Search Results for: JPMorgan

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 →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 16, 2021 ~ President Joe Biden is finding out the hard way that nominees for high office actually need to be vetted by multiple competent people. That clearly did not happen with Biden’s nominee, Saule Omarova, to head the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), a federal agency that supervises national banks – those operating across state lines. Omarova’s radical statements and position papers will likely come into sharp focus at her confirmation hearing at 9:30 a.m. this Thursday before the Senate Banking Committee. Omarova’s unhinged views have Biden supporters scratching their heads as to how she ever survived the vetting process at the White House. (See Biden’s Nominee Omarova Has a Published Plan to Move All Bank Deposits to the Fed and Let the New York Fed Short Stocks.) Omarova, a Cornell University law professor, essentially has no filter for what … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 10, 2021 ~ According to Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s daily appointment calendar, he met privately with Jamie Dimon, the Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, from 3:00 to 3:30 p.m. on Thursday, September 30. JPMorgan Chase is the largest bank in the United States. It is supervised – badly – by the Federal Reserve. Just how bad is that supervision? JPMorgan Chase is the only U.S. bank to have been charged by the Justice Department with five felony counts since 2014 – admitting to all of them. But despite that unfathomable number of felony counts under the same Chairman and CEO, the Board of JPMorgan Chase didn’t sack Dimon. The Federal Reserve didn’t order JPMorgan Chase’s Board to sack Dimon either – not even after the bank was charged with rigging the U.S. Treasury market last year – the market that allows the U.S. … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 5, 2021 ~ Yesterday, the S&P 500 and Nasdaq set new record highs for the sixth straight trading session. The Dow Jones Industrial Average, however, closed in the red. That’s because two high-priced bank components of the Dow, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase, closed in the red and helped to pull the index into negative territory. (The Dow Jones Industrial Average is a price-weighted index.) As the chart above indicates, the declines in Goldman and JPMorgan were part of a major bank selloff yesterday – a striking and disturbing divergence from the broader indices. It would be impossible to have a healthy stock market going forward if the mega banks that finance the bulk of corporate activity descend into a downward spiral. Among the worst bank performers yesterday were three foreign global banks that have a heavy presence on Wall Street: the British bank, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 4, 2021 ~ On April 5 of this year, Axios ran this headline: “Poll indicates low trust, poor public perception of the Fed.” Axios had commissioned an Ipsos poll which found that 53 percent of Americans didn’t trust the U.S. central bank, the Federal Reserve. An earlier Axios/Ipsos poll released on February 23 had found that a stunning 60 percent of Americans didn’t trust the Fed. Both of those polls were taken before the trading scandal at the Fed further damaged its credibility. Those poll numbers likely explain why Fed Chairman Jerome Powell uses every press conference he conducts as an opportunity to state that the Fed’s priority is to work for the American people. Unfortunately, the facts keep getting in the way of that statement. Powell held another of his press conferences yesterday and did more harm to the Fed’s credibility by making … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: November 3, 2021 ~ Yesterday, President Biden stunned moderates in his party by formally sending his nomination of Cornell Law Professor Saule Omarova to head the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) to the Senate. The OCC regulates national banks, those operating across state lines, which include some of the largest banks in the nation, such as JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Citigroup’s Citibank. Many folks believed that after Omarova’s recent law journal article became widely analyzed, she would remove herself from consideration or Biden would quietly ask her to step aside. As Wall Street On Parade revealed last week, Omarova’s 69-page paper published in the Vanderbilt Law Review in October, proposed the following: (1) Moving all commercial bank deposits from commercial banks to so-called FedAccounts at the Federal Reserve; (2) Allowing the Fed, in “extreme and rare circumstances, when the Fed is unable to … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 1, 2021 ~ On Friday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, S&P 500 Index and Nasdaq Composite, all closed in positive territory. But as the chart above indicates, mega banks on Wall Street closed in a sea of red ink. Citigroup (ticker, “C”) was among the big losers, closing down 1.72 percent, followed by Credit Suisse (CS) down 1.62 percent and Deutsche Bank (DB), down 1.31 percent. JPMorgan Chase (JPM), Barclays (BCS) and Goldman Sachs (GS) closed down less than 1 percent on Friday. The problem appeared to be the shifting shape of the U.S. Treasury yield curve. The longer out the yield curve an investor goes, the higher the yield – unless the yield curve flattens or inverts. That typically means that the Fed has started to hike interest rates, or is expected to begin hiking interest rates, and the market perceives that the … Continue reading →

Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 26, 2021 This month, the Vanderbilt Law Review published a 69-page paper by Saule Omarova, President Biden’s nominee to head the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the Federal regulator of the largest banks in the country that operate across state lines. The paper is titled “The People’s Ledger: How to Democratize Money and Finance the Economy.” The paper, in all seriousness, proposes the following: (1) Moving all commercial bank deposits from commercial banks to so-called FedAccounts at the Federal Reserve; (2) Allowing the Fed, in “extreme and rare circumstances, when the Fed is unable to control inflation by raising interest rates,” to confiscate deposits from these FedAccounts in order to tighten monetary policy; (3) Allowing the most Wall Street-conflicted regional Fed bank in the country, the New York Fed, when there are “rises in market value at rates suggestive of a … Continue reading →