Search Results for: JPMorgan

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 12, 2022 ~ Sarah Kendzior turned 44 on September 1. She has already had two bestselling books. She holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from Washington University with a focus on authoritarian regimes.   We mention this as background because Kendzior’s latest book, They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent, to be released tomorrow by Flatiron Books, needs to be read as the work of a serious scholar. Six years ago Kendzior correctly predicted in numerous articles what the rise of Trumpism would bring to the United States. On August 3, 2016, three months before the presidential election, Kendzior wrote the following for Foreign Policy under the headline: “Welcome to Donald Trump’s America”: “For over a year, pundits — especially Republicans who have a stake in legitimizing their party’s abject surrender — have been claiming that Trump will eventually pivot from his extremist positions. They … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 8, 2022 ~ Bailing out the Wall Street megabanks that are serially fined and hit with felony counts appears to be catching on as a major career advancement strategy at the New York Fed. On August 22, Lorie Logan began her big promotion as President of the Dallas Fed, a position that paid $440,700 at the end of 2020. That’s $40,700 more than the salary of the President of the United States. Prior to joining the Dallas Fed, Logan was the Manager of the System Open Market Account (SOMA) at the New York Fed, effectively the Fed’s trading floor. As part of her job, Logan oversaw the trillions of dollars that were electronically created at the New York Fed to bail out Wall Street trading houses in the fall of 2019 and through the middle of 2020. (See our related report The Fed Appears … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 8, 2022 ~ The Fed would appear to have violated both the spirit and the letter of the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation in the second quarter of 2020, according to new repo loan data released by the New York Fed for the second quarter of 2020. The data shows that Citigroup received 96 percent of all repo loans made by the Fed between June 24, 2020 and June 30, 2020. Citigroup also dwarfed all other borrowers in the Fed’s repo loan program during the full second quarter of 2020. Citigroup borrowed a cumulative total of $454,751,000,000 from the Fed between April 1 and June 30, 2020. Of the 24 firms that borrowed during the second quarter of 2020 from the Fed’s repo loan program, Citigroup’s share amounted to more than the combined total of 19 firms. (See charts above and below.) Congress and the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: September 7, 2022 On Thursday evening, September 1, President Joe Biden addressed the nation from Philadelphia, the second location of the U.S. Capitol in its early years. During his remarks, Biden spoke these words: “Too much of what’s happening in our country today is not normal. Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic. “Now, I want to be very clear — very clear up front: Not every Republican, not even the majority of Republicans, are MAGA Republicans. Not every Republican embraces their extreme ideology. I know because I’ve been able to work with these mainstream Republicans. “But there is no question that the Republican Party today is dominated, driven, and intimidated by Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans, and that is a threat to this country.” The two most important words in this excerpt from Biden’s remarks are the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 17, 2022 ~ After crypto has blighted trust in the financial landscape of the United States and left tens of thousands of Americans as victims of theft, or locked out of access to their money, the Federal Reserve has finally found the courage to take on the loud-mouthed crypto hawkers and issue a warning. The Fed sent a letter yesterday to supervisory staff at its 12 regional Federal Reserve banks and to all Fed member banks. The letter started out with a curious sentence (potentially crafted to assuage the loud-mouthed crypto hawkers which include a significant number of right-wing members of Congress on the Senate Banking and House Financial Services Committees which oversee the Fed). The sentence read: “The emerging crypto-asset sector presents potential opportunities to banking organizations, their customers, and the overall financial system…” (Italics added.) The word “opportunities” typically suggests that something of … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 15, 2022 ~ Last Thursday evening, Justice Department Attorney General, Merrick Garland, held a brief press conference to announce that he had asked a federal court to unseal the search warrant and inventory receipts filed in connection with the FBI’s search of Donald Trump’s Palm Beach oceanfront home and beach resort, Mar-a- Lago. As part of his statement to the press, Garland said this: “Faithful adherence to the rule of law is the bedrock principle of the Justice Department and of our democracy. Upholding the rule of law means applying the rule of law evenly, without fear or favor.” Unfortunately, the vast majority of Americans believe there is one set of laws for the rich and powerful and another set of laws for average Americans. According to a Gallup poll released on July 5, only 14 percent of Americans had “a great deal” or … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 15, 2022 ~ This past Friday, five state-owned companies in China announced that they would apply this month to delist their shares from the New York Stock Exchange. The companies plan to continue trading in Hong Kong and mainland China. The companies include the large oil company Sinopec; China Life Insurance; Aluminum Corporation of China; PetroChina; and Sinopec Shanghai Petrochemical Company. It is highly likely (and long overdue) that more Chinese share delistings on U.S. exchanges will follow. For the past two decades, China has been stonewalling U.S. regulators over access to the work papers of auditors of publicly traded companies that are based in China but listed on U.S. stock exchanges. China takes the position that these audit work papers hold state secrets and it prohibits audit firms from releasing the documents directly to U.S. regulators, effectively flouting U.S. accounting law. This untenable situation … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 8, 2022 ~ The Fed is doing something it’s never been allowed to do in its 109 years of operation. And, it’s doing it without any pushback from Congress. The Fed draws its statutory authority from the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 which created the Fed’s “discount window” for making loans to Fed member banks which are engaged in making loans for “agricultural, industrial or commercial purposes….” The Federal Reserve Act strictly prohibited the Fed from making loans “for the purpose of carrying or trading in stocks, bonds, or other investment securities….” After Wall Street trading casinos blew up the U.S. economy in 1929 and brought on the Great Depression of the 30s, Congress enacted the Glass-Steagall Act in 1933 which established federal deposit insurance for commercial banks and outlawed the merger of those federally-insured banks with Wall Street trading casinos (investment banks and … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: August 5, 2022 ~ During my career in finance, I had the privilege to work for A.G. Edwards, a century old Wall Street firm led at the time by Ben Franklin Edwards III, the fifth generation of the Edwards family to steward the company. Once, when Edwards was visiting our branch in New York, he shared with us his philosophy on how to deal with a rogue broker. He said he would use a scalpel to remove him from the organization, making sure to get any cancer he might have spread. What kind of cancer could a crooked broker spread? Just think about how Bernie Madoff corrupted everything he touched: his accountants; his IT staff who cooked up fake client statements; his brother, Peter Madoff, who ridiculously served as his Chief Compliance Officer; and even the bank that held his business account, JPMorgan Chase, whose reputation was severely … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 29, 2022 ~ What do you get when you mix federally-insured banks with Wall Street trading casinos? You get the potential for catastrophic risks for the U.S. taxpayer and astronomical riches for the CEOs of the banks and the hedge fund titans they serve. Why is this Faustian bargain tolerated by Washington lawmakers – especially after the greatest financial collapse since the Great Depression in 2008? Because the Wall Street fat cats throw a lot of money into the political campaigns of members of Congress, ensuring that no matter how many times these Frankenbanks make outrageous blunders involving billions of dollars, Congress will conduct a superficial investigation and move on. Below we examine outrageous money blunders by Barclays, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley – all of which have the earmarks of the brand of money incompetence as George Bailey’s Uncle Billy in Frank … Continue reading →