Search Results for: JPMorgan

U.S. Chamber of Commerce Frets About JPMorgan Hearing Tomorrow

By Pam Martens: June 18, 2012 You didn’t really think the ubiquitous U.S. Chamber of Commerce would stay quiet for long regarding the JPMorgan Chase fracas on Capital Hill did you? They’ve got a post up today at their blog comparing JPMorgan’s Chief Investment Office to getting hit by a bus.  While that’s exactly what it has felt like to shareholders who have lost a quarter of their investment in the stock since Bloomberg News first started reporting on the problem on April 5, the Chamber actually attempts to twist the bus analogy into an argument for giving JPMorgan a free hand to blow up depositors’ money as it sees fit. One suspects that someone connected to JPMorgan has asked the Chamber to trumpet a warning to frisky Congressmen on the House Financial Services Committee who will be probing Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, tomorrow.  After the … Continue reading

JPMorgan: If This Is a Financial Fortress, Run for the Bunkers

By Pam Martens, June 6, 2012 The U.S. Senate Banking Committee spent over two hours on Wednesday proving to the American people that any shred of confidence they might still have in our financial markets is misplaced. Just as with the six recent hearings on the collapse of MF Global and its $1.6 billion of missing customer funds, five different regulators could not, or would not, reveal anything useful to the American people on how JPMorgan, the largest bank by assets in the U.S., was permitted to blow up billions in depositor funds in an outpost in London.  Thomas Curry, head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) since April 9 of this year, did confirm one important detail during the hearing: the reckless derivative trading at JPMorgan’s London office occurred in a unit of the national bank (not the broker-dealer), using insured deposits of bank customers, … Continue reading

Occupy Wall Street Groups Demand Investigation of JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon

By Pam Martens: June 4, 2012 Occupy the SEC and Occupy Wall Street’s Alternative Banking Working Group are asking the  SEC to investigate Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, and make a criminal referral to the U.S. Department of Justice, if appropriate. This Wednesday, June 6th, at 5:30 p.m. EST, the two groups will march from Liberty Plaza to the offices of JPMorgan Chase, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and on to the Securities and Exchange Commission’s New York City office for a teach-in. The groups issued a statement, that read: “We are marching on June 6th because that date marks the 78th anniversary of the founding of the SEC in 1934. The SEC was created to enforce two basic principles: 1) public companies offering securities to investors must tell the truth about their business, the securities, and the risks involved in investing. 2) people who … Continue reading

Is a Whistleblower Involved in the FBI’s Criminal Probe of JPMorgan Chase?

By Pam Martens: May 18, 2012 On May 16, the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee convened a hearing on “Oversight of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”  The hearing came less than a week after JPMorgan Chase announced it had lost at least $2 billion of insured deposits in a so-called hedging strategy it has yet to define.  (According to media reports today, that loss is now dramatically larger.)  Senator Richard Blumenthal is a member of the Judiciary Committee with an impressive resume as a former prosecutor, serving five terms as Connecticut’s Attorney General as well as a former U.S. Attorney for Connecticut.  When Senator Blumenthal’s turn came to question FBI Director Robert Mueller, the dialogue went as follows:  Senator Blumenthal: “I would like to ask first about the JPMorgan Chase investigation.  Can you tell us what potential crimes could be under investigation, without asking you to conclude anything or talk about … Continue reading

Nasdaq Has Lost More than 3,000 Points Since Trump’s First Full Day in Office in 2025; the Pain Has Barely Begun

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 21, 2025 ~ The clown show in Washington should not divert your gaze from the circus at the Nasdaq stock market. On January 20, 2025, the day that Donald Trump was sworn into office for his second term as President, the stock market was closed in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day. On January 21, 2025, Trump’s first full day in office, the Nasdaq stock market closed at 19,756.7793. On Thursday, April 17, 2025 – the final day of trading last week because the stock market was closed for Good Friday on April 18 – the Nasdaq closed at 16,286.4476 – bringing its losses during Trump’s new reign in the White House to 3,470.3317 points or 17.57 percent. (The data comes from Dow Jones’ BigCharts.MarketWatch.com.) There are legitimate questions now being raised as to whether we’re in a tech bubble that’s going to … Continue reading

The Bond Crisis Last Week Was a Global No-Confidence Vote in U. S. President Donald Trump

