Search Results for: JPMorgan

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 15, 2021 ~ On Tuesday, SEC Commissioner Allison Herren Lee delivered an exceptionally well-researched speech on the rising dangers to the broader U.S. economy from the burgeoning dark private markets for non-publicly traded stocks. She makes many important points. However, there is a far larger and more dangerous dark market: the Dark Pools owned by the serially-charged mega banks on Wall Street that are trading, on a daily basis in darkness, the publicly-traded stocks that reside in public pension funds and the mutual funds that make up the bulk of retirement funds for tens of millions of Americans. According to an April 2021 report from McKinsey & Company, “global private equity AUM [Assets Under Management] reached $4.5 trillion in the first half of 2020.” That’s the dark market that SEC Commissioner Lee is worried about. The publicly-traded market in the U.S. stood at $54.768 trillion … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 14, 2021 ~ Yesterday was the last day that Randal Quarles served in the post as Vice Chair for Supervision at the Federal Reserve. Senator Sherrod Brown, the Chair of the Senate Banking Committee that oversees the Federal Reserve, used the occasion to send a scorching letter to Fed Chair Jerome Powell assessing Quarles’ performance in the job, which began on October 13, 2017. Brown wrote: “When Vice Chair Quarles was confirmed to his position, banking lobbyists cheered. Not only did he immediately set out a plan to shift post-crisis rules to benefitting industry interests over protecting working families, he dutifully continued his deregulatory efforts even as the economy was shaken by a global pandemic. I am deeply concerned about these efforts during a global economic crisis.” But it’s not just deregulation that has been a problem with Quarles and Powell at the helm of … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 13, 2021 ~ The Federal Reserve Bank of New York has quietly posted the names of the banks that grabbed billions of dollars under the Fed’s emergency repo loan operations that commenced on September 17, 2019 – months before there was a COVID-19 crisis anywhere in the world. The emergency repo loans were made via Open Market operations at the New York Fed. Under the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation of 2010, the names of the banks, dollar amounts borrowed, interest rate and collateral posted must be made public “on the last day of the eighth calendar quarter following the calendar quarter in which the covered transaction was conducted.” Since the emergency repo loans were initiated in the third quarter of 2019, that meant eight quarters had passed and the public was entitled to the information for at least the month of September 2019. (The Fed … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 12, 2021 ~ Last Wednesday, the Editorial Board of the Financial Times of London penned an editorial under a headline that read: “The Fed’s Trading Scandal Undermines Public Trust.” The editorial noted that the President of the Dallas Fed, Robert Kaplan, “held stakes over $1m each in 27 investments, and moved in and out of S&P 500 futures. The precise dates of his transactions are unknown as his form declaring financial interests merely gives ‘multiple’ as the timeframe.” Last Friday, this headline appeared at the Wall Street Journal: “Boston, Dallas Fed Banks Pledge Cooperation With Stock-Trading Probe.” But then the article revealed this: “The Dallas Fed has declined multiple requests to fully disclose Mr. Kaplan’s extensive trading activity. For example, Mr. Kaplan’s disclosures list ‘multiple’ for trades in stocks and other investments without specifying the dates of the transactions.” The financial disclosure form that Kaplan … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 11, 2021 ~ Regulation U is a 1936 Federal Reserve rule, that is still in force today, that allows federally-insured, taxpayer backstopped commercial banks to make margin loans for speculating in stocks. Unlike 1936, however, Wall Street trading houses are today allowed to own their own federally-insured, taxpayer backstopped commercial banks. That has allowed a lot of mischief to occur in the making of margin loans for speculating in the stock market. We’ll get to the details of all that in a few moments, but first some necessary background. Following the 1929 stock market crash, 9,096 banks that were holding deposits for average Americans failed as a result of insolvency between 1930 and 1933. (See chart above.) The 1930s banking crisis came to a head on March 6, 1933, just one day after President Franklin D. Roosevelt was inaugurated. Following a month-long run on the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 7, 2021 ~ Yesterday, at 4:19 in the afternoon, Wall Street On Parade received an email from the nice communications folks at the Senate Banking Committee, which is chaired by Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, a progressive Democrat who has had about all he can stand of the robber barons on Wall Street. The ranking member of the Senate Banking Committee, who was supposed to become the Chair of the Committee in a Trump coup d’état, is Republican Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, who has been serially funded and backed by Koch-funded front groups. Koch Industries owns a big trading operation, so it is very much vested in what happens in terms of stricter regulations for Wall Street. (For the role of Koch money in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, see our report: The Money Trail to the Siege at the Capitol Leads … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 6, 2021 ~ Buying global bank stocks at this moment in time would be like storing dynamite next to your fire pit. One of the worst pieces of advice we’ve ever read at Bloomberg News had a prominent headline on their digital front page early this morning. It read: “Citi Says Banks Are In, Tech Is Out Ahead of Rates Lift-Off.” The advice is so bad that we found ourselves pondering if this was a paid post from Citigroup. There wasn’t the typical paywall on the article, which further fueled our suspicions. The gist of the article is this: “In the race to find the best hedges against higher rates and inflation, Citigroup Inc.’s chief global equity strategist is moving with the tide toward global financial stocks. “Like a growing number of his peers, Robert Buckland expects value stocks to provide a degree of … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 5, 2021 ~ After watching the video below, if you have further doubts, consider this: On August 7 of last year, Wall Street On Parade reported that Fed Chairman, Jerome Powell, was having private phone calls with BlackRock CEO, Larry Fink, while BlackRock managed upwards of $25 million of Powell’s personal money and the Fed awarded three no-bid contracts to BlackRock for emergency lending facilities. One of those no-bid contracts allowed BlackRock to use Fed money to buy up corporate bonds and Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) in the secondary market, including BlackRock’s own ETFs. American taxpayers’ money was used to backstop losses in these bailout facilities. And while the individual stock-trading of Kaplan and Rosengren is indeed an outrage, it pales in comparison to what the New York Fed has been doing for decades. On October 30 of last year, Wall Street On Parade reported that the New … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 1, 2021 We’re sorry to have to tell you this, but the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) process, where the public and members of the press can request information from their government and get a meaningful response, is as dead under the Biden administration as it was under the Trump, Obama and George W. Bush administrations. In no small part, this is why the United States of America, which regularly lectures other countries on what it means to be a democracy, has lost the trust of the American people. Earlier this year we reported that the man that President Biden had selected to head the Criminal Division of the Justice Department, Kenneth Polite, owed more than $1.5 million in debts according to his financial disclosure form and public mortgage records; was paying over 18 percent interest on an outstanding balance on a credit card; 19.99 … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 29, 2021 ~ The culture of Wall Street has now completely engulfed the Fed: it’s legal if you can get away with it. For more than five years the President of the Dallas Fed, Robert Kaplan, was trading like a hedge fund kingpin in “over $1 million” transactions in S&P 500 futures while refusing to follow the requirements of the Fed’s financial disclosure form and list the specific dates of his purchases and sells so that the transactions could be examined for whether he had inside information from the Fed at the time. That information is now as much as five years overdue to the American people and we have asked the Dallas Fed to provide it promptly. The Dallas Fed further hampered the free press in America from doing its job by refusing to answer our simple question as to whether Kaplan … Continue reading →