Search Results for: Jamie Dimon

By Pam Martens: November 14, 2013 The Federal Reserve system turns 100 this coming December 23. Today, for the first time, a woman will undergo a Senate confirmation hearing to lead the Fed – an historic first. But gender is the last thing on anyone’s mind today when it comes to the new Fed Chairman. The Republicans are simmering over what they feel are “easy money” policies at the Fed. Wall Street will be measuring every syllable for a hint of when the Fed’s cash punchbowl of $85 billion a month in bond purchases might end. A few Democrats will delicately quiz Yellen on her views on ending too big to fail banks. What is very unlikely to emerge amid the theatrics in the Senate Banking confirmation hearing this morning, is the most basic question of all: how did a 100-year old institution created to implement independent monetary policy in … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: November 11, 2013 It’s time to visit the musty shelves of those rare book stores and ferret out a copy of Charles Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness Of Crowds, or simply buy a reprinted version. Mackay’s book was first published in 1841and takes a hard look at greed-based manias like the tulip bubble in Holland in the 1600s and the South Sea bubble in the early 1700s. At the peak of the tulip bubble in 1637, it is reported that a single tulip bulb sold for many times the annual wage of a skilled laborer. The South Sea bubble was built around the British South Sea Company which seduced investors with the vision of great wealth from trade with South America. The company’s share price collapsed in the early 1700s, seriously impacting the British economy. Subsequent investigations revealed bribes and trading manipulations to pump up … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: October 28, 2013 Last week the business press reported that the U.S. Department of Justice may assert charges against JPMorgan Chase for its role in perpetuating the Bernard Madoff Ponzi scheme which defrauded investors out of $17 billion in actual funds and $64 billion in paper losses based on the falsified values shown on client statements. Unnamed sources said the Justice Department may agree to a deferred prosecution agreement in exchange for an outside monitor or, in the alternative, charge JPMorgan’s banking division with violations of the Bank Secrecy Act for failing to report its Madoff suspicions to Federal authorities. Interestingly, JPMorgan did report its suspicions to a government regulator – in the United Kingdom, not in the U.S. Such a development would also raise serious new questions about how the Board of Trustees of NYU handles conflicts of interest. The Board is already under withering criticism … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: October 8, 2013 Last week, Ryan Chittum, writing for the Columbia Journalism Review, unleashed the simmering disgust of hundreds of editors and reporters across America: why won’t former Chairman and CEO of AIG, Maurice (Hank) Greenberg, just shut up and go to trial on his eight year old charges of engaging in accounting fraud at his former company. He’s now on his third New York State Attorney General who has valiantly tried to let this case see the sunshine of a jury trial. What Greenberg has done instead is to pay the law firm of superlawyer David Boies to motion our courts to death while his army of pr flacks try his case on CNBC and in the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal. Greenberg’s latest soiree into fantasy land came in an October 2 piece in the Wall Street Journal where Greenberg empathized out loud … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: October 7, 2013 Last Thursday, Mary Jo White, the Chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission since April, spoke at Fordham Law School on “The Importance of Independence” at the SEC. This is akin to Jamie Dimon speaking at the American Bankers Association on the importance of safety and soundness of insured deposits at the Nation’s banks. The audience sensed an agenda: that White was trying to publicly humiliate Judge Jed Rakoff like a schoolboy getting lectured by the teacher in front of the class. Rakoff is the Judge who is challenging the SEC’s perpetual no-admit-or-deny settlements with Wall Street firms. The Wall Street Journal reported that White looked right at Rakoff who was sitting in the room during her lecture. White came to the SEC from Debevoise and Plimpton, a key Wall Street law firm, where she represented some of Wall Street’s biggest names. Her husband, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: October 1, 2013 It’s come to the point that one must forego sipping anything hot while reading the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal in order to avoid gasps of hot liquid spewing onto one’s skin or business attire. On September 27, 2013, the Wall Street Journal ran the headline “Robbery at J.P. Morgan” over an unsigned editorial. Curious to see if the Occupy Wall Street crowd might have made off with Jamie Dimon’s Presidential cufflinks, I read on. The next sentence was gasp-worthy: “Government lawyers are backing up the truck again at J.P. Morgan Chase to extract another haul from the country’s largest bank.” And, mind you, it’s not because J.P. Morgan has broken the law or done anything seriously wrong, it’s because the bank is the “Obama Administration’s favorite Wall Street target” because of its independent-thinking CEO, Jamie Dimon, who “keeps deviating from the Obama script.” … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: September 19, 2013 JPMorgan has reached a $920 million settlement with four of its regulators over the London Whale matter, a high risk trading strategy where bank deposits were used to gamble in illiquid credit derivatives in London. We now know why JPMorgan has been auditioning the settlement in the press for the past four days: the language in the various settlement documents is harsh, making it crystal clear the company broke both banking law and securities law. But then, the regulators had very little choice; the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations had effectively already reached those conclusions in a 307-page report it issued on March 14 of this year. The settlement with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) reads: “The credit derivatives trading activity constituted recklessly unsafe and unsound practices, was part of a pattern of misconduct and resulted in more than minimal loss, all within … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: September 17, 2013 Since last evening, corporate media has been in a fierce competition to spin another toothless settlement on Wall Street as a win for the new tough cop on the beat, Securities and Exchange Commission Chair, Mary Jo White. It takes quite the creative imagination to frame this as anything more than the continuance of Wall Street’s business model of looting billions and paying back millions. Crime is still the best profit center Wall Street has going for it — having thoroughly dissuaded its customers against trusting its advice on investments. According to leaks, the settlement tab to JPMorgan Chase to make most of its civil regulatory problems disappear regarding the London Whale trades will be $700 to $800 million. (There still may be open criminal probes by the U.S. Justice Department and FBI. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission may bring its own civil enforcement action.) … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: August 27, 2013  George Melloan has done a deep disservice to the ever-shrinking pool of ethical investigative writers covering Wall Street, civic-minded prosecutors, and to the underpaid but dedicated career regulators overseeing the financial markets. (No, the revolving door from Wall Street to Washington hasn’t quite killed off all that is good.)  Yesterday, Melloan penned an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal that was so Koch-esque, so preposterously skewed, and so utterly lacking in factual basis that it must be called out. Melloan makes the claim that the big banks aren’t doing anything more egregious than they have done in the past and the growing charges of fraud are the product of overly zealous regulators, “encouraged by the Obama administration” to blame the nation’s economic ills “on the rich, Wall Street, moneybags bankers, deal makers like Mitt Romney or almost anyone else who still wears a suit … Continue reading →

With criminal charges imminent, we look back on reporting of the London Whale revelations at Wall Street On Parade.  Personal Investing Lessons From JPMorgan’s London Whale Debacle  Despite a multitude of formulas for measuring risk, multiple layers of oversight management, 28 members of a risk management team with titles like Managing Director, Executive Director, and Vice President, it somehow didn’t occur to any of these folks that the number one criteria for a trading investment is that you need to be able to get out of it. Continue Reading…  JPMorgan: Poster Child for the Most Dangerous Financial System Since 1929 Last Friday, Senator Carl Levin told the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations that JPMorgan “piled on risk, hid losses, disregarded risk limits, manipulated risk models, dodged oversight, and misinformed the public.” And here’s the punch line: that’s not even the worst of what JPMorgan did. Continue Reading…  The Other Thing JPMorgan Was … Continue reading →