Search Results for: JPMorgan

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 15, 2023 ~ The Bill Clinton administration’s repeal in 1999 of the 1933 Banking Act, commonly known as the Glass-Steagall Act, ushered in the greatest kleptocracy America has ever known. The Cambridge dictionary defines “kleptocracy” as: “a society whose leaders make themselves rich and powerful by stealing from the rest of the people.” In fact, the actual goal of repealing Glass-Steagall was to do just that. The momentum for the repeal of Glass-Steagall came from the announcement in 1998 that Wall Street veteran, Sandy Weill, wanted to merge his trading firms, Salomon Brothers and Smith Barney (under the Travelers Group umbrella), with Citicorp, parent of the federally-insured Citibank commercial bank. Because of the Glass-Steagall Act, such a merger was illegal at the time. The 1933 Congress that passed the Glass-Steagall Act had watched the stock market lose 89 percent of its value over the years … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 10, 2023 ~ That office space company we warned our readers about so extensively in 2019, WeWork, collapsed to 13 cents a share yesterday. Its bonds were trading at about 13 cents on the dollar. WeWork’s stock has been on a steady decline since the company began to trade publicly on October 21, 2021. The chart above shows how investors would have fared in WeWork stock versus a 10-year U.S. Treasury note since WeWork started trading in 2021. The collapse in the share price this week came as a result of an 8-K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday in which the company uttered these discomforting words: “…as a result of the Company’s losses and projected cash needs, combined with increased member churn and current liquidity levels, substantial doubt exists about the Company’s ability to continue as a going concern.” The … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 7, 2023 ~ Deposits at the 25-largest domestically-chartered U.S. commercial banks peaked at $11.680 trillion on April 13, 2022, according to the updated H.8 data maintained at the Federal Reserve Economic Database (FRED). As of the most current H.8 data for the week ending on Wednesday, July 26, 2023, deposits stood at $10.709 trillion at those 25 commercial banks, a dollar decline of $970 billion and a percentage decline of 8.3 percent. Equally noteworthy, the decline shows no signs of letting up. According to the FRED data, between July 5 and the most current reading on July 26, the 25 largest U.S. banks shed $174 billion in deposits. Despite all of the misleading news reports about depositors seeking out the perceived safety of the largest banks since the banking crisis in the spring, it’s actually been the smaller banks that have staged a comeback … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 3, 2023 ~ At 5:13 p.m. ET on Tuesday, after the stock market closed, Fitch downgraded the U.S. credit rating from AAA to AA+. Fitch is now the second of the three major credit rating agencies to have taken the historic step of removing the triple-A rating from the U.S. S&P made its first-ever downgrade to the U.S. credit rating on August 5, 2011, also from AAA to AA+, and has kept it there ever since. Moody’s is now the only member of the Big Three credit rating agencies that has maintained a triple-A rating on the U.S. As the chart above indicates, the stock market responded negatively to this development yesterday, particularly over the fact that it came at a time when the U.S. Treasury is boosting the amount of debt it is issuing. Yesterday, the U.S. Treasury announced its plans to increase … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 31, 2023 ~ The chart above compares the stock price performance of the kidney dialysis company, DaVita (ticker DVA), with the Standard and Poor’s 500 Index since 1996. Right away, something looks very wrong. Why should a healthcare company delivering dialysis treatment to people with kidney failure make the kind of profits that would generate this outsized stock price return? Investigative reporter and author, Tom Mueller, has dedicated his latest book to pulling back the curtain on the dirty underbelly of this industry. The book, How to Make a Killing: Blood, Death and Dollars in American Medicine, will be available for sale in bookstores tomorrow. If you have a loved one receiving kidney dialysis at centers run by either DaVita or Fresenius, we urge you to stop what you’re doing, buy this book, and read it from cover to cover. The book presents nothing … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 25, 2023 ~ In June, Reuters reported that JPMorgan Chase was expanding the reach of its commercial bank into two additional foreign countries – Israel and Singapore – bringing its foreign commercial bank presence to a total of 28 countries. Those plans could potentially add billions of dollars more to its already problematic uninsured deposits. Why federal regulators are allowing JPMorgan Chase to continue to expand, despite it admitting to five criminal felony counts since 2014 and currently facing three lawsuits in federal court for facilitating Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking of underage girls is drawing attention from watchdogs. According to its regulatory filings, as of December 31, 2022, JPMorgan Chase Bank N.A. held $2.015 trillion in deposits in domestic offices, of which $1.058 trillion were uninsured. It also held another $418.9 billion in deposits in foreign offices, which were also not insured by the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 24, 2023 ~ Prior to Ben Bernanke being sworn in as Fed Chair on February 6, 2006, the United States had been through World War I, the Great Depression, World War II, the Vietnam War and the stagflation of the 1970s, without an explosion in the Fed’s balance sheet. But since Ben Bernanke, Janet Yellen and Jerome Powell have, in turn, sat at the helm of the Federal Reserve, there has been unprecedented growth in the Fed’s Balance Sheet. For example, from June 1960 to August 1990, the Fed’s balance sheet increased from $53 billion to $309 billion – an increase of 483 percent in 30 years. But during the tenures of Bernanke, Yellen and Powell, the Fed’s balance sheet has exploded from $805 billion in February 2006, when Bernanke took his seat as Fed Chair, to the current reading last Wednesday, July 19, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 18, 2023 ~ The “Deep State” is increasingly feeling like the “Deep Banking State.” Try to get any meaningful information to unravel the corrupt and dangerous interconnections between global banking behemoths today and some government or other entity has slapped a padlock on the information. The latest example is the Swiss Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry that is delving into the collapse in March of the second largest global bank in Switzerland – Credit Suisse. The Commission has announced that it plans to lock away the details of its findings for 50 years. (UBS, the largest global bank in Switzerland, bought the crumbling remains of Credit Suisse earlier this year.) Reuters reported that the Swiss Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry is also requiring that “All persons participating in the meetings and the questioning are subject to the duty of secrecy, not only the members of … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 13, 2023 ~ Senator Elizabeth Warren is the Chair of the Senate Banking Committee’s Subcommittee on Economic Policy. She is also the most knowledgeable member of Congress when it comes to the mega banks on Wall Street and the most willing to hold them accountable. (See related articles below.) Yesterday, Warren’s Subcommittee held a hearing on “Bank Mergers and the Economic Impacts of Consolidation.” The urgency of this hearing was heightened by the fact that almost two years after President Joe Biden signed an Executive Order urging members of his administration to take a more aggressive investigation into the harmful impacts of consolidation and monopoly power before approving more mergers in a number of industries, including banking, bank regulators signed off on one of the most egregious mergers of this century. Senator Warren explained it this way: “When First Republic Bank collapsed in April, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 11, 2023 ~ The polling organization, Gallup, conducted a survey between June 1-22 to update its annual poll that measures the confidence that Americans have in key U.S. institutions. Banks, as might be expected, continued their downward trend, registering an abysmal 26 percent of Americans who have “a great deal” or “fair amount” of confidence in the banks. That confidence ranking stood at 27 percent last year and at 33 percent in 2021. It is actually somewhat baffling that confidence in banks only dropped by one percentage point from last year, given that the second, third and fourth largest bank failures in U.S. history occurred in the first half of this year. Measured against a longer time horizon, confidence in U.S. banks looks far worse. In 1979, the Gallup poll showed 60 percent of Americans had confidence in the banks. In the years prior … Continue reading →