Search Results for: Jamie Dimon

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 6, 2019 ~ The Federal Reserve Bank of New York (New York Fed) is just one of the 12 regional Federal Reserve banks around the country. But it has amassed enormous powers for itself since the Federal Reserve was created in 1913. Three of those powers dwarf all others: the ability to create money electronically at the push of a button; the accepted right to meddle in the markets; and the supervision of some of the largest bank holding companies in America. After Wall Street blew itself up under the indulging and incompetent supervision of the New York Fed in 2008 and it was exposed that the Fed had secretly created $29 trillion in electronic money to bail out zombie banks – most of that funneled out by the New York Fed – most rational folks would have assumed that Congress would have … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 5, 2019 ~ The Fed is in deep fear, while also in deep denial, about what happened last December. Its fear is that it could happen again this December. Its denial is that its lax supervision of the Wall Street mega banks is largely responsible for the mess. The stock market news on December 24 of last year was not what folks want to be reading about on Christmas Eve. The Dow Jones Industrial Average had plunged 653 points on Christmas Eve and headline writers across major media were declaring the month to have been the worst December for stocks since the Great Depression. But the declines in the broader stock market averages paled in comparison to the December carnage that occurred in the share prices of the mega banks on Wall Street and, to the Fed’s consternation, the insurance companies that are … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 28, 2019 ~  JPMorgan Chase is the largest bank in the United States with $1.6 trillion in deposits from more than 5,000 retail bank branches spread across the country. When it withdraws liquidity from the U.S. financial system, that has a reverberating impact.  According to the filings that JPMorgan Chase makes annually with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), since 2013 JPMorgan Chase has spent $77 billion buying back its own stock. That includes the whopping $17.01 billion it has spent in just the first nine months of this year buying back its stock. But here’s the shocking news. According to its SEC filings, JPMorgan Chase is partly using Federally insured deposits made by moms and pops across the country in its more than 5,000 branches to prop up its share price with buybacks. The wording in the filing is as follows: “In … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 22, 2019 ~ WeWork is just one more in a long series of Wall Street scandals that prove that the universal banking model is little more than a thinly-disguised wealth transfer system from the pockets of average Americans to the 1 percent. Just two months ago WeWork’s two lead Wall Street underwriters, JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs, were planning to offer WeWork’s shares to the public investor at a valuation in excess of $47 billion. Now we are learning that the company may run out of money next month and has an actual valuation of $8 billion or less. WeWork’s founder, Adam Neumann, who was attempting to cash out of his company that had never made a dime of profits in its nine years of existence and had run up losses of $900 million in just the first six months of this year, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 21, 2019 ~ This morning the Federal Reserve pumped another $58.15 billion into Wall Street securities firms under the repo loan program it initiated on September 17. That program has been pumping out hundreds of billions of dollars each week to Wall Street with no authorization from Congress, as far as the public is aware. We decided to take a look at Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell’s daily appointment calendars over the past few months to see if there was any hint of what precipitated the reopening of the Fed’s money spigot to Wall Street for the first time since the financial crisis. We found a very interesting pattern of phone calls and meetings in the month of August. On Thursday, August 1, Powell had a phone call with JPMorgan Chase’s Chairman and CEO, Jamie Dimon. The call lasted 7 minutes, from 10:30 … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 15, 2019 ~  The mega banks on Wall Street report earnings this week led off by JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and Wells Fargo this morning. Among the items of interest in JPMorgan Chase’s written presentation was that it spent $6.7 billion in this past third quarter buying up its own stock and thus boosting its stock price artificially beyond outside investor demand. The third quarter buybacks of its stock came on top of spending $5 billion in the second quarter and $4.7 billion in the first quarter, bringing its net repurchases of its own stock just so far this year to a whopping $16.4 billion — money that could have otherwise gone to loans to small businesses to kickstart innovation and job growth in America. This Thursday, the House Financial Services’ Subcommittee on Investor Protection, Entrepreneurship and Capital Markets will hold a … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 10, 2019 ~ No one can say with any certainty where the hundreds of billions of dollars that the Federal Reserve has been pumping into Wall Street since September 17 are actually ending up. The Fed is not releasing the names of which of its primary dealers (securities firms) are taking the lion’s share of the loans nor does anyone know if those borrowers are making further loans with the money (which is a core purpose of a central bank’s lender of last resort function) or simply plugging a whole in their own leaky boat. Astonishingly, Congress has yet to call a hearing to ask these critical questions. Let’s say, hypothetically, that there is a bank with a large, interconnected footprint on Wall Street that’s in trouble and on top of that there’s a big hedge fund taking on water and listing on … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 4, 2019 ~ Yesterday, the House Financial Services Committee released its hearing schedule for October. There is not a peep about holding a hearing on the unprecedented hundreds of billions of dollars that the Federal Reserve Bank of New York is pumping into unnamed banks on Wall Street at a time when there is no public acknowledgement of any kind of financial crisis taking place. Congressional committees should have been instantly on top of the Fed’s actions when they first started on September 17 because the Fed had gone completely rogue from 2007 to 2010 in funneling an unfathomable $29 trillion in revolving loans to Wall Street and global banks without authority or even awareness from Congress. The Fed also fought a multi-year court battle with the media in an effort to keep its giant money funnel a secret. According to Section 1101 … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 2, 2019 ~ Two notable things happened on Monday, September 16, 2019. Rates started to spike in the overnight loan (repo) market, reaching a high of 10 percent the next day and forcing the Federal Reserve to step in as a lender of last resort for the first time since the financial crisis. The Fed has had to intervene every business day since then with overnight loans, funneling hundreds of billions of dollars to its primary dealers, while also providing $150 billion in 14-day term loans to unnamed banks. The other notable thing to occur on September 16 was this: The largest bank in the United States, JPMorgan Chase, had its precious metals desk charged by the U.S. Department of Justice with being a criminal enterprise for approximately eight years as it rigged the prices of gold, silver and other precious metals. The … Continue reading →