Trump, Pied Piper

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 13, 2025 ~ U.S. President Donald Trump’s reputation for chaos; his longstanding history of thumbing his nose at the rule of law; his unpresidential insults directed at world leaders and willingness to turn his back on longstanding U.S. allies; and his packing of top cabinet posts with preposterously unqualified loyalists – have now delivered the inevitable blow to two of America’s most critical financial assets in domestic and  international markets: the U.S. dollar and U.S. Treasury securities. Instead of performing their usual role as safe havens in times of turmoil, they are now indelibly linked to the Trump brand of erratic behavior. Both the U.S. Dollar and U.S. Treasury securities are in a downtrend, with the 10-year Treasury note taking a wild plunge in value last week. Mark Blyth, a political economist at Brown University, was quoted in the New York Times today with this … Continue reading

Trump’s Tariff Plan Guts $5 Trillion in Stock Value in Two Days; Senator Warren Calls for Emergency Action Before Markets Open on Monday

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 6, 2025 ~ On Wednesday, President Donald Trump unveiled his sweeping tariff plan. By Thursday, Wall Street was stampeding to the exit doors, leaving the Dow Jones Industrial Average down 1,679.39 points by the closing bell. Showing just how dangerous the market is assessing Trump’s tariff war to be, contrarian investors couldn’t even stage a short squeeze by Friday to push stocks back up – something they have been able to do regularly since Trump’s chaos courtiers invaded Washington, promising to “Occupy Mars” as they took a blow torch to their current planet. Friday was indicative of full-on selling panic, with the Dow losing another 2,231 points. The two-day rout in the S&P 500 tallied up to a breathtaking $5 trillion in market value losses, setting a two-day historic record. The plunge in the S&P 500 futures market was so steep before the stock market … Continue reading

Four Megabanks on Wall Street Hold $3.2 Trillion in Uninsured Deposits – Which May Explain Senator Schumer’s Pivot to the GOP to Stop a Government Shutdown

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 17, 2025 ~ During Senator Chuck Schumer’s (D-NY) political career, three of his five largest campaign donors have been Wall Street megabanks – Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase. His second largest campaign donor over his political career are the partners and employees of Big Law firm Paul Weiss, where his brother, Robert, is actively engaged in Mergers and Acquisitions by major corporations that are publicly traded on Wall Street. Paul Weiss, as a firm, represents some of the largest banks and trading houses on Wall Street. Last week Schumer, the Minority Leader of the U.S. Senate, did a major pivot between Wednesday and Friday. On Wednesday he vowed that Democrats would stand firm in voting against the Republican version of a Continuing Resolution (CR) to keep the federal government open, a spending bill deeply opposed by the majority of Congressional Democrats, who viewed it … Continue reading

Who Benefits Alongside Elon Musk If He Succeeds in Killing the CFPB: the Megabanks on Wall Street that Underwrite His Tesla Stock Offerings

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 28, 2025 ~ On June 29, 2010 when the electric vehicle company, Tesla, launched its Initial Public Offering (IPO) on the Nasdaq Stock Market, its underwriters were trading powerhouses on Wall Street: Goldman, Sachs & Co., Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, and Deutsche Bank Securities. Over the next dozen years, Tesla would utilize these investment banks and others to raise billions more in secondary stock offerings of Tesla shares. It was a very happy marriage. The Wall Street megabanks made big fees on the underwritings and Musk was able to cash out tens of billions of dollars for himself in Tesla stock sales. That happy, mutually beneficial relationship turned sour when Musk borrowed $13 billion from a consortium of the megabanks to help fund his purchase of the social medium platform, Twitter, in 2022. (Musk has since renamed Twitter as “X.”) The banks got stuck with these … Continue reading

Barron’s Releases Audio of Jamie Dimon Cursing Out His Workers at a Town Hall, as Dimon Plans to Dump Another One Million JPM Shares

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 19, 2025 ~ Something is seriously wrong in the House of Dimon – also known as JPMorgan Chase, the largest bank in the United States. Barron’s, part of the Dow Jones Company that publishes the Wall Street Journal, has released an audio of the Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon, dropping F-bombs in a profanity-laced tirade during a Town Hall with his employees last Wednesday. We carefully transcribed a portion of that audio. Dimon said this: “We also had—and you know I’m right about this one—a lot of you on the f***ing Zoom and you were doing the following, okay: looking at your mail; sending texts to each other about what an a**hole the other person is, okay; not paying attention; not reading your stuff, you know. And if you don’t think that slows down efficiency, creativity, creates rudeness — it does. Okay.” Apparently, … Continue reading