Search Results for: jpmc

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 3, 2022 ~ Playing out in a federal courtroom in Chicago have been JPMorgan traders telling a jury that it was standard operating procedure at the bank to rig precious metals markets in order to make huge profits for their trading desk. That case is U.S. v. Smith in the Northern District Court in Chicago. (Case number 1:19-cr-00669.) Now there may be more explosive revelations spilling out against JPMorgan Chase in the Southern District Court in Manhattan beginning this fall. That case is Shaquala Williams v JPMorgan Chase. (Case number 1:21-cv-0932.) Last week, Judge Jed Rakoff, who is overseeing the Williams case, ruled that JPMorgan’s motion for dismissal would not prevail on Williams’ claim for retaliatory dismissal and ruled that a jury trial would begin on November 7. (Judge Rakoff did dismiss the Williams’ claim that the bank’s actions had adversely affected a job offer.) … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 8, 2022 ~ In 2018, Bloomberg reporters Peter Waldman, Lizette Chapman, and Jordan Robertson published a stunning expose on how JPMorgan Chase was spying on its employees, including after hours, using as many as 120 engineers from the data mining company Palantir Technologies Inc. According to the Bloomberg report, “It all ended when the bank’s senior executives learned that they, too, were being watched, and what began as a promising marriage of masters of big data and global finance descended into a spying scandal.” But the surveillance program did not end. The bank simply developed its own proprietary spying system instead. Business Insider reporter, Reed Alexander, has reignited the scandal with the news that the internal surveillance program at JPMorgan Chase is now called “Workforce Activity Data Utility” or WADU. According to Business Insider, the surveillance is fostering paranoia inside the bank with … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 25, 2022 ~ An attorney turned whistleblower who worked in compliance at JPMorgan Chase, Shaquala Williams, has named former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair as one of the parties receiving improperly processed “emergency payments” from the bank. Williams is suing the bank for retaliating against her protected whistleblowing activities by terminating her employment after she raised concerns about these payments to Blair and other serious compliance issues. (The case is Shaquala Williams v JPMorgan Chase, Case Number 1:21-cv-09326, which was filed last November in the Federal District Court for the Southern District of New York.) The new revelation naming Tony Blair was contained in a transcript of Williams’ deposition that was filed with the court last week. Prior to that, Blair had been referred to simply as “a high risk JPMorgan third-party intermediary for Jamie Dimon…” in the Williams’ complaint. The fact that Williams … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 14, 2022 ~ JPMorgan Chase’s publicly-traded shares closed out 2021 with a share price of $158.35. At the closing bell yesterday, shares of JPMorgan Chase were at $127.30, a year-to-date price decline of 19.6 percent. That’s dramatically worse than its peer bank, Wells Fargo, and modestly worse than another peer bank, Bank of America. That performance is shocking because the Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon, is paid like a rock star by his Board, treated like a financial wizard by the business press, and perpetually brags about his bank’s “fortress balance sheet” in his musings to Congress and shareholders. But the share price performance is not shocking if one considers that one of the artificial props under the share price for the past five years has been Dimon’s crony Board of Directors authorizing giant share buybacks of the stock. According to … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 22, 2021 ~ We have been reading lawsuits filed against Wall Street firms in the federal district court in the Southern District of New York for more than three decades. We didn’t think that we could still be shocked by what victims of Wall Street’s abuses tell the court. But the lawsuit filed on November 11 by Shaquala Williams against JPMorgan Chase contains allegations that are both stunning and unprecedented in our experience. Williams is an attorney who formerly worked in compliance at JPMorgan Chase. Part of her role was to make sure that the bank was in compliance with a non-prosecution agreement it had signed with the Justice Department in 2016. The Justice Department had charged in 2016 that JPMorgan’s Asia subsidiary had engaged in quid pro quo agreements with Chinese officials to obtain investment-banking business and had falsified internal documents to cover up … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 15, 2021 ~ The previous time a female lawyer who worked at JPMorgan Chase blew the whistle on frauds occurring inside the bank, the U.S. Department of Justice, along with other federal and state regulators, ended up charging the bank with selling toxic mortgage securities to investors and making JPMorgan Chase pay $13 billion to settle the charges. That female lawyer was Alayne Fleischmann, as Matt Taibbi detailed in a report for Rolling Stone in 2014. Taibbi summarizes the matter as follows: “Back in 2006, as a deal manager at the gigantic bank, Fleischmann first witnessed, then tried to stop, what she describes as ‘massive criminal securities fraud’ in the bank’s mortgage operations.” According to Fleischmann, who worked as a Transaction Manager at JPMorgan, her department was assigned with assuring that only good mortgage loans were securitized but, instead, under pressure from bosses, it waived in improperly … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 2, 2021 ~ The Office of Inspector General (OIG) for the Federal Reserve is conducting an investigation of the trading activities that led to the resignations of Dallas Fed President Robert Kaplan and Boston Fed President Eric Rosengren on September 27. The trading of other Fed officials may also be under the microscope. The OIG investigations are conducted by federal criminal investigators who have the power to “carry firearms, seek and execute search and arrest warrants, and make arrests without a warrant in certain circumstances.” The investigative findings can be referred to the U.S. Department of Justice for criminal or civil prosecution, if warranted. In the case of Kaplan, the matter belongs in the hands of the Department of Justice right now. Despite having ongoing access to market-moving information throughout 2020, Kaplan was trading in and out of S&P 500 futures in individual trades … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 24, 2021 ~ Yesterday, President Biden took the bold step of nominating Saule Omarova to head the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), a top federal bank regulator. Omarova is a Law Professor at Cornell and has written extensively on systemic risk containment. Prior to joining Cornell in 2014, Omarova was Associate Professor at the University of North Carolina School of Law. Prior to her academic career, Omarova worked for the corporate law firm, Davis Polk & Wardwell, in their Financial Institutions Group. In 2006-2007, she served at the U.S. Department of the Treasury as a Special Advisor for Regulatory Policy to the Under Secretary for Domestic Finance. Omarova represents a triple threat to the insidious behavior of mega banks on Wall Street: she has an in-depth knowledge of how they operate; she is not timid about explaining it to investigative bodies … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 17, 2021 ~ On Tuesday of this week, Bloomberg News published its umpteenth negative article on the San Francisco-headquartered bank, Wells Fargo. This time around, the article was highlighting Senator Elizabeth Warren calling for Wells Fargo to be broken up, with its federally insured bank separated from its Wall Street businesses. Bloomberg News syndicates its articles, so this story was quickly splashed all over other news outlets. And that’s the way it has been going since 2017. When Senator Warren bashes Wells Fargo, she gets lots of coverage by New York media outlets. Since March of 2018, Bloomberg News has published more than 80 negative articles on Wells Fargo with headlines like these: Wells Fargo CEO Abruptly Steps Down, Succumbing to Scandals; Wells Fargo’s CEO Disputes Claim His Bank Is Too Big to Manage; Elizabeth Warren on Wells Fargo CEO’s Departure: ‘About Damn Time’; Ex-Wells Fargo Bosses Face … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 7, 2021 ~ JPMorgan Chase has created its own digital coin called JPM Coin. The bank announced last October that the JPM Coin was being used commercially for the first time by “a large technology client to send payments around the world,” according to reporting at CNBC. According to JPMorgan’s website, the JPM Coin currently represents just U.S. dollars but the bank anticipates that it “will be extended to other major currencies, subject to market demand.” According to the trademark application for JPM Coin that was filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the JPM Coin is defined as follows: “Downloadable and recorded software for use in connection with transferring, managing and processing cryptocurrency, digital currency, virtual currency, and digital tokens based on blockchain technology.” JPM Coin runs on the Quorum blockchain, a network the bank developed as a private version of the … Continue reading →