Search Results for: Jamie Dimon

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 24, 2016 Presidential candidate Donald Trump and the mega Wall Street bank JPMorgan Chase share a common trait: they can conduct themselves in a manner that insults the values of a civilized society and instead of losing ground, their star rises – or so it appears. Trump’s public vulgarity and anti-Presidential demeanor are perpetually on display at his Twitter page and in the Republican debates.  In just the past month, Trump has called Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly “crazy”; boasted of the size of his “manhood” during a Republican debate; and promised to ramp up the use of torture – illegal under both domestic and international law. The typically staid Senator Elizabeth Warren even lost her cool with Trump on March 21, Tweeting that “his insecurities are on parade: petty bullying, attacks on women, cheap racism, flagrant narcissism.” In a new CBS News/New York … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 21, 2016 Americans have painful recollections of how allowing ratings agencies to take Wall Street money and dole out bogus triple-A ratings on subprime mortgages tanked the U.S. housing market in the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression. They fully understand that the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision that opened the floodgates to pay-to-play corporate financing of elections has grotesquely disfigured participatory democracy in America. Now they’re about to learn how America’s “free press” is able to be bought – literally. This past Friday, March 18, Laurence Kotlikoff, a Forbes contributor, Professor of Economics at Boston University and bestselling co-author of Get What’s Yours: The Secrets To Maxing Out Your Social Security, tweeted the headline of an article he had just posted at Forbes: “JPMorgan Chase – The True Story of America’s Most Corrupt Bank.” The Tweet linked to a two-page article … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 16, 2016  Since Wall Street’s felony counts last May (see “Related Articles” below) and the unleashing of ever more creative ways to fleece the populace, it’s getting tougher and tougher to find people willing to shill for the Wall Street claptrap that it’s been punished enough and it’s time to put the bashing to rest. It’s getting tougher — but not impossible. Matt Winkler, the Bloomberg News Editor-in-Chief Emeritus, wrote an opinion piece and appeared on Bloomberg TV last week to regurgitate the threadbare “Stop Bashing Wall Street. Times Have Changed” refrain. Winkler starts off with this premise: “One of the reasons the American economy is performing better than any of the largest in Asia and Europe is that its regulators have repaired the damage of the financial crisis and the worst recession since the Great Depression. Led by the Federal Reserve, they … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 25, 2016 In a feeble public relations move, Bill Dudley, the President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and FINRA, the self-regulatory body on Wall Street, are making noises about cleaning up the culture on Wall Street. It’s always dangerous to make any predictions when it comes to Wall Street but in this case we can confidently predict that when it comes to the New York Fed and FINRA, the only possible impact they could have on the culture is to make it worse. The New York Fed didn’t see a problem for Bill Dudley’s spouse to collect $190,000 a year in deferred compensation from JPMorgan Chase while the New York Fed served as the bank’s main regulator. The New York Fed didn’t see a problem for Citigroup’s CEO, Sandy Weill, or JPMorgan CEO, Jamie Dimon, to sit on its Board … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 24, 2016 The same phenomenon that’s been playing out for months took center stage yesterday with one notable twist: oil prices dove, the broader stock market swooned, but the mega Wall Street banks took a worse beating than the broader stock market averages. The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 1.14 percent yesterday while Bank of America, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley were off by more than 3 percent. In an unusual twist, JPMorgan Chase, the bank that analyst Mike Mayo has preposterously called the Lebron James of banking, performed the worst among its peers yesterday, down 4.18 percent. What knocked the wind out of JPMorgan’s sails yesterday is at the heart of why the banks keep tanking when oil prices swoon. In a nutshell, the market doesn’t think these banks are coming clean about their exposure to oil – whether it’s in loans to … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 29, 2016  There is quite a bit of inchoate dissonance as to whether JPMorgan Chase is a good investment. Recently, banking analyst Mike Mayo called JPMorgan Chase the “Lebron James of banking.” Lebron James is a famous basketball player who has won a lot of great awards for doing great things, including Olympic Gold. JPMorgan Chase is a bank that has, since Jamie Dimon took the helm as CEO on January 1, 2006, received a deferred prosecution agreement for two felony counts from the U.S. Justice Department for facilitating the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme and just last May agreed to a felony count for rigging foreign currency markets. In addition to the felony counts, there has been a serial stream of settlements for everything from rigging electricity markets to ripping off members of the U.S. military. We don’t know why Mike Mayo would … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 27, 2016 Expensive media real estate is reporting that presidential candidate, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, will meet with President Obama in the Oval Office today. Much is being made of the fact that the meeting comes less than a week before the politically important Iowa caucuses and just two days after Politico published an exclusive interview with the President in which he appeared to favor a Clinton presidency. (Memo to the President: this election is about finding an authentic non-establishment candidate, so your opinion as the quintessential establishment figure is not likely to sway folks – at least not in a good way.) The first thing that came to mind when we heard about the meeting was that one or more kingpins on Wall Street might have asked the President to whisper in Senator Sanders’ ear to stop repeating at every campaign … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 6, 2016 Presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont gave a speech yesterday that is destined to go down in the history books of this era, further enshrining him as one of the most courageous voices of our time. Sanders promised to break up the serially criminally-inclined banks on Wall Street and reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act to drive a permanent stake through the heart of too-big-to-fail. But if you watched either his official campaign’s YouTube video of his speech or the one provided by volunteers for his campaign, three key passages of what he said have gone missing from the video. We were able to reconstruct the full speech as delivered by transcribing the three missing sections from a YouTube video posted by the PBS Newshour which, notably, had no gaps in its video. (Watch the PBS video of the speech at the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 30, 2015 The problem with Wall Street is not just that individual participants serially disrespect the law. The bigger problem is that Wall Street as an industry has structured itself as an ingrained law-avoidance system. There’s simply no other industry in America where you could start the sentence – “Wall Street is the only industry in America where…” – and find endless ways to finish that thought. Jamil Nazarali, the head of Citadel Execution Services, the trading arm of a hedge fund and dark pool operator, gave the above sentence a trial run on October 27 at a Securities and Exchange Commission meeting on market structure. Nazarali said: “This industry is the only one that I am aware of where a for-profit public company regulates its customers and competitors. And I understand that you guys think that that’s important but what is it … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 24, 2015  After lamenting in a recent book how Presidents George W. Bush and Obama didn’t answer his letters (Return to Sender: Unanswered Letters to the President, 2001-2015), Ralph Nader has finally been requited by a powerful person in Washington. Nader had the temerity to write Fed Chair Janet Yellen a letter on October 30, pointing out how the Fed’s zero bound interest rate policy is crimping the spending ability of savers who rely on such things as savings accounts and money market interest for added income to survive. Yesterday, Yellen boldly answered Nader’s letter with a smackdown. The letter has caused an outbreak of sexism charges against Nader by various writers for his suggestion in the letter that Yellen would be wise to “sit down with your Nobel Prize winning husband, economist George Akerlof, who is known to be consumer-sensitive.” Annie Lowrey … Continue reading →