Search Results for: JPMorgan

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 24, 2021 ~ Yesterday, President Biden took the bold step of nominating Saule Omarova to head the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), a top federal bank regulator. Omarova is a Law Professor at Cornell and has written extensively on systemic risk containment. Prior to joining Cornell in 2014, Omarova was Associate Professor at the University of North Carolina School of Law. Prior to her academic career, Omarova worked for the corporate law firm, Davis Polk & Wardwell, in their Financial Institutions Group. In 2006-2007, she served at the U.S. Department of the Treasury as a Special Advisor for Regulatory Policy to the Under Secretary for Domestic Finance. Omarova represents a triple threat to the insidious behavior of mega banks on Wall Street: she has an in-depth knowledge of how they operate; she is not timid about explaining it to investigative bodies … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 22, 2021 ~ Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell took a few wonky questions from various reporters at his press conference today and then Jeanna Smialek, Federal Reserve and Economy reporter for the New York Times, was called on. Smialek was the first reporter to lead the elephant in the room out into the open. The exchange went as follows: Smialek: “Prior to recent media reports, were you aware of the kind of security buying and selling that [Dallas Fed and Boston Fed] Presidents Kaplan and Rosengren were participating in last year? And I wonder if you thought those were appropriate?” Powell: “So, no I was not aware of the specifics of what they were doing. So let me just say a couple of things about this subject. We understand very well that the trust of the American people is essential for us to effectively … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 21, 2021 ~ Fortunately for Americans, the keen-eyed Wall Street watchdog group, Better Markets, is not living in the same alternative reality universe as the cable financial news network, CNBC. Last Friday, CNBC published a crazy headline regarding Dallas Fed President Robert Kaplan trading tens of millions of dollars of individual stocks and S&P 500 futures in 2020 while Boston Fed President Eric Rosengren traded in and out of REITs (Real Estate Investment Trusts). The trading occurred despite both men being privy to non-public, market moving information coming from the Federal Reserve, the central bank of the United States. CNBC’s headline read: “After years of being ‘squeaky clean,’ the Federal Reserve is surrounded by controversy.” CNBC was royally roasted on Twitter for its “squeaky clean” fairy tale. CNBC’s flight from reality comes after the Fed’s former Chair, Janet Yellen, went straight from her position at … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 15, 2021 ~ Last Tuesday, Mike Derby reported at the Wall Street Journal that the President of the Dallas Fed, Robert Kaplan, had “made multiple million-dollar-plus stock trades in 2020, according to a financial disclosure form provided by his bank.” The individual stocks included shares of Apple, Alphabet (Google), Alibaba,  Amazon, Chevron, Delta Airlines, Facebook, General Electric, Johnson and Johnson, Oracle, Tesla and numerous others. Kaplan previously spent more than two decades at Goldman Sachs, one of the largest trading houses on Wall Street, and, apparently, he thinks he still works there. Think about this for a moment. While Fed Chair Jerome Powell is repeatedly testifying to Congress last year that its every monetary move during the pandemic was on behalf of the average American, the Dallas Fed President is making million-dollar bets on big tech stocks the Justice Department is investigating for anti-trust … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 14, 2021 ~ The Senate Banking Committee will hold a hearing today titled “Oversight of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.” The SEC needs a lot of oversight because that’s the federal agency that didn’t catch Bernie Madoff for more than four decades, despite a financial expert, Harry Markopolos, sending the SEC detailed written reports (in 2000, 2001, 2005, 2007 and 2008), making the case that Madoff was running a Ponzi scheme. The SEC was also asleep at the switch while Wall Street banks concocted their subprime debt bombs, then bet billions of dollars that they would fail while selling them to public pension funds as good investments. Those subprime bombs blew up in 2008, cratering the U.S. economy and leaving millions of innocent Americans jobless and homeless. More recently, the SEC was caught flat-footed when the family office hedge fund, Archegos Capital Management, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 8, 2021 ~ Natalie Mayflower Sours Edwards received her Ph.D. in 2007 from Virginia Commonwealth University. Her dissertation was titled: “Core Competences Required to Lead an Executive Level at the Department of Homeland Security.” On Friday morning, September 3, Edwards began serving a six-month sentence, to be followed by three years of supervised release, in the Federal Prison Camp known simply as “Alderson” in Alderson, West Virginia. There is currently a notice on the prison camp’s website that reads: “All visiting at this facility has been suspended until further notice.” This means that a woman who set out to help her country ferret out criminal money laundering now finds herself unable to even visit with her husband or her 16-year old daughter. Edwards is the heroic former Treasury official who tried in vain to get her superiors in the federal government to act on … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 7, 2021 ~ JPMorgan Chase has created its own digital coin called JPM Coin. The bank announced last October that the JPM Coin was being used commercially for the first time by “a large technology client to send payments around the world,” according to reporting at CNBC. According to JPMorgan’s website, the JPM Coin currently represents just U.S. dollars but the bank anticipates that it “will be extended to other major currencies, subject to market demand.” According to the trademark application for JPM Coin that was filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the JPM Coin is defined as follows: “Downloadable and recorded software for use in connection with transferring, managing and processing cryptocurrency, digital currency, virtual currency, and digital tokens based on blockchain technology.” JPM Coin runs on the Quorum blockchain, a network the bank developed as a private version of the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 27, 2021 ~ For the past 19 years, China has been stonewalling U.S. regulators over access to the work papers of auditors of publicly traded companies that are based in China but listed on U.S. stock exchanges. China takes the position that these audit work papers hold state secrets and it prohibits audit firms from releasing the documents directly to U.S. regulators, effectively gutting U.S. law. Finally, last December, Congress addressed the long brewing problem. Both houses of Congress unanimously passed legislation called the Holding Foreign Companies Accountable Act. The legislation requires that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) identify companies that are listed in the U.S. which the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) cannot “inspect or investigate completely because of a position taken by an authority in the foreign jurisdiction.” The legislation also requires the listed companies to provide documentation showing that … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 19, 2021 ~ When high risk derivatives start blowing up again at Wall Street’s mega banks and tanking the U.S. economy, be sure to send your thoughts along to these two men: former Congressman Randy Hultgren (R-IL) and former Congressman Kevin Yoder (R-KS). You can reach Hultgren at the Illinois Bankers Association where he now sits as President and CEO after losing his seat in Congress in the 2018 election. Yoder…wait for it…is a registered lobbyist at Hobart Hallaway & Quayle Ventures after also losing his seat in the general election of 2018. These two men were effectively the handmaidens of Wall Street in getting a critical derivatives provision in the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation repealed in 2014. We’ll get to the specifics of the role the two men played in a moment, but first some background. According to the official analysis and report … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 18, 2021 ~ Before daybreak on any business day in lower Manhattan, the glow of lights from Bloomberg terminals illuminate windows at 33 Liberty Street, home of the New York Fed. The New York Fed not only has its own trading floor with speed dials to the Wall Street trading houses, but it also has its own global markets intelligence gathering group, called simply the Markets Group. According to a previously released educational video featuring Karin Kimbrough, then the Director of Financial Stability Market Monitoring at the New York Fed – a position she held until November of 2014 — the traders at the New York Fed take turns coming in at 4:30 a.m. in order to get a jump on market intelligence by calling their contacts in London, Frankfurt and Japan. (See video below.) Kimbrough explains what kind of intelligence the traders and … Continue reading →