Search Results for: Jamie Dimon

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 →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 2, 2015 Last March, Wall Street On Parade reported that the appointment calendar of Ben Bernanke during his Chairmanship of the Federal Reserve in the years of the greatest financial crash since the Great Depression, showed 84 redactions of meetings he conducted with unnamed persons between January 1, 2007 through the collapse of Bear Stearns on the weekend of March 15-16, 2008. According to the “official” record, those months were far from the core months of the financial crash, which are said to have been triggered with the collapse of Lehman Brothers on September 15, 2008 and the quick implosion of other major financial institutions that Fall. Last month, Bernanke released a 600-page tome on the crash, The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and its Aftermath. (It’s not every day that an author credits himself with courage in a book … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 22, 2015  One of the common complaints heard about the U.S. financial regulatory system is that it’s so fragmented that one hand doesn’t know what the other is doing. For example, both the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and the Federal Reserve Board of Governors (Fed) regulate the largest banks – including the biggest banks on Wall Street. But neither of these regulators has any clarity on the securities trading risks that these banks holding trillions in insured deposits are taking. Neither does the FDIC that insures the deposits with backstopping from the taxpayer. That’s the Securities and Exchange Commission’s job. The same banks are also taking big risks in commodities and futures trading – but that’s left to the oversight of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). And on and on it goes. A speech given yesterday by Thomas … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: October 19, 2015  A funny thing happened in 2012 after Andrew Ross Sorkin, a financial writer at the New York Times, wrote his spectacularly false narrative telling readers that the repeal of Glass-Steagall Act had nothing to do with the crash because problem firms like Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and AIG didn’t own insured commercial banks — which would have been prohibited under the Glass Steagall Act, had it not been repealed in 1999. In fact, all three of the firms did, indeed, own banks insured by the FDIC at the time of the crash. We figured that Sorkin had just made an error, or, well, three monster errors, so we wrote to his editor. We heard nothing. We wrote to the New York Times public editor who is supposed to uphold the integrity of the paper. Nothing. We wrote to the publisher. Nothing. To this very … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 2, 2015 The Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged 469.6 points yesterday for a loss of 2.84 percent but Wall Street banks and trading firms took a far heavier bruising. Business media have been placing the blame for global stock market convulsions on China’s slowing economy, devaluation of its currency and seemingly unstoppable selloffs in its wildly inflated stock market. There would seem to be much more to this story than we know so far to explain the outsized fall in Wall Street bank stocks. Yesterday, with the Dow losing 2.84 percent, the major names on Wall Street fared as follows: Citigroup, down 4.75 percent; Bank of America, down 4.65 percent; Wells Fargo, down 4.39 percent; JPMorgan Chase, down 4.13 percent; Morgan Stanley, down 3.86 percent; and Goldman Sachs, down 3.44 percent. The Blackstone Group, a private equity firm with significant involvement in China, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 20, 2015 Judging by the speed at which U.S. billionaires are going unfiltered on the airwaves and in print, the U.S. may soon find itself indelibly defined as a nation of well-heeled meatheads. Yesterday we reported on billionaire Sandy Weill, whose crackpot idea of a financial supermarket and rollback of the Glass Steagall Act resulted in his becoming a billionaire despite the implosion of his creation, Citigroup, in 2008.  Citigroup became the largest banking bailout in U.S. history and a catalyst for the largest U.S. downturn since the Great Depression. Now in their twilight years, Weill and his wife, Joan, have nothing better to do than attempt to gut a dead man’s will in order to chisel Joan’s name into the façade of Paul Smith’s College, a 1,000-student campus in New York’s Adirondack mountains. As the Weill article evolved, reflecting a life-long pattern … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 19, 2015 Yesterday, Mary Jo White was in London to address the International Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSCO). While there, she commented on the U.K.’s new plan to hold senior managers in the finance industry responsible for fraud in their departments. Each senior manager will have a specific delegated responsibility and if fraud occurs in their area, he or she can be terminated and banned for life from the industry if the senior manager had knowledge of the fraud. White called the idea “intriguing.” While White was chatting with her fellow securities regulators in London on this novel idea of actually holding crooked Wall Street bosses accountable, Thomas Hayes was on trial in another section of London over charges that he rigged the benchmark interest rate, Libor, on which interest rates on loans and financial instruments are set around the world. Yesterday, Hayes produced … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 15, 2015 The U.S. Treasury’s Office of Financial Research (OFR), the body created under the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation to make sure another 2008 epic crash never happened again, quietly released a report last week which not only suggests another 2008-style crash is possible but that regulators will likely be blindsided again. The report, written by Jill Cetina, John McDonough, and Sriram Rajan, reveals that the big Wall Street banks are ginning up their capital measures by engaging in opaque and potentially dangerous “capital relief trades.” To illustrate how dangerous this kind of capital relief arbitrage can be, the report says that JPMorgan’s London Whale trades (which blew a $6.2 billion hole in the insured bank) was a capital relief trade. Here’s the precise language from the report: “JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s losses in the 2012 London Whale case were the result of … Continue reading →