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Recent Posts
- Three Megabanks Had Loans Outstanding of $1.832 Trillion to Giant Hedge Funds on March 31
- Jamie Dimon’s Washington Post OpEd Gets Pummeled at Yahoo Finance
- In the Span of 72 Hours, Four People Tied to a Hewlett-Packard Criminal Case Died in Two Separate Events
- Crypto Took Down Another Federally-Insured Bank and Just Handed Its CEO a 24-Year Prison Sentence
- All the Devils from 2008 Are Back at the Megabanks: Leverage, Off-Balance-Sheet Debt, Over $192 Trillion in Derivatives, Shaky Capital Levels
- New Study Says the Fed Is Captured by Congress and White House — Not the Megabanks that Own the Fed Banks and Get Trillions in Bailouts
- Data from the Fed’s Emergency Funding Program Shows Spring 2023 Banking Crisis Was Far Deeper than Americans Were Told
- These FDIC-Insured Banks Have Lost 69 to 40 Percent of their Market Value Year-to-Date
- Exposure at Hedge Funds Has Skyrocketed to Over $28 Trillion; Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Are at Risk
- We Charted the Plunge and Rebound in the Nikkei Versus Nomura and Citigroup; the Correlation Is Frightening
- Former U.S. Labor Secretary Says Billionaires Have No Right to Exist Because their Wealth Comes from Five Illegal or Bad Practices
- Citigroup Is Having a Helluva Summer: A Protest on Thursday Will Turn Up the Heat
- Nikkei Has Biggest Drop in History: Here’s What’s Causing the Global Market Selloff
- JPMorgan Is Tapping Illiquid Assets in its Global Collateral Program; the New York Fed Is Paying for Its Services
- Bank Regulators Issue Warnings on Fintech and Banking as Disasters Pile Up
- Donald Trump Gives a Speech on Not Letting China Win the Crypto Race – Not Realizing China Banned Crypto Mining and Transactions Four Years Ago
- The New York Fed Has Contracted Out Key Functions to JPMorgan Chase; We Filed a FOIA and Got These Strange Invoices
- On the Eve of Netanyahu’s Address to Congress, Senator Bernie Sanders Delivers a Breathtaking Assessment of His War Crimes
- Trump’s Sit-Down with Netanyahu at Mar-a-Lago Will Cost U.S. Taxpayers Millions While Profiting Trump’s Business
- Protecting Trump and His Jet-Setting Adult Children During His Presidency Cost Taxpayers Over $1 Billion
- A Congressman and a Doctor Reported a Woman Being Shot at Trump Rally: She’s Vanished from Official Reports
- Jamie Dimon Goes Missing from Earnings Call, After Dumping $183 Million of His JPMorgan Chase Stock Earlier this Year
- U.S. Senate Candidate Backed by Hedge Fund Billionaires Was Sitting in Front Row at Trump Rally as the Sniper Fired into the Bleachers
- Project 2025: The Fossil Fuel and Banking Money Behind the Madness
- The Fund Created to Unwind a Failing Megabank Has a Problem: There’s No Money in It
- Joe Biden Versus the New York Times
- Grand Jury Transcript in Jeffrey Epstein Case Is Released, Raising Questions about Epstein’s Darkest Secrets Being Protected in JPMorgan Cases
- The Supreme Court Crowns a King, Immunizing Future Criminal Acts Under Project 2025 – a Right Wing Manifesto
- The Debate Disaster and the Supreme Court’s “Chevron” Repeal Have a Money Trail Leading to Charles Koch
- Congressman Andy Barr Stacks a Hearing on the Fed’s Stress Tests with Lobbyists for Megabanks
- The Fed Posts Historic Operating Losses As It Pays Out 5.40 Percent Interest to Banks
- Goldman Sachs’ Bank Derivatives Have Grown from $40 Trillion to $54 Trillion in Five Years; So How Did Its Credit Exposure Improve by 200 Percent?
- The Fed and FDIC Wake Up Suddenly to the Threat of Derivatives, Flunking the Four Largest Derivative Banks on their Wind-Down Plans
- Is the Stock Market Setting Investors Up for a Tech Bust Similar to the Dot.com Bust?
