated risks like derivatives. It did not. (See our report from 2015: President Has His Facts Seriously Wrong on Financial Reform.) According to data from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the regulator of national banks, as of March 31, 2009, five bank holding companies held … Continue reading

Jamie Dimon’s Statement Last Month that Trump “Was Kind of Right About NATO,” Sounds Even More Unhinged Today

Jamie Dimon Being Sworn In at House Financial Services Committee Hearing, May 27, 2021

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 12, 2024 ~ On January 17 of this year, during a CNBC interview during the World Economic Forum in Davos, the Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon, made the unhinged remark that Donald Trump “was kind of right about NATO.” A New York Times article from January 14, 2019 outlined Trump’s position on NATO as follows: “There are few things that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia desires more than the weakening of NATO, the military alliance among the United States, Europe and Canada that has deterred Soviet and Russian aggression for 70 years. “Last year, President Trump suggested a move tantamount to destroying NATO: the withdrawal of the United States.” This past Saturday, during a campaign stop in South Carolina, Trump recited a prior conversation he said he had had about NATO with a world leader. The video clip of Trump’s remarks was aired yesterday on … Continue reading

S&P 500 Sets a Record on Wednesday as Banks Continue Tanking

Frightened Wall Street Trader

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 8, 2024 ~ The S&P 500 closed at a record of 4995.06 yesterday while banks – big, medium, and small – continued to see their share prices hammered. And while the media is focusing the public’s attention on the share price collapse of New York Community Bancorp, which as of yesterday’s closing price is down 56 percent year-to-date and had its credit rating downgraded to junk by Moody’s on Tuesday evening, numerous other banks are trading at their lowest levels in two years. Below is just a tiny sampling of what’s going on in the U.S. banking system (that you’re not reading about in the mainstream news). The chart above shows the share price performance over the past two years of the six banks described below. U.S. Bancorp, parent of U.S. Bank, is the 5th largest bank in the U.S. with $663.5 billion in assets … Continue reading

NYCB Downgraded to Junk; Shocking Charts for Citigroup, Barclays and Deutsche Bank

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 7, 2024 ~ New York Community Bancorp (NYCB) closed out 2023 with a share price of $10.23. At the closing bell yesterday, its share price was $4.20 – a year-to-date decline of 59 percent. More pain is expected today as the credit rating agency, Moody’s, cut the regional bank’s credit rating two notches to junk after the market closed yesterday. Moody’s noted in its downgrade that a third of the bank’s deposits lack FDIC insurance. Uninsured deposits were a key factor in the rapid meltdown of Silicon Valley Bank in March of last year as $146 billion in deposits attempted to exit the bank in the span of 48 hours, leading to the FDIC being forced to take the bank into receivership. NYCB’s rapid share price descent began on January 31 when the bank filed an 8K form with the SEC indicating a $260 million … Continue reading

Reporters Who Ask Tough Questions at Fed Press Conferences Have a Habit of Being Disappeared from the Room

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 6, 2024 ~ The Fed’s longstanding relationship with reporters who are allowed to attend the Fed Chair’s press conferences is akin to a master class in Stockholm Syndrome. Your survival in this room depends on your subservience to intellectual capture by the woman who runs this room with the precision of a heat-seeking missile. A growing number of Fed watchers believe that it is Michelle Smith, the Director of Communications at the Fed for the past 23 years, who is quietly cracking the whip. Smith is now such a critical part of policing every word spoken to the public by or about the Fed that she appeared walking beside Fed Chair Powell in one of his rare interviews on 60 Minutes this past Sunday. Consider the following cases of disappeared reporters from the Fed’s press conferences. On September 7, 2021, reporter Michael Derby of the … Continue reading

Jamie Dimon Has Spent $117 Billion Propping Up JPMorgan’s Share Price with Buybacks in 10 Years; He’s Counting on Trump’s MAGA Crowd to Rescue Him

Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 5, 2024 ~ On January 17, Jamie Dimon stunned CNBC viewers when he launched into what sounded like a TV commercial for Republican Presidential candidate and 91-count indictee Donald Trump. Dimon stated: “Take a step back, be honest. He was kind of right about NATO, kind of right about immigration. He grew the economy quite well. Tax reform worked. He was right about some of China…He wasn’t wrong about some of these critical issues.” Dimon also said that Democrats need to be more respectful of their fellow citizens that identify as MAGA Republicans. Former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich was one of the folks who caught Dimon’s act and published a sharp retort, writing: “Kind of right about NATO? Trump wanted the U.S. to withdraw from NATO — and may get his way if he becomes president again. This would open Europe further to Putin’s aggression. “Kind of … Continue reading