Search Results for: Jamie Dimon

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 20, 2023 ~ Yesterday, the Swiss banking giant, UBS, agreed to a shotgun wedding with its collapsing long-time Swiss rival, Credit Suisse. Switzerland has committed $173 billion in loans and guarantees to the combined firm. A key player in this deal was the central bank of Switzerland, the Swiss National Bank. That’s the very same central bank that had quietly bailed out UBS during the financial crisis of 2008 with the assistance of dollar swap lines from the Federal Reserve (the “Fed”) – the central bank of the U.S. Yesterday, the Fed announced the return of those emergency dollar swap lines as the shotgun wedding of UBS and Credit Suisse failed to quell a spreading banking panic. The way this UBS bailout went down in 2008 was illuminated in the audit of the Fed’s emergency bailout facilities from December 2007 to July 2010 that was … Continue reading →

Editor’s Update: California state regulators shut down Silicon Valley Bank during market hours on Friday, creating mayhem in the stock market’s banking sector. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) has been appointed the receiver at the bank. The FDIC issued a statement on Friday indicating that only insured depositors (those with $250,000 or less at the bank) will have full access to their money by Monday. As of December 31, Silicon Valley Bank had $209 billion in assets and $175 billion in total deposits, making it the second largest bank failure in U.S. history, after Washington Mutual which failed in September 2008 during the Wall Street financial crisis. Tragically, according to SEC filings, more than $150 billion of Silicon Valley Bank’s deposits were uninsured, leaving hundreds of the tech startup companies it served unsure of how to make payroll next week. By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 10, 2023 ~ … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 19, 2023 ~ On Tuesday, Jerome Powell’s Federal Reserve once again thumbed its nose at President Biden’s antitrust directive regarding the creation of more mega banks through merger. This time around, the Fed allowed the Bank of Montreal, with assets of $834 billion, and its subsidiary, BMO Financial, to gobble up Bank of the West, based in San Francisco. Following the merger, Bank of the West is to be merged into Bank of Montreal’s subsidiary bank, BMO Harris Bank. On Friday, July 9, 2021, President Biden released a sweeping Executive Order that warned federal bank regulators against actions that create “excessive market concentration” with specific mention of bank merger activity. One business day later, the Federal Reserve announced that it had approved another bank merger. According to the Fed’s own data, since January 1, 2006, it has approved 4,506 bank mergers, while denying one application. (See … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 13, 2022 ~ Two new nonfiction books are being released today. Bestselling author and anthropologist Sarah Kendzior’s book, They Knew, describes Donald Trump as a “transnational career criminal.” The book from the former top federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York under the Trump Justice Department, Geoffrey Berman, a Republican, reinforces Kendzior’s thesis with the revelation that Trump’s Justice Department was weaponized “to aid the President’s friends and punish his enemies,” both foreign and domestic. One of the most outrageous demands from the Justice Department, writes Berman, was “pressure to pursue baseless criminal charges against John Kerry, who had served in the Obama administration as secretary of state.” Berman writes the following in Holding the Line: Inside the Nation’s Preeminent US Attorney’s Office and Its Battle with the Trump Justice Department: “Throughout my tenure as U.S. attorney, Trump’s Justice Department kept demanding that I use my office … 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: July 12, 2022 ~ On May 4, 2020, while Jay Clayton was the Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission in the Trump administration, the SEC granted approval for a new national stock exchange called MEMX, whose Wall Street megabank owners have admitted to a collective nine criminal felony counts brought by the U.S. Department of Justice. JPMorgan Chase accounts for five of those felony counts; Goldman Sachs and a subsidiary account for two felony counts; Citigroup and UBS account for one felony count each. The other owners of MEMX include: Bank of America, BlackRock, Charles Schwab, Citadel Securities, E*TRADE, Fidelity Investments, Flow Traders, Jane Street, Manikay Partners, Morgan Stanley, TD Ameritrade, Virtu Financial, Wells Fargo, and Williams Trading. The SEC’s letter approving MEMX as a national securities exchange stated that the SEC was confident that MEMX would “prevent fraudulent and manipulative acts and practices, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 24, 2022 ~ Add JPMorgan Chase, the biggest bank in the United States with an unprecedented five criminal felony counts since 2014, to the growing list of debacles of which the Fed has lost control. The Fed has its bank examiners pouring over the books of JPMorgan Chase on an ongoing basis, but somehow the bank’s dangerous book of derivatives has been allowed to spike by $14.42 trillion in the first quarter of this year, soaring from $45.84 trillion on December 31, 2021 to $60.26 trillion on March 31, 2022. That’s an increase of 24 percent in a three-month span. That information comes from page 18 of the newly-released report on derivatives in the banking system from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC). The Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 was supposed to stop the insanity of unfathomable amounts of risky derivatives being … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 29, 2022 ~ The above headline regarding Citadel Securities and Virtu Financial comes from a report authored by John Detrixhe that was published at Quartz in February of last year. The report found that as of December 2020 the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) had a 19.9 percent share of stock market trading versus 13.4 for Citadel Securities and 9.4 percent for Virtu Financial. This gave Citadel Securities and Virtu a combined stock market trading share of 22.8 percent versus 19.9 for the NYSE. The big problem with this picture is that neither Citadel Securities or Virtu Financial are registered as stock exchanges and neither are regulated by the SEC as stock exchanges. Citadel Securities is a broker-dealer that pays for order flow from at least nine online brokerage firms and has a dubious history of regulatory fines and abusive behavior. Virtu Financial is … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 14, 2022 ~ Nike can’t seem to take its own advice and “just do it.” On March 3 Reuters and the Wall Street Journal reported that Nike was temporarily closing its more than 100 stores in Russia. The Wall Street Journal carried this statement from Nike: “We are deeply troubled by the devastating crisis in Ukraine and our thoughts are with all those impacted, including our employees, partners and their families in the region.” This sounds like something one might say following an act of nature – like a hurricane or a flood. It doesn’t sound appropriate for a barbaric bombing attack by Russian President Vladimir Putin on hospitals, schools and apartment buildings in Ukraine that had left hundreds of civilians dead at that point. The day after Nike’s statement to the press, we could find no official statement on Nike’s website to indicate that it … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 1, 2021 ~ Jes Staley, the CEO at the British global bank, Barclays, is stepping down immediately following a probe by British regulators into his ties with child sex trafficker, Jeffrey Epstein. Staley’s ties to Epstein occurred while he was an executive at JPMorgan Chase, the U.S. bank that has racked up five felony counts from the U.S. Department of Justice in the past seven years. Staley will be replaced as CEO by Barclays’ head of global markets, C.S. Venkatakrishnan, who himself came from JPMorgan Chase. Reuters reported early this morning that Staley’s abrupt departure came after Barclays was informed this past Friday of the, as yet unreleased, findings of a report by U.K. financial regulators’ into Staley’s characterization of his relationship with Epstein, who killed himself in jail in August 2019 while awaiting trial on charges involving child sex trafficking. On February 13 … Continue reading →