Search Results for: rap sheet

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 9, 2023 ~ Making headlines around the world last week was the news that the Attorney General of the U.S. Virgin Islands, Denise George, was fired just days after she filed a federal lawsuit against JPMorgan Chase, charging it with facilitating the sex trafficking of children by Jeffrey Epstein. George was fired by the Governor of the Virgin Islands, Albert Bryan Jr. Unfortunately, those headlines and the mainstream news articles that accompanied them, fail to capture the worst parts of this story, which includes the following: the 30-page lawsuit filed by Attorney General George on December 27 in the Federal District Court for the Southern District of New York includes a “Sealed Document Placed in Vault” according to the Docket Sheet in the case; after the paragraph headlined as “JP Morgan Ignored Obvious Red Flags Relating to Epstein’s Accounts,” large segments of the lawsuit … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 7, 2022 ~ If you’re the Chairman and CEO of a trucking company or air conditioner installer or a computer manufacturer (or thousands of other companies that don’t handle cash and have access to personal and financial data on millions of Americans) announcing to the world that 10 percent of your company’s new hires last year had criminal backgrounds might make you look like a social justice advocate. If you’re Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO of the largest bank in the U.S. with 5,023 bank branches across the country taking in cash each day that represents the life savings of moms and pops and pension funds, announcing that 10 percent of last year’s new hires had criminal backgrounds is not exactly a confidence builder – especially since Dimon’s bank has been charged by the U.S. Department of Justice with an unprecedented five criminal felony … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 17, 2022 ~ Just two business days after the crypto exchange FTX filed for bankruptcy and headlines swirled around the world suggesting it had used its crypto token to perpetuate a massive fraud reminiscent of Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, the New York Fed thought this would be an ideal time to announce it was launching a digital token pilot with the serial fraudster, Citigroup. (See here for the unintelligible, jargonized version from the New York Fed; here for the decrypted translation from CoinDesk; and here for a sampling of Citigroup’s rap sheet.) If the New York Fed teaming up with Citigroup isn’t troubling enough, the New York Fed also reveals that “ Legal services are being provided by Sullivan & Cromwell LLP….” for the pilot token project. (Why does one need to hire a Big Law firm for a pilot program using a “theoretical” concept?) … 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: July 19, 2022 ~ JPMorgan Chase is the largest federally-insured bank in the United States. It is also one of the largest trading houses on Wall Street. That’s the Faustian bargain the Clinton administration entered into with Wall Street when it repealed the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999. According to data from the FDIC, as of June 30 of last year, JPMorgan Chase Bank N.A. had 4,925 branches in 44 U.S. states holding $2.01 trillion in deposits. Many of those deposits belong to mom and pop savers who have no idea that the bank has admitted to five criminal felony counts since 2014 and has a rap sheet that is the envy of the Gambino crime family. (Apparently, a federal judge in New York overseeing a current JPMorgan case is just as naïve about the bank’s criminal history. More on that shortly.) The bulk of Americans … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 8, 2022 ~ In 2018, Bloomberg reporters Peter Waldman, Lizette Chapman, and Jordan Robertson published a stunning expose on how JPMorgan Chase was spying on its employees, including after hours, using as many as 120 engineers from the data mining company Palantir Technologies Inc. According to the Bloomberg report, “It all ended when the bank’s senior executives learned that they, too, were being watched, and what began as a promising marriage of masters of big data and global finance descended into a spying scandal.” But the surveillance program did not end. The bank simply developed its own proprietary spying system instead. Business Insider reporter, Reed Alexander, has reignited the scandal with the news that the internal surveillance program at JPMorgan Chase is now called “Workforce Activity Data Utility” or WADU. According to Business Insider, the surveillance is fostering paranoia inside the bank with … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 30, 2022 ~ JPMorgan Chase’s stock has lost 27 percent of its market value year-to-date through its June 29 closing price. But more disturbing than that is the above chart showing that the behemoth German lender, Deutsche Bank, has been trading like a clone of JPMorgan Chase for the past two months. Deutsche Bank’s stock price is down just one percentage point more than JPMorgan Chase year-to-date. JPMorgan Chase is the largest federally-insured bank in the United States. Looking like one is tied with an umbilical cord to Deutsche Bank has its perils on Wall Street. Let’s start with the raids on the Deutsche Bank’s headquarters, two of which coincided with dead bodies turning up. On November 29, 2018, Deutsche Bank’s headquarters in Germany were raided by 170 members of law enforcement. Prosecutors explained the action by stating that “Deutsche Bank helped customers found … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 1, 2022 ~ Wall Street On Parade was previously a big fan of Senator Sherrod Brown, the Chair of the Senate Banking Committee. Not so much anymore. Brown supported the nutty nomination of Saule Omarova to head the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the regulator of national banks, while attempting to spin the naysayers as part of a smear campaign. So far this year, the Senate Banking Committee has held hearings on tangential areas while ignoring the biggest threats to financial stability in the U.S.: the $200.18 trillion in notional derivatives (face amount) concentrated at just five Wall Street megabanks (JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America). There have been no subpoenas flying from the Senate Banking Committee as the Fed continues to cover up the largest trading scandal in its history and refusing to release to … Continue reading →