Search Results for: Jamie Dimon

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 5, 2014 On January 6 of this year, JPMorgan Chase entered into a two-year probation agreement known as a “deferred prosecution” agreement with the U.S. Justice Department. The deal allowed JPMorgan to avoid prosecution for two felony counts related to its failures in serving as Bernard Madoff’s bank as tens of billions of dollars were laundered between accounts while it made none of the required suspicious activity reports – except one to the United Kingdom. The deferred prosecution agreement, signed on January 6, 2014, required that for the next two years, JPMorgan had to bring to the attention of Federal prosecutors any knowledge of wrongdoing inside the bank, cooperate fully and in good faith, and agree to “commit no crimes under the federal laws of the United States subsequent to the execution of this agreement…” If JPMorgan broke its end of the bargain, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 23, 2014 What the New York Fed attempted to pull off this past Monday with its full-day conference for the execs of wayward Wall Street banks was a public relations stunt to switch the national debate from its culture to Wall Street’s culture. Styled as a “Workshop on Reforming Culture and Behavior in the Financial Services Industry,” the event came less than a month after ProPublica and public radio’s “This American Life” released internal tape recordings made by a former New York Fed bank examiner, Carmen Segarra, revealing a regulator with no bark or bite. ProPublica’s Jake Bernstein wrote that the tapes and a confidential report by an outside consultant demonstrated the New York Fed’s “history of deference to banks.” But there is far more to this story. Wall Street banking executives, who elect two-thirds of the Board of Directors of the New … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 22, 2014  Yesterday the Inspector General of the Federal Reserve System released a highly abbreviated report on the New York Fed’s supervision of JPMorgan’s Chief Investment Office (CIO) that spawned the $6.2 billion in exotic derivative losses in 2012 – using hundreds of billions of dollars in FDIC insured deposits to make those wild bets. The debacle became known as the London Whale since the outsized trades were conducted in London. The four page summary report that was sanitized for the public includes two bombshells for those who took the time to read the report carefully. First, the Inspector General specifically notes that “we selected July 2004 through April 2012 as the time period for our evaluation. July 2004 marked JPMC’s merger with Bank One Corporation (Bank One), and JPMC created the CIO in 2005.” What is the relevance of that nugget? We … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 6, 2014 America’s central bank, the Federal Reserve, has a credibility problem and a management crisis unique to its unusual structure. If the Chair of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, Janet Yellen, had any real management powers, she would have immediately asked William Dudley, President of the New York Fed, to step down after internal tape recordings revealed that his staff rubber stamps “legal but shady” deals at the big Wall Street banks it supervises. “Legal but shady” and patently illegal dressed up as just shady deals collapsed this Nation’s financial system only six years ago and continues to depress the country’s economic growth. The tapes were released by former New York Fed bank examiner, Carmen Segarra, via the public interest web site ProPublica and public radio’s “This American Life.” Segarra is suing the New York Fed, charging that she was terminated … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: September 28, 2014 If you missed our coverage in 2012 of the Lower Manhattan Security Coordination Center where Wall Street sleuths from those serially charged firms like Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan dunk donuts alongside New York’s finest in a $150 million spy center, keeping tabs on the comings and goings of their own Wall Street employees as well as innocent pedestrians, then you may not fully appreciate why Carmen Segarra has been celebrated all weekend for her temerity in taping her boss and colleagues at the New York Fed, as well as employees inside the cloistered bowels of Goldman Sachs. While Wall Street was spying on everyone else in lower Manhattan in a high tech center funded by the taxpayer, Segarra strolled over to a Spy Store, plunked down a modest sum and walked out with a tiny tape recorder. She then proceeded to capture the essence … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 25, 2014 Imagine historians 25 years from now looking back on one of the worst economic periods since the Great Depression and finding that the Wall Street Journal was calling this a “Goldilocks Economy” – “not too hot, not too cold.” (They can’t actually bring themselves to say “just right” to stay on script with the fairy tale.) On September 7, 2014 the Wall Street Journal went with this headline: “The Upside of August’s Jobs Report: A Goldilocks Economy.” The next day, in a blog post, this appeared: “Stocks rallied Friday following the disappointing jobs report as those hoping for a Goldilocks economy (not too hot, not too cold) cheered.” During the Great Depression, headline writers were admonished not to use the phrase “Great Depression” but to go with the more benign “hard times.” The theory behind the use of the phrase “Goldilocks … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 12, 2014 Eric Cantor’s campaign may have eaten its way through $168,000 of steak dinners but big players on Wall Street are eating crow. Between 2000 and 2007, Goldman Sachs’ Chairman and CEO, Lloyd Blankfein, personally stuffed $73,500 into the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee to help elect Democrats to Federal office. But by 2012, Blankfein had decided that “Every Republican is Crucial” and gave just defeated Virginia Republican and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s leadership PAC by the same name $5,000 in 2012 and another $5,000 in 2013. In addition, Blankfein gave the Cantor Victory Fund $10,200 on December 6, 2013 according to receipts at the Federal Election Commission. In the 2013-2014 election cycle, Goldman Sachs’ employees and/or their family members gave a total of $88,500 to Cantor’s leadership PAC – which sluices money to Republican candidates around the country – and another … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: June 11, 2014 Wall Street On Parade has been reporting for some time now that much of Wall Street’s past and current history has up and disappeared – either at the hands of high speed shredders on orders from the SEC, or through Courts sealing documents, or Wall Street’s private justice system preventing access to hearings, non-disparagement contracts when you change your job on Wall Street, or critical pieces of Wall Street history just go missing and no one can find out exactly why. Now we learn that a vital book on Wall Street’s history had vanished until an NYU Professor made it his mission to return it to the public’s hands. In 2011, Darcy Flynn, an SEC lawyer, told Congressional investigators and the SEC Inspector General that for at least 18 years, the SEC had been shredding documents and emails related to its investigations — documents … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 21, 2014 There are lots of reasons to worry about America’s future. But one worry that we seldom hear discussed in any comprehensive way is the growing brand impairment resulting from the loss of Americans’ belief in their country’s sense of decency and the loss of credibility abroad from the too-big-to-discipline CEO – who, for better or worse, is acutely aligned with the corporate brand. Whether we like it or not, great corporate brands create jobs in America and tarnished brands result in job losses. There seems to be an intellectual disconnect in the thinking of the corporate Board of Directors who continue to lavish obscene pay on the discredited CEO and the reality that the corporate brand – the most valuable asset the corporation owns – is being severely diminished in the eyes of the consumer whose trust or distrust in that … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 20, 2014 If it’s at all possible, don’t die on the premises of a too-big-to-fail bank like JPMorgan. That’s because if you do your otherwise meritorious life and career is likely to be turned into a circus of slanderous tidbits in order to promote the reputation of the global banking behemoth as the benevolent guardian of all things noble and saintly. A coroner’s inquest began at 10 a.m. in London this morning to investigate how 39 year old Gabriel Magee, a technology Vice President who worked in JPMorgan’s European headquarters at 25 Bank Street in London, came to be found dead on a 9th level rooftop at approximately 8:02 a.m. on the morning of January 28 of this year. The inquest had barely begun when the wire service, Reuters, ran this headline: “JP Morgan Executive Had High Alcohol Level Before Skyscraper Plunge, London … Continue reading →