Search Results for: rap sheet

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 3, 2024 ~ On Monday, the transcript of the July 19, 2006 grand jury proceedings involving sexual assaults and rape by Jeffrey Epstein against underage girls in Palm Beach County, Florida was released by a Circuit Court. The Palm Beach Post newspaper had sued in that court for release of the transcript in 2019 in order to shine more light on how Florida State Attorney, Barry Krischer, had ignored a powder keg of evidence against Epstein that had been developed by the Palm Beach Police and cut a sweetheart deal under pressure from Epstein’s attorneys. Florida legislation, signed into law by Governor Ron DeSantis, called for the transcript to be released on or after July 1, in response to the extensive public interest in the case. Despite police evidence that Epstein had sexually assaulted dozens of underage school girls, Krischer and the U.S. Department … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 19 2024 ~ On January 29, Anne Marie Murphy and two of her colleagues at law firm Cotchett, Pitre & McCarthy, LLP in Santa Monica, California filed a lawsuit in Superior Court on behalf of a 76-year old widow, Diane Artemis Yaffe. Scammers had tricked Ms. Yaffe into making seven wire transfers out of her Chase Bank account, which tallied up to the astonishing sum of $1.8 million, or the bulk of her funds at the time.  There are three things which jump out of the factual details in the case that would appear to be legally problematic for Chase Bank – the federally-insured, retail banking unit of JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A. First, the six figure wires were completely out-of-character for this elderly client. Second, the huge sums were being wired out of the country. Third, the funds that Chase Bank wired were originally … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 7, 2024 ~ Last Wednesday, JPMorgan Chase, the publicly-traded parent of the largest federally-insured bank in the United States as well as a five-count felon, revealed in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that on top of the $348 million it paid out in March to two of its banking regulators for sketchy trading violations involving “billions” of trades on 30 global trading venues, it “expects to enter into a resolution with a third U.S. regulator that will require the Firm to, among other things, pay a civil penalty of $100 million….” (See “Trading Venues Investigations” on page 168 of the SEC filing at this link.) JPMorgan Chase did not name this third regulator but Bloomberg News reported that it is the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The two federal banking regulators that imposed the trading fines in March are the Office of the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 16, 2024 ~ Stanford Finance and Economics Professor Anat Admati has been valiantly attempting to save the American financial system from the corrupting influence and disinformation campaigns of men like JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon for more than a decade. Her voice is gaining traction and that’s making Dimon very nervous. Dimon has admitted in his recent letter to shareholders that his federal banking regulators want the bank to raise 25 percent more capital. Making banks hold more equity capital (as opposed to debt) is an issue that Admati has made a central focus of her arguments for years. Dimon’s bank would have a lot more equity capital if Dimon had retained the bank’s earnings each year instead of tapping those earnings to boost the bank’s stock price by using $117 billion of the bank’s earnings for share buybacks over the past decade. (Retained earnings add … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 18, 2024 ~ On Thursday of last week, two of JPMorgan Chase Bank’s federal regulators fined the riskiest bank in the United States $348 million dollars for engaging in “unsafe and unsound banking practices” for failing to supervise “billions” of trades on at least 30 global trading venues. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) fined JPMorgan Chase Bank $250 million while the Federal Reserve fined the bank $98.2 million. The OCC said the misconduct occurred since at least 2019. The Fed said the bank had engaged in the misconduct over the span of nine years, from 2014 to 2023. The key outrage embedded in these charges – that mainstream media failed to point out in its coverage last week – is that this “trading” activity did not occur at the registered brokerage firm of JPMorgan, which has properly licensed traders and trading … Continue reading →

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 →

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 →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 8, 2024 ~ According to the complaint filed by lawyers for Jeffrey Epstein’s victims against the biggest bank in America, JPMorgan Chase, Epstein was running a “sex-themed cult.” According to a deposition of a JPMorgan banker, the only money-generating business that Epstein had was tending to his “network.” According to witness testimony, fulfilling the sexual fantasies of some men in Epstein’s “network,” was how he obtained six opulent homes and hundreds of millions of dollars in wealth. Epstein’s cult and network needed one essential ingredient to thrive: a financial institution willing to look the other way at vast sums of hard cash being withdrawn monthly and suspicious transfers of money between Epstein and his accomplices. Epstein found that for at least fifteen years at JPMorgan Chase according to documents and internal emails obtained in discovery in separate lawsuits against the bank in November and December … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 28, 2023 ~ The year 2023 will go down in U.S. banking history as the year in which the fastest bank runs in U.S. history occurred, producing the second, third and fourth largest banking failures in U.S. history in the span of seven weeks.  Losses of more than $32 billion from these failed banks hit the Federal Deposit Insurance Fund (FDIC). Adding to the regulatory hubris, the largest and riskiest bank in the U.S., JPMorgan Chase, was allowed by its compromised regulators to become even riskier by gobbling up the failed First Republic Bank while JPMorgan Chase got an unexplained $50 billion 5-year loan from the FDIC at an undisclosed interest rate to sweeten its purchase of the failed bank. And, what good is a banking crisis if the Fed can’t pony up yet another bank bailout fund, this time with loans of up to … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 19, 2023 ~ From 2010 through 2014, the most intractably corrupt industry in America – Wall Street – was the perpetual focus of the Senate Permanent Subcomittee on Investigations. The late Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) Chaired that Subcommittee throughout that span of time. Then Levin retired from the Senate in January 2015 and Wall Street’s name disappeared from hearings of that critical Subcommittee from 2015 through 2023 – a span of nine years. Wall Street did not become less corrupt from 2015 through 2023 to warrant it falling off the hearing schedule of the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. In fact, Wall Street became more corrupt. Financial watchdog, Better Markets, wrote the following in its detailed report in October on Wall Street mega banks’ unending crime spree: “For years, Better Markets has been tracking the enforcement actions against the nation’s six largest banks (the … Continue reading →