Search Results for: JPMorgan

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 18, 2022 ~ Credit Suisse presents a cautionary tale about creating so much innovation in the realm of credit derivatives that one gets named “Credit Derivatives House of the Year.” That award might sound like a good thing to traders who make their living cooking up and trading exotic derivatives but it might sound like a very bad thing to pension funds and mutual funds who own big chunks of the stock and bonds of that bank and remember how credit derivatives blew up much of Wall Street in 2008. On September 28, Risk.net named Credit Suisse the “Credit Derivatives House of the Year.” Three businesses days later, Credit Suisse saw its own Credit Default Swaps blow out to more than 300 basis points and some of its own bonds trade at 63 cents on the dollar. Simultaneously, its shares traded at an intraday … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 17, 2022 ~ It was one year ago that Wall Street On Parade raised a multitude of red flags about Raphael Bostic, the President of the Atlanta Fed. We have published the entirety of that article below so that our readers can see just how long it took both Bostic and the Atlanta Fed to come clean with the American people about his trading on Wall Street. On Friday, Bostic released a seven-page statement in which he owned up to the following: failing to list a multitude of trades that were conducted on his behalf by trading firms on Wall Street over a period of five years; failing to properly report income on his assets on his financial disclosure forms; trading during blackout periods when trading was barred by the Federal Reserve; providing inaccurate values on his financial disclosure forms. The upshot was that … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 13, 2022 ~ When something happens for the first time in history at federally-insured banks, Congress and federal regulators need to pull their heads out of the sand and pay attention. We’re talking about the fact that in the second quarter of this year, trading revenues at federally-insured commercial banks eclipsed the trading revenues at bank holding companies – which typically include subsidiaries where traders actually have licenses to trade. This latest data on what is happening inside the nation’s largest federally-insured banks comes from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), see pages 2 and 3 here. The federally-insured banks generated a total of $10.3 billion in trading revenue in the second quarter versus $10.2 billion for the bank holding companies, or 101 percent of the bank holding company revenues. That’s never happened before according to the data provided by the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 12, 2022 ~ The last thing that a stockbroker on Wall Street wants to have on his BrokerCheck record is a “Disclosure” item. BrokerCheck is the database maintained by Wall Street’s self-regulator, FINRA, which allows the public to peruse the past history of someone they might be considering doing investment business with on Wall Street. A “Disclosure” item means that a complaint has been brought against you and it describes the nature of the complaint and the status. In our more than three decades of using BrokerCheck, we have never seen a broker still employed with any major Wall Street firm who has listed even one criminal charge, let alone four – until we looked up the BrokerCheck Record for the Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon. Under his individual record, Dimon has listed two pending civil cases, four criminal cases, and … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 10, 2022 ~ At Fed Chairman Jerome Powell’s last press conference on September 21 he said that there is “good reason to think that this will continue to be a reasonably strong economy.” Unfortunately, the U.S. can’t have a strong economy without strong banks willing and able to lend. And there are serious storm fronts in that area that the Fed Chair and mainstream media are choosing to ignore. Last week multiple news outlets raised the question as to whether the troubles at Credit Suisse signaled another “Lehman moment.” (See here, here, and here, for example.) A “Lehman moment” refers to the former 158-year old Wall Street investment bank, Lehman Brothers, collapsing into bankruptcy on September 15, 2008 during a widening financial crisis on Wall Street. Because Lehman was the only major Wall Street firm that the Fed allowed to collapse into bankruptcy (rather … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 7, 2022 ~ Nomura Holdings is tiny compared to the mega banks on Wall Street. According to its website, it had just $384 billion in assets as of March 31, 2021. On the same date, JPMorgan Chase had $3.2 trillion in assets. But for reasons that neither the Federal Reserve nor Congress have yet to explain, a unit of Nomura was allowed to borrow trillions of dollars in emergency repo loans from the Fed beginning on September 17, 2019 – months before there was any COVID crisis anywhere in the world. The chart above shows that in the last three months of 2019, Nomura borrowed $3.7 trillion cumulatively under the Fed’s emergency repo loan program, topping the amount borrowed by JPMorgan Chase by $1.11 trillion. The loan amounts come directly from the emergency repo loan data being released quarterly by the New York Fed, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 6, 2022 ~ Last Thursday, while news outlets focused on videos of the devastating impact of Hurricane Ian on the southwest coast of Florida, two researchers at the Office of Financial Research published a breathtaking and almost surreal analysis of how the mega banks on Wall Street are once again doubling down on unprecedented risk with derivatives and threatening the financial stability of the U.S. The report was ignored by mainstream business media. The Office of Financial Research was created under the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation of 2010 to make sure that Wall Street mega banks could never again ravage the economy and financial system of the United States — as they did in 2008 – by engaging in reckless derivative trades and toxic bets. OFR describes its mission as follows: “Our job is to shine a light in the dark corners of the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 3, 2022 ~ The Swiss global bank, Credit Suisse, which is a derivatives counterparty to major Wall Street banks and U.S. insurers, raised alarm bells in markets on Friday and is raising more anxiety this morning. Its 5-year credit default swap (CDS), a measurement of its risk of defaulting on its debt, jumped to 250 basis points on Friday and traded as high as 350 basis points in early morning trade today. The big move in the CDS on Credit Suisse is further impacting the price of its common stock. The shares closed on Friday in New York at $3.92, just pennies away from its all-time low, then dropped another 11 percent in early morning trading in Europe today. When a major derivatives counterparty begins to see a blowout in its credit default swaps, that impacts the stock prices of all major Wall Street … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 25, 2022 ~ The corrupt political backdrop for today’s unprecedented market quagmire feels like a hyperbolic trailer for a low-budget sci-fi thriller: The former president of the only remaining superpower in the world has been charged with “staggering” frauds against banks – the ones he just deregulated as president. (This same former president was also caught red-handed with Top Secret documents after he left public office — but the super power’s 18 intelligence agencies have no idea what he did, or was planning to do, with these documents.) On the other side of the globe, the sitting president of a bygone superpower is engaging in nuclear saber-rattling and conscripting 60-year-old men to fight an illegal war while young, able-bodied men flee the country en masse. The world’s financial markets have gone off the rails in an equally disorienting fashion. The central bankers that had … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 22, 2022 ~ Yesterday, the New York State Attorney General, Letitia James, filed a 222-page lawsuit against former President Donald Trump, the Trump Organization, his three adult children (Donald Jr., Ivanka and Eric), and two company executives, Allen Weisselberg and Jeffrey McConney. The lawsuit is the culmination of a three-year investigation and documents in meticulous detail a “staggering” pattern of fraud from 2011 through 2021. A sampling of the more than 200 instances of fraud alleged by the New York State Attorney General is as follows: “Relying on objectively false numbers to calculate property values. For example, Mr. Trump’s own triplex apartment in Trump Tower was valued as being 30,000 square feet when it was 10,996 square feet. As a result, in 2015 the apartment was valued at $327 million in total, or $29,738 per square foot. That price was absurd given the fact … Continue reading →