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Recent Posts
- Three Megabanks Had Loans Outstanding of $1.832 Trillion to Giant Hedge Funds on March 31
- Jamie Dimon’s Washington Post OpEd Gets Pummeled at Yahoo Finance
- In the Span of 72 Hours, Four People Tied to a Hewlett-Packard Criminal Case Died in Two Separate Events
- Crypto Took Down Another Federally-Insured Bank and Just Handed Its CEO a 24-Year Prison Sentence
- All the Devils from 2008 Are Back at the Megabanks: Leverage, Off-Balance-Sheet Debt, Over $192 Trillion in Derivatives, Shaky Capital Levels
- New Study Says the Fed Is Captured by Congress and White House — Not the Megabanks that Own the Fed Banks and Get Trillions in Bailouts
- Data from the Fed’s Emergency Funding Program Shows Spring 2023 Banking Crisis Was Far Deeper than Americans Were Told
- These FDIC-Insured Banks Have Lost 69 to 40 Percent of their Market Value Year-to-Date
- Exposure at Hedge Funds Has Skyrocketed to Over $28 Trillion; Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Are at Risk
- We Charted the Plunge and Rebound in the Nikkei Versus Nomura and Citigroup; the Correlation Is Frightening
- Former U.S. Labor Secretary Says Billionaires Have No Right to Exist Because their Wealth Comes from Five Illegal or Bad Practices
- Citigroup Is Having a Helluva Summer: A Protest on Thursday Will Turn Up the Heat
- Nikkei Has Biggest Drop in History: Here’s What’s Causing the Global Market Selloff
- JPMorgan Is Tapping Illiquid Assets in its Global Collateral Program; the New York Fed Is Paying for Its Services
- Bank Regulators Issue Warnings on Fintech and Banking as Disasters Pile Up
- Donald Trump Gives a Speech on Not Letting China Win the Crypto Race – Not Realizing China Banned Crypto Mining and Transactions Four Years Ago
- The New York Fed Has Contracted Out Key Functions to JPMorgan Chase; We Filed a FOIA and Got These Strange Invoices
- On the Eve of Netanyahu’s Address to Congress, Senator Bernie Sanders Delivers a Breathtaking Assessment of His War Crimes
- Trump’s Sit-Down with Netanyahu at Mar-a-Lago Will Cost U.S. Taxpayers Millions While Profiting Trump’s Business
- Protecting Trump and His Jet-Setting Adult Children During His Presidency Cost Taxpayers Over $1 Billion
- A Congressman and a Doctor Reported a Woman Being Shot at Trump Rally: She’s Vanished from Official Reports
- Jamie Dimon Goes Missing from Earnings Call, After Dumping $183 Million of His JPMorgan Chase Stock Earlier this Year
- U.S. Senate Candidate Backed by Hedge Fund Billionaires Was Sitting in Front Row at Trump Rally as the Sniper Fired into the Bleachers
- Project 2025: The Fossil Fuel and Banking Money Behind the Madness
- The Fund Created to Unwind a Failing Megabank Has a Problem: There’s No Money in It
- Joe Biden Versus the New York Times
- Grand Jury Transcript in Jeffrey Epstein Case Is Released, Raising Questions about Epstein’s Darkest Secrets Being Protected in JPMorgan Cases
- The Supreme Court Crowns a King, Immunizing Future Criminal Acts Under Project 2025 – a Right Wing Manifesto
- The Debate Disaster and the Supreme Court’s “Chevron” Repeal Have a Money Trail Leading to Charles Koch
- Congressman Andy Barr Stacks a Hearing on the Fed’s Stress Tests with Lobbyists for Megabanks
- The Fed Posts Historic Operating Losses As It Pays Out 5.40 Percent Interest to Banks
- Goldman Sachs’ Bank Derivatives Have Grown from $40 Trillion to $54 Trillion in Five Years; So How Did Its Credit Exposure Improve by 200 Percent?
- The Fed and FDIC Wake Up Suddenly to the Threat of Derivatives, Flunking the Four Largest Derivative Banks on their Wind-Down Plans
- Is the Stock Market Setting Investors Up for a Tech Bust Similar to the Dot.com Bust?