- Chase Bank Customers Are Reporting a Wave of Wire Fraud in their Accounts; the Bank Won’t Make Good on the Looted Funds
- The Senate Race in Ohio Is the Sickest in U.S. History in Terms of Billionaire Money from Outside the State
- Sullivan & Cromwell’s Legal Work for Sam Bankman-Fried’s Crypto House of Fraud Is Getting a Closer Look in Two Federal Court Cases
- Crypto Tries to Recreate the Koch Money Machine to Pack Congress with Shills
- French Fears Ignite Selloff in U.S. Megabanks and Foreign Peers
- Crypto Just Got Exponentially More Dangerous: Meet Fairshake
- Nvidia Hit a $3 Trillion Market Cap Last Week; Dark Pools Are Making Over 300,000 Trades in the Stock Weekly
- The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Is Making Enemies in All the Right Places
- A Former Exec at Citibank Raises Alarm Bells in Federal Court Over Failed Risk Controls Inside the Bank
- Charles Koch’s Money Is Being Used in Elections in Ways Only Orwell Could Have Imagined
- Freakonomics and Frankenbanks: JPMorgan Chase Sucked Up 18 Percent of All Profits of 4,568 FDIC-Insured Banks in the First Quarter
- Academic Study Provides Hard Numbers to the Sick, Revolving Door Culture at Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Citigroup
- $244 Billion of Treasury Debt to Hit the Market Today and Tomorrow as Interest Rates Spike on Ballooning Supply
- CFTC Fines J.P. Morgan Securities — a Fed Primary Dealer — $100 Million for Failing to Surveil Potential Spoofing and High Frequency Trading for Eight Years
- Another FDIC-Insured Bank Got in Bed with Fintech; It’s Now Got a Dumpster Fire and Desperate Pleas from Customers for their Money
- Citigroup Gets Fined $79 Million Two Years After It Caused a $300 Billion Flash Crash in European Stock Markets
Search Results for: Jamie Dimon
Dreyfuss’ Hedge Hogs Timely Read As FERC Fine Against JPMorgan Looms
By Pam Martens: July 19, 2013 Hedge Hogs, the Barbara Dreyfuss book that hit number 9 on the Washington Post’s Hardcover Bestseller List last week, should have a cautionary logo: “Don’t Start Reading This Book Late In the Day: It Could Be Hazardous To Your Sleep.” If you are an avid follower of Wall Street, you’ll read it in one sitting. Sales of the book may soar if, as reported yesterday, JPMorgan reaches an estimated $500 million settlement with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission shortly for rigging energy markets and we learn the details of just what its traders were doing to manipulate energy prices. What does this have to do with Hedge Hogs? The Dreyfuss book is the fast moving and riveting account of Amaranth Advisors LLC, the hedge fund that went from holding $9.668 billion in client assets in August 2006 to flaming out in losses exceeding $6 billion … Continue reading
About That $500 Million JPMorgan May Shell Out to FERC
By Pam Martens: July 18, 2013 The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times are reporting this morning that JPMorgan Chase, the mega Wall Street bank that has shelled out over $16 billion in the last three years for legal expenses connected to investigations and lawsuits, may shortly be inking a deal with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) that would settle claims it manipulated energy prices. The price tag for making another regulatory mess go away, says the New York Times, may reach $500 million. The specifics of just what charges JPMorgan will be settling are not yet available, but the path to this outlay of a cool half billion is, without question, related to a regulator incensed with what it believes to be stonewalling on the part of JPMorgan’s lawyers. On November 14, 2012, FERC suspended JPMorgan Ventures Energy Corp.’s electric market-based rate authority for submitting false information … Continue reading
MF Global and Wall Street: Whose Job Is It To Take the Keys Away
By Pam Martens: June 28, 2013 The day after the U.S. House of Representatives’ Financial Services Committee held a hearing on why their seminal financial reform legislation, Dodd-Frank, is a bureaucratic boondoggle that will not prevent another taxpayer bailout of Wall Street in the event of a systemic collapse, we learn just how vulnerable the system is to powerful men allowed to play with other people’s money. Yesterday, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) brought charges in Federal Court against MF Global, its former CEO, Jon Corzine, and its former Assistant Treasurer, Edith O’Brien. Corzine is a former U.S. Senator and Governor of New Jersey. The two are charged with the unlawful allocation of customer money at the commodities trading firm. The company has agreed to settle the charges against the firm for $100 million. The claims remain outstanding against the individuals. MFGlobal collapsed in October 2011. Corzine had directed the … Continue reading
It has been the contention of Wall Street On Parade for more than a decade that today’s so-called “universal banks,” also variously known as megabanks or Global Systemically Important Banks (G-SIBs), are a banking model from hell that was thoroughly discredited in the tens of thousands of transcripts and documents released by the U.S. Senate following its multi-year investigation of that structure in the early 1930s. Now the seminal book proving that theory has been published. Written by Arthur E. Wilmarth, Jr. and titled Taming the Megabanks: Why We Need a New Glass-Steagall Act, the book brilliantly takes the reader through a riveting guided tour covering the past century and the resurrection of this same disastrous U.S. banking model in 1999. Oxford University Press is the publisher of Wilmarth’s book. We can envision it becoming one of the most important works of this century in providing the impetus for Congress … Continue reading
