Search Results for: rap sheet

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 →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 11, 2023 ~ During the Sunday, December 10 news program on CNN, “State of the Union with Jake Tapper and Dana Bash,” a deceptive, scare-mongering TV commercial popped up, warning that federal banking regulators’ proposed plan to require the mega banks on Wall Street to hold more capital against their riskiest trading activities “will increase the cost of mortgages and car payments” and “hurt small businesses, making it harder for them to access credit, meet payroll and run their operations.” The ad featured images of a farmer on his tractor, an auto mechanic, a worried small business owner, and other emotion-packed images. Wall Street On Parade has been warning our readers for weeks about this deceptive campaign by the Wall Street mega banks, so we jumped to our feet to get closer to the TV screen and read the fine print to see who … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 5, 2023 ~ Tomorrow at 9:30 a.m., the CEOs of the eight mega banks on Wall Street will take their seats at a hearing called by the Senate Banking Committee as part of its annual nod to the pretense that it is providing oversight of these inscrutable Frankenbanks. Among the gang of eight will be Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, the largest bank in the United States with a rap sheet that makes a mockery of U.S. rules for maintaining the safety and soundness of banks. JPMorgan Chase is an enigma wrapped in the surreal details of five felony counts, shrouded in the deepening intrigue of why crime boss Jamie Dimon is allowed to remain at the helm of this federally-insured bank despite his presiding over the worst banking scandals in U.S. history. The scandals at this bank have evolved from … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 21, 2023 ~ In seven of the past nine days, a Wall Street Journal article has been published attacking the culture of the bank regulator, the FDIC, and/or its Chairman, Martin Gruenberg, a Democrat and Biden nominee. The cumulative total of this attack so far is eight articles bylined by Rebecca Ballhaus (one was co-bylined with Andrew Ackerman); an unsigned Wall Street Journal video; and a podcast interview with Rebecca Ballhaus on her reporting about the FDIC and Gruenberg. According to one Ballhaus article, the Wall Street Journal investigation included “interviews with more than 100 current and former employees, including more than 20 women who quit.” The thrust of the unprecedented volume of articles in such a short span of time is that a culture of sexual harassment has existed for years at the FDIC, under both Republican and Democratic leadership. But after more … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 20, 2023 ~ At some point, federal regulators, the Senate Banking Committee and the criminal division of the U.S. Department of Justice are going to reach the same conclusion that Wall Street On Parade reached quite some time ago: JPMorgan Chase is a criminal enterprise in drag as a federally-insured bank. JPMorgan Chase is the largest U.S. bank, with $3.9 trillion in assets and 4,863 Chase Bank branches sucking in mom and pop deposits across the United States. According to its regulators, it is also the riskiest bank in the United States. And, two trial lawyers have written a fact-intensive book describing how the bank resembles the Gambino crime family. The bank’s admission to five criminal felony counts since 2015 and spiraling rap sheet would seem to back up that theory. Now comes the latest revelation in the bank’s own 8K filing with the Securities … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 9, 2023 ~ It took eight years of research to compile a data set of annual balance sheets of more than 11,000 commercial banks dating back to 1870 in 17 advanced economies. And in every country, the study arrived at the same finding: concentrating the banking system in the hands of five or less giant banks leads to financial instability and more severe financial crises. The bank balance sheets of the following countries were examined: Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The 150-year banking study is titled: “Survival of the Biggest: Large Banks and Financial Crises.” Its authors are Matthew Baron of Cornell University; Moritz Schularick of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy and Sciences; and Kaspar Zimmermann of the Leibniz Institute for Financial Research SAFE. Other … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 5, 2023 ~ As evidenced by the speech that the FDIC Chair, Martin Gruenberg, delivered at a conference yesterday, the FDIC is very much aware that both the level of uninsured deposits and the concentration of those uninsured deposits among a handful of mega banks is a serious problem for the U.S. banking system. Gruenberg didn’t name names, but we will do that in this article. Gruenberg pointed out in his speech that year-end data for the three banks that failed this past spring indicated that anywhere from 90 percent to 70 percent of their deposits were uninsured. (During a banking panic, uninsured deposits are typically those that head for the exits at the fastest clip.) But those three failed banks (Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank and First Republic Bank) were minnows compared to the asset-size of the banking whales which now account for … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 21, 2023 ~ Remember all of that sensational social media buzz in 2016 about a politically-connected ring of pedophiles operating out of a pizza parlor in Washington, D.C.? The story was debunked by Snopes but not before it had gone viral. While the pizza parlor was getting plenty of attention, an actual, highly sophisticated, child sex-trafficking ring had been operating with impunity for more than a decade out of the largest bank in the United States, JPMorgan Chase. Based on astonishing internal documents from JPMorgan Chase obtained during discovery in a federal lawsuit and filed on the court docket last week, it now appears that the U.S. Department of Justice has turned a blind eye toward this bank’s facilitation of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking crimes for more than 16 years, during the administrations of four separate Presidents of the United States. The heavy-lifting for what … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 20, 2023 ~ The data in the chart above comes directly from what the biggest bank in the United States, JPMorgan Chase, reported on its 10-Q filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for the quarter ending March 31, 2023. Despite all those mainstream media headlines and news stories about the biggest banks in the U.S. being the deposit beneficiaries of the banking panic earlier this year, the cold, hard facts on the ground are the following: at the end of the first quarter of this year, JPMorgan Chase had seen deposit outflows in four out of the past five quarters. Mainstream media conveniently forgot to mention that. The only quarter in which JPMorgan Chase saw an inflow of deposits was the first quarter of this year, when three banks blew up: Silvergate Bank, Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank. That increase was … Continue reading →