Search Results for: Jamie Dimon

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 2, 2023 ~ In the eyes of Wall Street veterans who are paying close attention to what’s going down at the mega banks on Wall Street, federal regulators are making the crime wave at these banks worse, not better. The federal fines for egregious behavior at these banks are getting smaller and more meaningless by the day. Take, for example, what happened on Friday. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) fined three of the largest trading houses on Wall Street a combined $53 million for derivative reporting violations. Those trading houses were units of Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and JPMorgan Chase. But what was particularly tone deaf about the CFTC’s settlement with JPMorgan Chase was the tiny amount of the monetary fine and the praise heaped on the five-count felon bank for its “cooperation” with the federal regulator. According to the CFTC, over … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 14, 2023 ~ There may be a lesson here: don’t put the word “Republic” in the name of your bank; don’t hold a lot of uninsured deposits; and don’t have wads of unrealized losses on your investment securities. If those lessons sound familiar, it’s because they played out in stunning fashion earlier this year when the second, third and fourth largest bank failures in U.S. history occurred. One of those banks that blew up was First Republic Bank, which was put into FDIC receivership on May 1 and later sold, under much controversy, to the already behemoth JPMorgan Chase, the largest bank in the U.S. (JPMorgan Chase can’t seem to stay away from criminal charges. It thus far has notched five felony counts in its belt and is currently being sued by the U.S. Virgin Islands for “actively participating” in Jeffrey Epstein’s sex-trafficking of minors … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 16, 2023 ~ Yesterday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average took a tumble of 361 points by the closing bell. Numerous headlines attributed the big decline to a weakening economy in China. But the actual trigger for angst among traders was a headline at 5:30 a.m. EDT yesterday at CNBC. The headline read: “Fitch warns it may be forced to downgrade dozens of banks, including JPMorgan Chase.” JPMorgan Chase is not just the biggest bank in the United States in terms of assets and deposits. It is the biggest bank in terms of its derivative exposure. According to the federal regulator of national banks (those operating across state lines), the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), as of March 31, 2023, JPMorgan Chase Bank had assets of $3.2 trillion and derivative exposure of more than $59 trillion notional (face amount). The OCC report also … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 7, 2023 ~ Deposits at the 25-largest domestically-chartered U.S. commercial banks peaked at $11.680 trillion on April 13, 2022, according to the updated H.8 data maintained at the Federal Reserve Economic Database (FRED). As of the most current H.8 data for the week ending on Wednesday, July 26, 2023, deposits stood at $10.709 trillion at those 25 commercial banks, a dollar decline of $970 billion and a percentage decline of 8.3 percent. Equally noteworthy, the decline shows no signs of letting up. According to the FRED data, between July 5 and the most current reading on July 26, the 25 largest U.S. banks shed $174 billion in deposits. Despite all of the misleading news reports about depositors seeking out the perceived safety of the largest banks since the banking crisis in the spring, it’s actually been the smaller banks that have staged a comeback … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 25, 2023 ~ In June, Reuters reported that JPMorgan Chase was expanding the reach of its commercial bank into two additional foreign countries – Israel and Singapore – bringing its foreign commercial bank presence to a total of 28 countries. Those plans could potentially add billions of dollars more to its already problematic uninsured deposits. Why federal regulators are allowing JPMorgan Chase to continue to expand, despite it admitting to five criminal felony counts since 2014 and currently facing three lawsuits in federal court for facilitating Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking of underage girls is drawing attention from watchdogs. According to its regulatory filings, as of December 31, 2022, JPMorgan Chase Bank N.A. held $2.015 trillion in deposits in domestic offices, of which $1.058 trillion were uninsured. It also held another $418.9 billion in deposits in foreign offices, which were also not insured by the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 20, 2023 ~ The data in the chart above comes directly from what the biggest bank in the United States, JPMorgan Chase, reported on its 10-Q filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for the quarter ending March 31, 2023. Despite all those mainstream media headlines and news stories about the biggest banks in the U.S. being the deposit beneficiaries of the banking panic earlier this year, the cold, hard facts on the ground are the following: at the end of the first quarter of this year, JPMorgan Chase had seen deposit outflows in four out of the past five quarters. Mainstream media conveniently forgot to mention that. The only quarter in which JPMorgan Chase saw an inflow of deposits was the first quarter of this year, when three banks blew up: Silvergate Bank, Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank. That increase was … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 17, 2023 ~ In August 2007, Slate writer Emily Yoffe exploded a powder keg of parental anger when she shared her experience shopping with her 11-year-old daughter for back-to-school clothing in a store called Limited Too. The store, part of a large retail chain, marketed itself as an apparel haven for Tweens – girls ages 7 to 14. What Yoffe found inside the store was deeply disturbing: “a line of padded, underwire push-up bras for girls with nothing of their own to pad or push up…scanty panties…pairs with rhinestone hearts or printed with cheeky sayings such as ‘Buy It Now! Tell Dad Later!’ ” Limited Too is no longer in business but we did a check at the Internet Archives’ Wayback Machine to get a first-hand look at what Limited Too was peddling on its website in those early years. We found really sick stuff … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 13, 2023 ~ Senator Elizabeth Warren is the Chair of the Senate Banking Committee’s Subcommittee on Economic Policy. She is also the most knowledgeable member of Congress when it comes to the mega banks on Wall Street and the most willing to hold them accountable. (See related articles below.) Yesterday, Warren’s Subcommittee held a hearing on “Bank Mergers and the Economic Impacts of Consolidation.” The urgency of this hearing was heightened by the fact that almost two years after President Joe Biden signed an Executive Order urging members of his administration to take a more aggressive investigation into the harmful impacts of consolidation and monopoly power before approving more mergers in a number of industries, including banking, bank regulators signed off on one of the most egregious mergers of this century. Senator Warren explained it this way: “When First Republic Bank collapsed in April, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 6, 2023 ~ You may recall reading a burst of headlines during the banking crisis in March of this year about depositors fleeing small banks for the perceived comfort of the largest banks. Unfortunately, those headlines were never put in context or updated to reflect a broader picture. In fact, using deposit data that is updated weekly from the Federal Reserve’s own H.8 releases, it becomes crystal clear that the large banks are bleeding deposits at the fastest pace in 40 years. As the Federal Reserve data in the chart above indicates, deposits at the largest 25 commercial banks in the U.S. peaked at $11,679,758,700,000 on April 13, 2022. The most recent H.8 release shows that the deposits of the 25 largest banks as of June 21 stood at $10,758,977,000,000. That’s a percentage decline of 7.88 percent or $920,781,700. The Fed’s H.8 data defines … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 27, 2023 ~ Between March 10 and May 1 of this year, three of the largest bank failures in U.S. history occurred. On March 10 the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) seized Silicon Valley Bank after $42 billion in deposits had exited the bank the day prior with another $100 billion queued up to leave the next day – meaning it was possible for a federally-insured bank to lose 85 percent of its deposits in the span of 48 hours in the digital age. (For a closer look at what was going on at Silicon Valley Bank, see our report: Silicon Valley Bank Was a Wall Street IPO Pipeline in Drag as a Federally-Insured Bank; FHLB of San Francisco Was Quietly Bailing It Out.) Two more bank failures followed in short order: Signature Bank on March 12 and First Republic Bank on May 1. … Continue reading →