Search Results for: JPMorgan

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 17, 2022 ~ Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal dropped the bombshell that the Justice Department has been conducting raids on prominent short-sellers, including Muddy Waters’ Carson Block and Andrew Left of Citron Research. The Journal reported that the Justice Department “has seized hardware, trading records and private communications….” Reuters reported yesterday that the Justice Department’s probe is “part of a wide-ranging investigation into short-sellers and hedge funds focused on suspected coordinated manipulative trading, according to two people familiar with the matter.” Reuters also reported that “dozens” of subpoenas have been issued to various firms since early last year. Of particular interest to Wall Street On Parade was a report on December 10 by Reuters which indicated that trading activity in the shares of GSX Techedu was in the cross hairs of the Justice Department because both Muddy Waters and Citron Research had circulated negative … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 11, 2022 ~ A Fed spokesperson has provided Wall Street On Parade with a detailed response to our article yesterday, which documented that trades were made in accounts in which Fed Chair Jerome Powell had a financial interest during a Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting in 2015 and another in 2019. Fed officials are clearly prohibited from trading before and during FOMC meetings because that is when they have insider, market-moving information. Below is the full statement from the Fed spokesperson. Following the statement, we will explain its many, serious flaws. “Chair Powell has not traded during FOMC blackout periods. The transactions that were reported occurred in family trusts over which he had no control. Chair Powell is not a trustee and did not direct or control the trades. He relinquished his previous role as a trustee in 2012 when he joined the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 10, 2022 ~ An anonymous activist group called Occupy the Fed reported in a Substack article on Sunday that Fed Chair Jerome Powell traded on the final day of a Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting on April 29, 2015, when he was a Fed Governor, and also on the final day of an FOMC meeting on December 11, 2019, when he was Fed Chair.  Powell’s trading directly violates the Fed’s written policy which prohibits trading “during the period that begins at the start of the second Saturday (midnight) Eastern Time before the beginning of each FOMC meeting and ends at midnight Eastern Time on the last day of the meeting.” The FOMC meetings are typically when the most sensitive and market-moving information occurs at the Fed, including votes on hiking or lowering interest rates and other confidential actions. Dallas Fed President Robert Kaplan, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 9, 2022 ~ At 3:00 p.m. last Friday, the Federal Reserve quietly released the following statement: “The Federal Reserve Board on Friday named Jerome H. Powell as Chair Pro Tempore, pending Senate confirmation to a second term as Chair of the Board of Governors. The action, effective February 5, enables him to continue to carry out his duties as Chair after the expiration of his term on the same day, and while the confirmation process is underway. In its annual organizational meeting in January, the Federal Open Market Committee separately named him as its Chair.” This is the first time in a quarter century that a Fed Chairman’s term has lapsed before he was reconfirmed by the Senate. According to Reuters, the last time it happened was 1996 when Alan Greenspan served from March 3 to June 20 as Fed Chair Pro Tempore. Powell … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 8, 2022 ~ As Wall Street On Parade, two trial lawyers, the U.S. Department of Justice, the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations and one of the bank’s former lawyers have suggested, the largest bank in the United States, JPMorgan Chase, has enshrined crime as a business model. The man ultimately responsible for this business model is Jamie Dimon, the bank’s Chairman and CEO since December 31, 2006. Since 2014, JPMorgan Chase has the unprecedented distinction of admitting to five felony counts brought by the U.S. Department of Justice. In each case, it was given a deferred prosecution agreement and put on probation. (See a sampling of its Rap Sheet here.) Now Dimon and the bank have come into the cross hairs of Senator Sherrod Brown, Chairman of the powerful Senate Banking Committee that oversees the megabanks on Wall Street. Yesterday, Brown and five of … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 7, 2022 ~ Winston Churchill once described Russia as “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” The same could be said of Bloomberg LP, parent of Bloomberg News, which last Friday ran the false headline “Russia Invades Ukraine.” For still unexplained reasons, the headline was left up for at least 24 minutes on the digital front page of Bloomberg News. But as the hundreds of thousands of traders around the globe that use the Bloomberg Data Terminal well know, Bloomberg News first publishes many of its headlines on the Bloomberg Data Terminal – the cash cow of Bloomberg LP that has made its majority owner, Michael Bloomberg, a billionaire. Bloomberg’s largest customers for its Data Terminals include Wall Street megabanks like JPMorgan Chase that it also provides news coverage on via Bloomberg News. (Sometimes that coverage leaves a lot to be desired.) … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 3, 2022 ~ New details have emerged to provide a fuller picture of the turmoil that was taking place in the dark corners of markets when the overnight repo market blew up on September 17, 2019 and the Fed had to run to the rescue with trillions of dollars in cumulative loans that went on for months. Imagine if you were the Federal Reserve and had been thoroughly disgraced by waging more than a two-year court battle to prevent the press in America from doing its job and publishing the granular details of the Fed’s 2007 to 2010 bailout of Wall Street and its foreign bank derivative counterparties. Then the Fed was further disgraced after losing the court battles when in 2011 the details of the $29 trillion bailout were published. Chances are that the Fed would not be anxious to let the public … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 1, 2022 ~ Adding to a very long laundry list of questions about exactly whom the New York Fed serves, is the help-wanted ad that was posted four days ago. The ad is for a Financial Planning & Analysis Expert to work at the New York Fed’s headquarters in lower Manhattan. One part of the job description is this: “modelling of potential investment opportunities.” The New York Fed is supposed to be implementing monetary policy on behalf of the United States as mandated by the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC). As far as public FOMC records indicate, the New York Fed has not been assigned the job of seeking out “potential investment opportunities.” So for whom is it seeking out these investment opportunities? Is it looking for profit-making investments for the Wall Street megabanks who own it and whose CEOs rotate on and off … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 27, 2022 ~ The last thing a volatile stock market needs right now is more surprises from the dark corners of Wall Street. Unfortunately, we can guarantee you that more surprises are coming in the way of uncleared derivatives blowing up on the balance sheets of publicly-traded corporations. How do we know this? The information in the chart above comes from a study quietly released last July by the Office of Financial Research (OFR). That’s the federal agency that provides research to bank regulators to prevent systemic financial contagion from taking down the Wall Street megabanks and the U.S. economy in another replay of 2008. What the study actually shows, however, is that neither Congress nor bank regulators have done anything meaningful to prevent derivatives from once again blowing up the world’s largest economy. Instead, the watchdogs have simply allowed a rearrangement of … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 25, 2022 ~ The Office of Financial Research (OFR) is the federal agency created under the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation of 2010. Its role is to provide early warnings to U.S. bank regulators and the public of systemic risks that threaten U.S. financial stability, so that another 2008-style Wall Street crisis can never again devastate the U.S. economy. The OFR was doing an outstanding job of sounding alarm bells until the Trump administration gutted the agency. The Biden administration has clearly not done enough to restore the integrity of the office. Consider the research report that was released by the OFR on July 12 of last year, which we just discovered yesterday. The report is titled: “Counterparty Choice, Bank Interconnectedness, and Systemic Risk.” The researchers, Andrew Ellul and Dasol Kim, examined 18 different over-the-counter (OTC) derivative markets and noted the following: “Bank interconnectedness through … Continue reading →