- Chase Bank Customers Are Reporting a Wave of Wire Fraud in their Accounts; the Bank Won’t Make Good on the Looted Funds
- The Senate Race in Ohio Is the Sickest in U.S. History in Terms of Billionaire Money from Outside the State
- Sullivan & Cromwell’s Legal Work for Sam Bankman-Fried’s Crypto House of Fraud Is Getting a Closer Look in Two Federal Court Cases
- Crypto Tries to Recreate the Koch Money Machine to Pack Congress with Shills
- French Fears Ignite Selloff in U.S. Megabanks and Foreign Peers
- Crypto Just Got Exponentially More Dangerous: Meet Fairshake
- Nvidia Hit a $3 Trillion Market Cap Last Week; Dark Pools Are Making Over 300,000 Trades in the Stock Weekly
- The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Is Making Enemies in All the Right Places
- A Former Exec at Citibank Raises Alarm Bells in Federal Court Over Failed Risk Controls Inside the Bank
- Charles Koch’s Money Is Being Used in Elections in Ways Only Orwell Could Have Imagined
- Freakonomics and Frankenbanks: JPMorgan Chase Sucked Up 18 Percent of All Profits of 4,568 FDIC-Insured Banks in the First Quarter
- Academic Study Provides Hard Numbers to the Sick, Revolving Door Culture at Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Citigroup
- $244 Billion of Treasury Debt to Hit the Market Today and Tomorrow as Interest Rates Spike on Ballooning Supply
- CFTC Fines J.P. Morgan Securities — a Fed Primary Dealer — $100 Million for Failing to Surveil Potential Spoofing and High Frequency Trading for Eight Years
- Another FDIC-Insured Bank Got in Bed with Fintech; It’s Now Got a Dumpster Fire and Desperate Pleas from Customers for their Money
- Citigroup Gets Fined $79 Million Two Years After It Caused a $300 Billion Flash Crash in European Stock Markets
Search Results for: Jamie Dimon
JPMorgan’s Most Admired Bank Award: General Public Had No Say
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 29, 2018 Someone really needs to send the good folks at Fortune Magazine a heads up that naming a bank that has admitted to three criminal felony counts in 2014-15 and lost more than $6 billion gambling with its depositors’ money does not have the makings for a most-admired anything, unless possibly most-admired for dodging jail time. JPMorgan Chase has decided to spin the award as follows on its website: “JPMorgan Chase was given the top industry ranking the second year in a row on Fortune magazine’s list of ‘The World’s Most Admired Companies of 2018.’ Fortune also ranked the firm as the tenth most-admired company in the world.” One might suspect from the above that the industry in which JPMorgan Chase was ranked was the overall financial services industry or overall banking industry. But it wasn’t. JPMorgan Chase achieved its top award … Continue reading
Just How Big a Player Is the Federal Reserve in the Stock Market?
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 18, 2018 To understand how the U.S. central bank, known as the Federal Reserve, is influencing the froth of the stock market, you need to take a few moments to understand the interaction of bond yields with stock prices. Sophisticated investors who predominate in the markets compare the yield on bonds to the cash dividend yield on stocks to determine which is a better value. Following the financial crash of 2008, the Federal Reserve began buying up Treasury bonds and mortgage-backed bonds in the marketplace to the overall tune of more than $3 trillion. This has driven down bond yields and provided an artificial boost to the stock market. The Fed’s assets swelled from $914.8 billion at the end of 2007 to $4.5 trillion in 2014 from its bond buying program. In just the single year of 2013 the Fed’s assets mushroomed by … Continue reading
Voting Rights for Human Felons Versus Bank Felons
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 11, 2017 In 2012, the Sentencing Project released a study that estimated that 5.85 million people would be ineligible to vote in the U.S. Presidential election that year because they had been convicted of a felony. In 22 states, felons lose their voting rights during incarceration, and for a set period of time thereafter. Usually, this includes while the individual is on parole and/or probation. Eleven states in the U.S. are more harsh. They deny voting rights to felons who have served their time in prison and have successfully completed parole and probation. If you’re a citizen of the United States and commit a felony, it’s a big deal. If you’re a Wall Street bank and commit a felony, it’s business as usual. In January 2014, JPMorgan Chase was charged with two felony counts by the U.S. Department of Justice for its involvement … Continue reading
A Private Citizen Would Be in Prison If He Had Citigroup’s Rap Sheet
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 27, 2017 Since its financial meltdown in 2008 and unprecedented bailout by the U.S. taxpayer, Citigroup (parent of Citibank) has been repeatedly charged by its Federal regulators with odious crimes against its pooled mortgage investors, credit card and banking customers, student loan borrowers, and for its foreclosure frauds. It has paid billions of dollars in fines for its past misdeeds while new charges pile up. In 2015, it became an admitted felon for participating in rigging foreign exchange markets. In short, Citigroup is a lawbreaking recidivist. If it were a mere human, it would be serving a long prison term. Instead, its fines for charges of egregious acts are getting smaller, not larger. Last Tuesday, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), which typically has a good track record of holding the big Wall Street banks accountable for their misdeeds, imposed an unusually feeble … Continue reading
Wall Street Flacks Have an Increasingly Murky Presence in U.S. Media
