Search Results for: JPMorgan

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 13, 2023 ~ Women have been demanding equal opportunity on Wall Street for the past 60 years. We’re pretty sure that equal opportunity to commit crimes on a par with the big boys on Wall Street is not what they had in mind. Confronting women on Wall Street today are two especially disheartening cases. In the photo on the left above is Caroline Ellison, who looks more like the wholesome star of a Disney children’s flick than a woman who has pled guilty to seven criminal counts for frauds she committed as CEO of Sam Bankman-Fried’s hedge fund, Alameda Research. On the right in the photo above is Charlie Javice, founder and former CEO of Frank, a company that was hyped in a JPMorgan Chase press release when it acquired it in September of 2021 for $175 million as “the fastest growing college financial … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 12, 2023 ~ To grasp the severity of the miscarriage of justice that occurred yesterday at the hands of Judge John Dorsey in the bankruptcy hearing for collapsed crypto exchange, FTX, one first needs a brief bit of background. The FTX companies that the bankruptcy lawyers are attempting to resuscitate or sell off to other crypto outfits (while the law firms collect millions of dollars in billable hours for their work) are peddling a product – crypto – that is created out of thin air and has no legitimate productive purpose. (See Over 1,600 of the Brightest Scientific Minds in Technology Have Signed a Letter Calling Both Crypto and Blockchain a Sham.) The hundreds of billions of dollars that American investors have been dumped into crypto exchanges, crypto lenders, crypto miners, and crypto banks are not only threatening the safety and soundness of the … Continue reading →

Editor’s Update: Two days after Wall Street On Parade published this article, Judge Abrams decided to recuse herself from this case, writing as follows: “It has come to the Court’s attention that the law firm of Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP, at which my husband is a partner, advised FTX in 2021, as well as represented parties that may be adverse to FTX and Defendant Bankman-Fried in other proceedings (or potential proceedings). My husband has had no involvement in any of these representations. These matters are confidential and their substance is unknown to the Court. Nonetheless, to avoid any possible conflict, or the appearance of one, the Court hereby recuses itself from this action. See 28 U.S.C. § 455. SO ORDERED. Dated: December 23, 2022 New York, New York.” Clearly, not all of these matters were “confidential,” as Judge Abrams states above. The BlockFi deal appeared on the Davis Polk … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 6, 2022 ~ U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has the dual role of Chairing the Financial Stability Oversight Council (F-SOC), whose role is to provide “comprehensive monitoring of the stability of our nation’s financial system.” Heads of each of the federal agencies that supervise Wall Street and the mega banks sit in on meetings of F-SOC. One would think that such an august body would have a handle on “staggering” threats to the U.S. financial system – especially since F-SOC was created under the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation to prevent a replay of the off-balance sheet derivatives that crashed the U.S. economy in 2008 and forced an unprecedented and secret bailout of U.S. and foreign global banks by the Federal Reserve to the tune of $29 trillion. If Yellen is aware of the latest threat to financial stability, she’s not sharing the details … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 30, 2022 ~ You can’t make this stuff up. After promoting the false story that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and pushing the U.S. into a deadly and costly war through its reporter, Judith Miller; and using its editorial board to shill for the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act to advance the greedy Wall Street ambitions of Citigroup kingpin Sandy Weill, which ended up taking down the U.S. economy in 2008; the New York Times now appears determined to rehabilitate the reputation of the disgraced Sam Bankman-Fried, Co-Founder and recently ousted CEO of the bankrupt crypto exchange, FTX.  Bankman-Fried is being investigated on multiple continents, including North America, for stealing customer assets and looting his private investors. He has been compared, in headlines around the globe, to Bernie Madoff and his Ponzi scheme. Reuters reported that Bankman-Fried had moved as much as … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 21, 2022 ~ On August 1 of this year, we penned this headline at Wall Street On Parade: Brace Yourself for Federally-Insured Bank Failures Caused by Crypto. Our research for that article was so stomach-churning and frightening that we emailed the article to key staff for the Senators who sit on the Senate Banking Committee. One of the banks we researched for that article was Silvergate Bank. We wrote: “FDIC-insured Silvergate Bank is part of the publicly-traded Silvergate Capital Corp., (ticker SI). Silvergate’s website says this about its hot pursuit of crypto: ‘We began pursuing digital currency customers in 2013 and have been deliberate in our approach to serving this community since then. Today, we have 1,300+ digital currency and fintech customers that are using our platform daily to grow and scale their businesses.’ “Silvergate Capital’s 10-K (annual report) for the year ending Dec 31, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 16, 2022 ~ On June 10 of last year, Wall Street On Parade penned this headline: Seven Years after Michael Lewis Described on National TV How the U.S. Stock Market Is Rigged, SEC Chair Gensler Says He’s Going to Tackle Market Structure. Unfortunately for confidence in U.S. markets, that’s yet to happen. And it’s not just the fault of Gensler. The Senate Banking Committee and House Financial Services Committee that should be holding in-depth hearings on the most corrupted market structure since 1929 have opted instead to hold superficial hearings each time something blows up as a result of that corrupted market structure, but never actually get around to tackling the corrupt market structure itself. So here we are today with another abject failure of market structure causing a week of sensational headlines around the globe that make U.S. markets look unhinged. If one … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 7, 2022 ~ One minute after the stock market closed on Friday, the Federal Reserve mailed out a link to its newly-released Financial Stability Report to folks who have signed up to get press releases from the Fed. For those of you who have been reading our reports on the Fed for years – its unaccountable money printing and bailouts of Wall Street, the opaque activities of the trading floors owned by the New York Fed, its unchecked conflicts of interest, and its brazen, and as yet unprosecuted, trading scandal – you might suspect that the Fed would have pulled a lot of punches in its “Financial Stability Report.” You would be correct. On the topic of derivatives, which remain the greatest risk at the mega banks on Wall Street, the word “derivatives” is mentioned just eight times in the report – with little … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 31, 2022 ~ Whether your mutual fund was one of the popular 60/40 funds (60 percent equities and 40 percent bonds) or was 100 percent in equities, you’ve been battered this year. The Fed’s relentless hiking of interest rates this year beat down the market value of existing bonds because they have lower fixed rates of interest, thus making them less valuable than the newly issued bonds with higher rates of interest. Growth stocks, which have dominated the investment scene for years, were particularly crushed because growth companies need to borrow money to grow and higher interest rates mean that their cost of capital will become more expensive, thus slowing growth and hurting their earnings outlook. Another factor weighing on the negative performance of equities (stocks) is that higher interest rates pumped up the value of the U.S. dollar, hurting the earnings of U.S. … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 19, 2022 ~ Today, we will be asking the Senate Banking Committee, its Chair, Senator Sherrod Brown, and one of its most knowledgeable members, Senator Elizabeth Warren, to call an emergency hearing and subpoena the testimony of two brilliant researchers for the Office of Financial Research. Those researchers are Andrew Ellul and Dasol Kim. The men have done nothing wrong. In fact, they have done something courageous. They have effectively blown the whistle on how global Wall Street banks have, once again, endangered the stability of the U.S. financial system through their opaque and dangerous use of over-the-counter derivatives. Unfortunately, because of the legions of lobbyists employed by Wall Street that shape and corrupt the rules of federal bank regulators, these men are prevented from revealing the names of the most dangerous banks and their most dangerous counterparties because that information is considered restricted … Continue reading →