Personal Investing Lessons from JPMorgan’s London Whale Debacle
By Pam Martens: March 22, 2013 One year ago this week, Ina Drew, head of the Chief Investment Office at JPMorgan which oversaw the synthetic credit derivatives portfolio that eventually blew up $6.2 billion of depositors’ money, told her traders “phones down,” signaling that she was halting all trading in those instruments. What Drew should have much earlier told her traders was: “unplug algorithms; plug in brains.” 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. London Whale was the nickname given to the JPMorgan trader, Bruno Iksil, as a result of the outsized bets he was making on … Continue reading
Senate Censors Part of Report on JPMorgan About Its Stock Trading
By Pam Martens: March 18, 2013 The 307-page report the Senate released last Thursday on JPMorgan’s cowboy culture was deeply unsettling; the testimony under oath at the related Senate hearing on Friday was equally shocking with eyewitness accounts confirming that CEO Jamie Dimon ordered the withholding of financial data to a regulator while both he and the Chief Financial Officer at the time, Douglas Braunstein, presented an Alice in Wonderland version of facts to the public in April 2012. But it now appears that the worst of this story may be so unsettling to the markets and the public perception of Wall Street that it must be censored from public viewing. Throughout the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigation’s 98 exhibits of emails and internal memos on the wild trading schemes at JPMorgan, the word “Redacted” appears. In a high number of the areas where the material is censored, it concerns … Continue reading
Is Wall Street Still Dangerous? Yes, According to Senate Hearings
By Pam Martens: March 8, 2013 For years I’ve used the phrase “Frankenbanks” in my articles – those global banking behemoths created as a result of the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999 that allow the co-mingling of FDIC insured mom and pop savings accounts with investment banking activities that blow up things using the mom and pop savings accounts leveraged to the hilt. Now the U.S. Senate is making my case for me on the use of Frankenbanks as an appropriate soubriquet. If we date the run up to the financial crisis as beginning in the summer of 2007, which the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency does, it is more than five years since Congress has been studying why Wall Street is very adept at blowing up things but adept at not much else – like its main job of fairly allocating capital to new companies that … Continue reading
Are Big Banks Raccoons? Latest Bank Plan Calls For Erecting Electrical Fences
By Pam Martens: February 4, 2013 The U.K. Chancellor of the Exchequer,George Osborne, plans to reform big banks in his country the way farmers keep raccoons out of their corn fields: an electrical fence. Banking reform by soap box and silly ideas has crossed the Atlantic. Osborne delivered a flurry of inspirational words today on his new plans for banking reform in the U.K. Curiously, he delivered his speech at JPMorgan’s back office operation in Bournemouth. Osborne said the site location was to remind everyone how many jobs banking brings to England and specifically mentioned a landscaping business called Stewarts that takes care of JPMorgan’s grounds that he planned to visit later. That was possibly not the best choice of examples since wealth and income inequality has been institutionalized by the lack of banking reform. On this side of the pond the suspicion rises that Chancellor Osborne’s site selection might … Continue reading
Regulator Says JPMorgan Engaged in Unsafe or Unsound Banking Practices But Preserves Golden Parachutes For Execs
By Pam Martens: January 15, 2013 Yesterday, two of JPMorgan Chase’s regulators, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and the Federal Reserve, released the details of their cease and desist consent orders with the mega bank over its lack of proper risk controls in its Chief Investment Office (CIO). The lapses have led to $6.2 billion in losses thus far. JPMorgan, for its part, made sure its golden parachutes – outsized payments to departing executives –would not be limited by the consent agreement. The debacle, known on Wall Street as the London Whale trades, stem from traders in London, particularly Bruno Iksil who is no longer at the bank, engaging in high risk derivatives trading in a thinly traded corporate bond derivatives index. The nickname, “Whale,” derives from the bank making trades so large that it effectively became the market in that index and could not quickly exit the positions. Congress held … Continue reading
Crony Capitalism Lives On: New York Times’ Event Headlines Its Writers With Wall Street Honchos
By Pam Martens: December 3, 2012 In what can only be described as an unseemly marriage of the plundering herd on Wall Street and the so-called paper of record assigned with the arduous task of delivering unbiased investigative reports to the public, the New York Times has made the deeply unwise decision to hold “The Inaugural DealBook Conference.” The all-day conference to be held at the New York Times Center on December 12, headlines Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase – a company under serious Federal investigation on multiple fronts — and Lloyd Blankfein, Chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs, a company which faces multiple lawsuits alleging investors were defrauded and which paid $550 million two years ago to settle SEC charges that it knowingly harmed its own clients. The Times’ business writer, Andrew Ross Sorkin, appears to be the official host of the conference, delivering the opening welcome alongside Arthur … Continue reading
