Search Results for: Jamie Dimon

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 5, 2021 ~ The House Financial Services Committee has released its official Memorandum outlining the general topics it wants to cover in tomorrow’s hearing on the wild trading action in GameStop and other meme stocks in January that has raised serious questions about U.S. market integrity. The implosion of the Archegos Capital Management family office hedge fund in March, which has generated losses of more than $10 billion thus far at global systemically important banks, will likely be a key topic when the Senate Banking and House Financial Services Committees haul Wall Street bank CEOs to hearings on May 26 and 27, respectively. An insightful paragraph in the Memorandum for the House hearing tomorrow reads as follows: “Testimony given at the first two GameStop hearings raised concerns about the market dominance of some capital market participants, as well as correlated risks arising from the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 12, 2021 ~ The CBS “investigative” program, 60 Minutes, gave Wall Street a pass again last night. This time around 60 Minutes’ host Scott Pelley interviewed Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell. The Fed, and by extension, Powell, are in charge of supervising the holding companies of the mega banks on Wall Street, including those involved just two weeks ago in loaning out their balance sheets to the tune of tens of billions of dollars to a hedge fund run by a man previously charged with insider trading and stock price manipulations. The man is Sung Kook (Bill) Hwang and the hedge fund is Archegos Capital Management. (Fed-supervised mega banks loaning out their balance sheets to hedge funds for nefarious purposes was previously exposed in 2014 in an in-depth report and hearing by the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. The practice has clearly metastasized … Continue reading →

“This raises the serious question as to whether the Senate Banking and House Financial Services Committees should be investigating the gamification of markets or the monetization of the stock market via Wall Street’s ownership of federally insured deposits.” By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 5, 2021 ~ In late March, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) released its quarterly report on “Bank Trading and Derivatives Activities.” Graph 15 of the report shows that using data submitted by banks on their form RC-R of their call reports, JPMorgan Chase’s federally insured bank had exposure to $2.65 trillion in notional equity (stock) derivatives as of December 31, 2020. (Notional means face amount.) That’s a stunning figure for the largest federally-insured bank in the United States to have in exposure to the stock market. But more stunning is the fact that according to the OCC, JPMorgan Chase’s equity derivative contracts … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 23, 2021 ~ Yesterday the Federal Reserve released its “audited” financial statements with the following caveat, among numerous others: “Due to the unique nature of the Reserve Banks’ powers and responsibilities as part of the nation’s central bank and given the System’s unique responsibility to conduct monetary policy, the Board has adopted accounting principles and practices in the FAM [Financial Accounting Manual for Federal Reserve Banks] that differ from accounting principles generally accepted in the United States of America (GAAP).” The Federal Reserve is the regulator of the largest bank holding companies in the United States and, since December of 2007, has been shoveling trillions of dollars at the trading houses owned by these bank holding companies almost on a non-stop basis, if you include Quantitative Easing (QE) programs 1, 2, 3 and 4 and the repo loan bailout that began on September 17, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 18, 2021 ~ There were plenty of fireworks during yesterday’s House Financial Services Committee hearing on the ongoing GameStop trading fiasco and two of the major players involved: retail broker-dealer, Robinhood, which offers free trading accounts to novice investors and provides behavioral messaging like a digital display of confetti when they complete a trade; and Citadel Securities, a giant market-maker that pays Robinhood to route the bulk of its orders to it for execution. The most interesting moment of the day arrived several hours into the hearing in the following exchange between Congressman Jim Himes (D-CT) and a hearing witness, Dennis Kelleher, Co-Founder, President and CEO of Better Markets, a Wall Street watchdog that has been working in the public interest for the past decade. Kelleher holds a law degree from Harvard Law School. Himes said he wanted to figure out if “what we’re … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 19, 2020 ~ It’s starting to feel like Goldman Sachs has an insatiable appetite for scandal. Thanks to Matt Taibbi, Goldman is already known around the world as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” Most recently, Goldman jammed its blood funnel into the 1MDB sovereign wealth fund of Malaysia, resulting in a criminal indictment by the Malaysian government followed by a settlement with Malaysia for $3.9 billion. In October criminal charges were brought in the same matter by the U.S. Department of Justice against Goldman, resulting in another $2.9 billion in fines by U.S. and foreign regulators. The heavily publicized 1MDB scandal has filled headlines for the past five years. The Justice Department just settled its 1MDB charges against Goldman four weeks ago. Now Goldman is already back … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 23, 2020 ~ If you needed further proof that crime pays on Wall Street, look at the chart above. Goldman Sachs and its Malaysian subsidiary were criminally charged yesterday by the Justice Department, they admit to the charges, and its stock closed up on the day by $2.49. The U.S. Department of Justice is being played like a fiddle at a tractor meet. Those big white shoe law firms that handle increasingly dirty cases against the mega banks on Wall Street have twice, in a period of just three weeks, managed to get the Justice Department to announce settlements of landmark criminal cases against two of the largest banks on Wall Street on the day of presidential debates when the public and the media are not paying attention to Wall Street. On September 29, the day of the first presidential debate between President … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 13, 2020 ~ It has been the contention of Wall Street On Parade for more than a decade that today’s so-called “universal banks,” also variously known as megabanks or Global Systemically Important Banks (G-SIBs), are a banking model from hell that was thoroughly discredited in the tens of thousands of transcripts and documents released by the U.S. Senate following its multi-year investigation of that structure in the early 1930s. Now the seminal book proving that theory has just been published. Written by Arthur E. Wilmarth, Jr. and titled Taming the Megabanks: Why We Need a New Glass-Steagall Act, the book brilliantly takes the reader through a riveting guided tour covering the past century and the resurrection of this same disastrous U.S. banking model in 1999. Oxford University Press is the publisher of Wilmarth’s book. We can envision it becoming one of the most … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 12, 2020 ~ It’s off to the races today for BlackRock. The New York Fed, with authority from the Federal Reserve Board and backstopped with taxpayers’ money, will begin the first phase of the Fed’s unprecedented leap into shoring up the sagging prices of investment grade corporate debt and junk bonds. BlackRock has been selected by the New York Fed to be the investment manager for these bailout facilities and will begin Phase I today by buying up Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) containing investment grade corporate bonds as well as junk bonds. Making the situation particularly dicey is that BlackRock just happens to be one of the largest purveyors of said ETFs. The screaming conflict-of-interest that this raises in the minds of many is not ruffling any feathers at the New York Fed (which is itself a bundle of conflicts wrapped in a … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 4, 2020 ~ We write this with some trepidation that after this appears in print Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell will stop taking questions at his press conferences or that all media questions will have to be routed through Vice President Mike Pence’s press office, as is now occurring with matters pertaining to the coronavirus. (We say that with only some facetiousness.) However, in this age of spin, facts matter more than ever. First, a little background. After losing 3600 points the prior week, the Dow Jones Industrial Average staged a monster rally (more likely a short squeeze) on Monday, climbing 1293 points to close at 26,703. At 1:34 a.m. (the wee hours of Tuesday morning) President Donald Trump posted a tweet to his Twitter page stating, among other things, that the Fed should ease and “cut rate big” adding that “Powell led … Continue reading →