Search Results for: Jamie Dimon

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 →

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 →