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 14, 2017 Yesterday, one of our readers sent us a link to an article at Real Clear Politics by Allan Golombek which makes the same error-filled assertions as those of Andrew Ross Sorkin at the New York Times: that the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act did not lead to the U.S. financial crisis of 2007-2010. Golombek’s bio at the end of the article says only that he is “a Senior Director at the White House Writers Group.” A check at the firm’s website shows it to be an organization that freely admits to being paid by corporations and other special interests to advance their position in the media. The firm states: “Whether in a campaign or a crisis, we help our clients determine how best to define their messages for media acceptance and then disseminate those messages for maximum exposure and impact.” There … Continue reading
The Stock Market Is Confident; Business Leaders, Not So Much
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 17, 2017 As the stock market repeatedly set new highs this year, confidence in the President was eroding among the general public. That erosion of confidence now extends to dozens of the top corporate leaders in America. There is apparently a new social standard in America. When it was revealed in the final weeks of Trump’s Presidential bid that he had stated on video that he could sexually assault women (“grab ‘em by the p*ssy), it was not a serious impediment for the top executives of the largest corporations in America to continue to pander to Trump, take top posts in his administration and serve on his business advisory councils. Even though it is generally accepted that women “drive 70-80% of all consumer purchasing, through a combination of their buying power and influence” the male executives that sit atop the most famous brands … Continue reading
Despite Record Stock Markets, Almost Half of Americans Own No Stocks
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 10, 2017 On April 7, 2011 the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 12,409.49. Yesterday, it closed at 22,048.70, an increase of more than 9600 points over the six-year span. A bull market of this magnitude lasting more than half a decade would have been expected by Wall Street experts to have sucked in even the most cynical Wall Street naysayers. It hasn’t. Each April, the polling firm, Gallup, conducts its annual Economy and Personal Finance Survey. It asks U.S. adults whether they personally or jointly have money invested in the stock market, either in individual stocks or stock market funds, including through vehicles such as 401(k)s and Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs). Gallup began its 2011 survey on April 7, 2011, the day that the Dow closed at 12,409.49. That year’s survey found that 45 percent of Americans owned no stocks. Despite a … Continue reading
After Passing Stress Tests, Wall Street Banks to Spend Like a Drunken Sailor – on their Own Stock Buybacks
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 29, 2017 Yesterday, the Federal Reserve announced the second leg of its 2017 stress tests for the nation’s most systemic financial institutions. Known as the Comprehensive Capital Analysis and Review (CCAR), the Fed said it “did not object to the capital plans of all 34 bank holding companies” although Capital One Financial will be required to “submit a new capital plan within six months that addresses identified weaknesses in its capital planning process.” That all clear from the Fed unleashed what JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon fondly refers to as “animal spirits” on Wall Street. The Fed had barely made its announcement when three of the biggest Wall Street banks announced they were earmarking about $47 billion to gorging on their own share buybacks. JPMorgan Chase led the pack with a potential buyback of $19.4 billion over the next 12 months, according to … Continue reading
Media Focus on Trump Blindsides the Public from Rising Wall Street Risks
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 27, 2017 There are some very serious undercurrents at work in the U.S. financial markets but they are getting short shrift on the front pages of newspapers as the President’s travails dominate the news. That’s working out well for Wall Street, which wants to keep the public slumbering as long as possible in hopes of gutting more financial regulations. One of those serious undercurrents is the amount of risk being held by the biggest banks in the country. According to the Federal Reserve’s release of its Supervisory Stress Test, of the 34 Bank Holding Companies that are subject to its review, under a “severely adverse scenario,” meaning a deep recession, losses for the combined group are projected to be $493 billion. Not to put too fine a point on it but that’s just 34 banks out of a total of 5,856 FDIC insured … Continue reading
Sergey Aleynikov, Jailed by Goldman Sachs, May Be Just the Man to Stop Russian Hacking of U.S. Voting Systems
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 13, 2017 If Goldman Sachs thinks this Russian computer genius is worthy of endless prosecution for the past eight years, despite two courts overturning their efforts, perhaps he’s just the man the Department of Homeland Security and FBI need to stop the Russian assault on the U.S. election system. This morning Bloomberg News is reporting that in the leadup to the Presidential election of 2016, Russian hackers hit voting systems in a total of 39 states, confirming other reports that the U.S. public has not previously been made aware of the extent of Russian hacking into state voting systems. In testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee on June 8, former FBI Director James Comey stated in regard to Russian interference in our elections that “They’re coming after America,” adding that “They will be back.” This is where computer experts on Wall Street could help the … Continue reading