By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 19, 2022 ~ JPMorgan Chase is the largest federally-insured bank in the United States. It is also one of the largest trading houses on Wall Street. That’s the Faustian bargain the Clinton administration entered into with Wall Street when it repealed the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999. According to data from the FDIC, as of June 30 of last year, JPMorgan Chase Bank N.A. had 4,925 branches in 44 U.S. states holding $2.01 trillion in deposits. Many of those deposits belong to mom and pop savers who have no idea that the bank has admitted to five criminal felony counts since 2014 and has a rap sheet that is the envy of the Gambino crime family. (Apparently, a federal judge in New York overseeing a current JPMorgan case is just as naïve about the bank’s criminal history. More on that shortly.) The bulk of Americans … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 18, 2022 ~ Yesterday we spotted a headline at the news outlet, Politico, that read: “Meeting the Moment: Without cryptocurrency regulatory approval, the U.S. risks its status as a financial leader.” Posing as actual journalism with a byline by a person named Jennifer Gregory, the article provides a lengthy interview with Michael Sonnenshein, the CEO of Grayscale Investments, a peddler of Bitcoin. Sonnenshein uses the interview to whine about a recent Securities and Exchange Commission decision that didn’t go his way and tout how his powerful outside law firm, Davis Polk, plans to appeal the decision. In small print, the article notes that it is actually “Sponsored by Grayscale Investments.” In other words, it’s an advertisement posing as real journalism. Unfortunately, this co-branding between the Bitcoin company, Grayscale, and the news outlet, Politico, goes much deeper than just this one headline. On March 24 … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 15, 2022 ~ Yesterday afternoon, Mark Bialek, the Inspector General of the Federal Reserve, released a memorandum clearing Fed Chair Jerome Powell and former Fed Vice Chair Richard Clarida of wrongdoing in the trading scandal that has engulfed multiple officials of the Federal Reserve. Curiously, that memorandum came just one day after Senator Sherrod Brown, Chair of the Senate Banking Committee, and four other Democratic colleagues in the Senate, sent Powell a letter about the trading scandal. The letter suggested that Powell was hampering the investigation and took him to task for failing to put the force of law and a chain of command in place for the Fed’s newly upgraded trading restrictions. Even more curious, the memorandum from the Fed’s Inspector General came just hours after Wall Street On Parade reported on Senator Brown’s letter and called attention to the fact that the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 14, 2022 ~ This month marks the 10th month since the worst insider trading scandal in the 109-year history of the Fed made media headlines. Yesterday, Senator Sherrod Brown, the Chair of the Senate Banking Committee, along with two of his fellow Senators on that Committee (Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock) and two additional Senators who do not serve on that Committee (Jeff Merkley and Kirsten Gillibrand) sent a stunning letter to Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell. The overall thrust of the letter suggested that the Fed had attempted to quiet public outrage over the Fed’s trading scandal by issuing new trading conduct rules for Fed officials but had failed to put the force of law behind those rules or set up a proper chain of command. But three sentences in the letter also strongly suggest that the Fed Chairman is actually hampering the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 13, 2022 ~ The letter is a punch in the gut to the Wall Street underwriters who have brought billions of dollars of crypto related companies to the public markets, most of which have now collapsed in price. It makes the billionaire venture capitalists who have invested billions in crypto startups look like fools. And it renders the big-name celebrities who have promoted this garbage in TV commercials look like the shills that they are. The letter was sent to key members of Congress and to the Chairs of the Senate Banking and House Financial Services Committees. It is signed by more than 1,600 computer scientists, software engineers and technologists from around the world. There are 45 signatories who currently work at Google; 19 who work at Microsoft; 11 employed at Apple. (Those three companies currently have a collective market capitalization of more than … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 12, 2022 ~ On May 4, 2020, while Jay Clayton was the Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission in the Trump administration, the SEC granted approval for a new national stock exchange called MEMX, whose Wall Street megabank owners have admitted to a collective nine criminal felony counts brought by the U.S. Department of Justice. JPMorgan Chase accounts for five of those felony counts; Goldman Sachs and a subsidiary account for two felony counts; Citigroup and UBS account for one felony count each. The other owners of MEMX include: Bank of America, BlackRock, Charles Schwab, Citadel Securities, E*TRADE, Fidelity Investments, Flow Traders, Jane Street, Manikay Partners, Morgan Stanley, TD Ameritrade, Virtu Financial, Wells Fargo, and Williams Trading. The SEC’s letter approving MEMX as a national securities exchange stated that the SEC was confident that MEMX would “prevent fraudulent and manipulative acts and practices, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 11, 2022 ~ Two members of the January 6 House Select Committee who will do the questioning of witnesses at this coming Tuesday’s hearing appeared on two of the key Sunday news programs. House Rep Jamie Raskin (D-MD) made an appearance on the CBS program, Face the Nation, while House Rep Stephanie Murphy (D-FL) gave an interview to Chuck Todd on the NBC program, Meet the Press. Raskin revealed that the infamous December 18 meeting at the White House will be explored at Tuesday’s hearing. Highlights of that meeting have been covered in numerous books and articles but now the Committee plans to offer first-hand testimony (potentially from filmed depositions) about the illegal proposals that were discussed with President Donald Trump at that meeting. Trump’s outside lawyers at that meeting, who were referred to by White House lawyers as “Team Crazy,” included Sidney Powell … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 8, 2022 ~ In 2018, Bloomberg reporters Peter Waldman, Lizette Chapman, and Jordan Robertson published a stunning expose on how JPMorgan Chase was spying on its employees, including after hours, using as many as 120 engineers from the data mining company Palantir Technologies Inc. According to the Bloomberg report, “It all ended when the bank’s senior executives learned that they, too, were being watched, and what began as a promising marriage of masters of big data and global finance descended into a spying scandal.” But the surveillance program did not end. The bank simply developed its own proprietary spying system instead. Business Insider reporter, Reed Alexander, has reignited the scandal with the news that the internal surveillance program at JPMorgan Chase is now called “Workforce Activity Data Utility” or WADU. According to Business Insider, the surveillance is fostering paranoia inside the bank with … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 7, 2022 ~ The Office of Financial Research (OFR), a unit of the U.S. Treasury Department, was created under the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation of 2010. Its job is to prevent, through early warnings, the kind of catastrophic financial crisis that occurred in 2008 when irresponsible and corrupt practices on Wall Street toppled the U.S. economy; brought on the deepest financial crisis since the Great Depression; and left the taxpayer and Fed bailing out the Wall Street megabanks that would have otherwise collapsed from their own hubris. Unfortunately, the OFR was savagely gutted under the Trump administration. Today, OFR is like the cop on the beat that has been stripped of his whistle, his walkie-talkie and is wearing dark sun glasses on a cloudy day. One of the tools that the OFR is supposed to use to warn federal regulators that Wall Street is … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 6, 2022 ~ Sam Bankman-Fried is the co-founder and CEO of crypto firm, FTX. He’s also a man on a mission. The mission is to spend tens of millions of dollars on political campaigns until he gets his desired outcome in Washington: permission for FTX to be able to offer highly leveraged derivative contracts on cryptocurrencies with margin accounts and 24/7 automated liquidation of defaulting customers, effectively being able to sell out customer accounts while they’re asleep in their beds. And, by the way, the pesky detail of a regulated brokerage firm intermediary in the transaction would become history. To bring his dream to fruition, Bankman-Fried has been writing out checks in a wild flurry of activity this year. Between February 4 and April 14 of this year, Bankman-Fried wrote out three checks totaling $23 million to Protect Our Future PAC. According to Federal Election … Continue reading →