Search Results for: JPMorgan

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 28, 2021 ~ On December 3 there were 585 new 52-week lows on the Nasdaq stock market versus 12 new 52-week highs. To look at it another way, 48.75 times more stocks were setting new 52-week lows than were reaching new 52-week highs. That doesn’t sound like the definition of a bull market to us. The Nasdaq had closed down just 1.9 percent that day. Yesterday, the Nasdaq closed up 1.39 percent. We decided to check out the breadth of the market. Sure enough, even on an up day for the Nasdaq, there was negative breadth. There were 139 new 52-week highs but 203 new 52-week lows. Against this pattern of a clearly deteriorating stock market picture came a raft of headlines yesterday touting that the S&P 500 Index had notched its 69th record close for the year. But here’s what you need to know … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 27, 2021 ~ Maxine Waters is the Chair of the House Financial Services Committee. That Committee oversees the nation’s banks, including the megabanks on Wall Street that are serially charged by prosecutors with ever creative ways of looting the public. Waters’ Committee also oversees the bank regulators, which are frequently “captured” by Wall Street. One of those bank regulators has now come into the cross hairs of Waters. Typically, if one is a captured bank regulator, one goes to extreme lengths to hide that fact. Thus, it is unusual that the Chair of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), Jelena McWilliams (a Trump holdover), has decided she has the power to run the federal agency with an iron hand and overturn the will of her Board of Directors. Even more unusual, McWilliams is engaging in this battle with her Board in public. We’ve seen … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: December 22, 2021 ~ Two interesting things happened this week just one day apart. On Monday, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the regulator of national banks, released its quarterly report on “Bank Trading and Derivatives Activities” which documented insane levels of risk at four federally-insured banks, which have merged themselves with Wall Street’s trading casinos to form Frankenbanks. The very next day, an opinion columnist at Bloomberg News, Jared Dillian, wrote a column lamenting the “loss of risk-taking” on Wall Street which he appears to blame on “excessive compliance and regulation.” The column was given the pity-party title: “The Wall Street That I Once Knew No Longer Exists.” Compare these two very disparate views of the reality on Wall Street today. The OCC’s report shares this: “The total notional amount of derivative contracts held by banks in the third quarter increased by $978.0 billion (0.5 … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 21, 2021 ~ Last Friday, with the public’s attention diverted to the surge in Omicron variant cases of COVID in the U.S. and holiday travelers’ attention focused on the safety of air travel and family gatherings, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York quietly announced, in a one sentence statement, that it was adding the following three federally-insured banks to its list of counterparties for its newly-minted $500 billion Standing Repo Facility: Citibank, Goldman Sachs Bank USA, and the New York Branch of Mizuho Bank. If you’re stunned that Goldman Sachs is allowed to own a federally-insured bank under existing U.S. law, see our previous report: Goldman Sachs’ Rich Man’s Bank Backstopped by You and Me. If you’re stunned that a New York branch of Mizuho Bank, part of the Japanese conglomerate Mizuho Financial Group, is able to have federal deposit insurance backstopped by … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 16, 2021 ~ The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) is the agency that prevents financial panics from turning into catastrophic runs on banks by providing taxpayer-backstopped and government guaranteed insurance on deposits, up to $250,000 per depositor. Its leadership and honest governance is thus critically important to every American. So when a nasty public brawl breaks out between the Board of Directors of the FDIC and its Chairwoman, Jelena McWilliams, every American needs to sit up and pay attention. On Tuesday, Rohit Chopra, President Biden’s nominee who has been confirmed to lead the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), which automatically makes him a member of the Board of Directors of the FDIC, posted at the CFPB’s website serious charges against FDIC Chairwoman McWilliams – effectively stating that she was staging a one-woman coup against her Board and usurping their power to govern the FDIC. … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 8, 2021 ~ Yesterday, Cornell Law Professor, Saule Omarova, withdrew from her nomination to become the head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the regulator of national banks. Emily Flitter, reporting for the New York Times, said it was because Omarova had been “painted as a communist.” In terms of the full story on why Omarova had to withdraw, that is like pointing to a single droplet of rain as the cause of a hurricane. In October, the Vanderbilt Law Review published a 69-page paper by Omarova in which she made the following bizarre recommendations to reform the U.S. banking system: (1) Move all commercial bank deposits from commercial banks to so-called FedAccounts at the Federal Reserve; (2) Allow the Fed, in “extreme and rare circumstances, when the Fed is unable to control inflation by raising interest rates,” to confiscate deposits … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 2, 2021 ~ We can tell you with some confidence what Jamie Dimon, the Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, is going to be doing at 11:00 a.m. this morning. He’s going to be listening to a teleconference in a federal court case titled Shaquala Williams v JPMorgan Chase & Co. That’s because the outcome of that case will determine if the bank Dimon has helmed through five separate felony counts – all of which received non-prosecution agreements from the Justice Department – will finally be prosecuted for a crime. One might suspect that Kenneth Polite, the man President Biden nominated and the Senate confirmed to head the Criminal Division of the Justice Department in July, might also take an interest in this matter since the plaintiff is alleging that the Justice Department got played by JPMorgan Chase in its 2016 non-prosecution agreement. Unfortunately, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: November 29, 2021 ~ For more than two decades, the general counsels of Wall Street’s mega banks have been meeting together secretly once a year at ritzy hotels and resorts around the world. This would appear to be a clear violation of anti-trust law but since Wall Street’s revolving door has compromised the U.S. Department of Justice over much of that time span, there has been no pushback from the Justice Department to shut down these clandestine meetings. Wall Street insiders say that among the top agenda items at this annual confab are strategy sessions on how to keep Congress from enacting legislation that would bring an end to Wall Street’s privatized justice system called mandatory arbitration. This system allows the most serially corrupt industry in America to effectively lock the nation’s courthouse doors to claims of fraud from its workers and customers. This private justice system also … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 23, 2021 ~ Fed Chair Jerome Powell now finds himself in the same position as Morgan Stanley’s Howie Hubler and JPMorgan’s Bruno Iksil: he’s got a big trade on and no exit plan. The problem for the U.S. economy is this: Hubler and Iksil were gambling with billions of dollars. Powell is gambling with trillions of dollars. Powell’s Fed has effectively become the Whale in the U.S. debt market. Powell was last sworn in as Fed Chair on February 5, 2018. Five days earlier, the securities held on the Fed’s balance sheet totaled $4.2 trillion. As of last Wednesday, that figure stood at $8.179 trillion, thanks to Powell’s endless purchases of U.S. Treasury securities and agency mortgage-backed securities (MBS). Making this situation even more dicey, the Fed bought these debt securities with money it creates out of thin air. The U.S. taxpayer is on … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 17, 2021 ~ We recently read the report conducted by the Special Committee of the Board of Directors of Credit Suisse into how the bank had lost $5.5 billion when the Archegos family office hedge fund that was being financed by Credit Suisse and other Wall Street firms blew itself up this past March. One paragraph in particular caught our attention: “The Archegos-related losses sustained by CS are the result of a fundamental failure of management and controls in CS’s Investment Bank and, specifically, in its Prime Services business. The business was focused on maximizing short-term profits and failed to rein in and, indeed, enabled Archegos’s voracious risk-taking. There were numerous warning signals—including large, persistent limit breaches—indicating that Archegos’s concentrated, volatile, and severely under-margined swap positions posed potentially catastrophic risk to CS. Yet the business, from the in-business risk managers to the Global Head … Continue reading →