Search Results for: JPMorgan

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 26, 2021 ~ If the Securities and Exchange Commission is not taking a hard look at the involvement of Dark Pools owned by the biggest banks on Wall Street during the meteoric spike in the price of GameStop shares in late January, then we have to conclude that it doesn’t want to actually get at the truth. Wall Street On Parade spent one hour combing through the Dark Pool trading data available through Wall Street’s self-regulator, FINRA, and the evidence of Dark Pools’ involvement in the dodgy trading in GameStop is striking. (GameStop is a New York Stock Exchange listed company and it has been trading like a penny stock operated out of a boiler room – raising questions about the integrity of U.S. markets.) FINRA only provides Dark Pool data lumped together for an entire week, instead of on a daily basis. But … 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: March 16, 2021 ~ Less than five months ago, Goldman Sachs and its Malaysian subsidiary were criminally charged by the U.S. Department of Justice “for a sweeping international corruption scheme, conspiring to avail itself of more than $1.6 billion in bribes to multiple high-level government officials across several countries so that the company could reap hundreds of millions of dollars in fees.” The case has become infamously known as the 1MDB scandal, named after the Malaysian sovereign wealth fund that was ripped off. Goldman Sachs admitted to the charges and paid a criminal penalty and disgorgement of over $2.9 billion to settle the charges with the Department of Justice. That sum was on top of the $2.5 billion in cash it paid to settle with the government of Malaysia. Stripping shareholders of $5.4 billion of their capital for criminal conduct in the midst of the worst … Continue reading →

Ask and it shall be given: pic.twitter.com/FcnwtuAJQT — Trevor Chow (@tmychow) March 11, 2021 By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 12, 2021 ~ Trevor Chow is a first-year economist and Jardine Scholar at Trinity College, part of the University of Cambridge in England. With his hilarious and profoundly thought-provoking video satire of the four most recent Chairs of the Federal Reserve singing the words to Rick Astley’s 1987 hit single, “Never Gonna Give You Up,” he has immortalized himself with us and, very likely, Nomi Prins, Senator Bernie Sanders and the family of the late, courageous reporter, Mark Pittman of Bloomberg News. All of us have attempted to bring transparency to the wayward path of the Fed. Debuting in what is sure to be the first of many such Fed singing videos are, left to right, former Fed Chairs Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, Janet Yellen and the current Fed Chair, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 11, 2021 ~ Welcome to the casino where the house always wins. One day after the U.S. Senate Banking Committee held a wide-ranging hearing on the price manipulation that is occurring in the shares of GameStop and other meme stocks, the high frequency traders and hedge funds and Dark Pools that are making a killing on this manipulation poked their fingers directly in the eyes of Senate lawmakers. They put on a wild trading show yesterday that basically said, “catch us if you can.” GameStop is not some penny stock operating out of a boiler room in some grimy backwater of Wall Street. GameStop is a New York Stock Exchange listed stock. It has a market capitalization of $18.48 billion. But the brazen manipulation of its stock, as both the House Financial Services Committee and Senate Banking Committee conduct investigative hearings into who’s behind … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 1, 2021 ~ Beginning on September 17, 2019 – months before there was any report of a COVID-19 case anywhere in the world – the Federal Reserve turned on its money spigot to the trading houses on Wall Street. By October 23, 2019 the Fed announced that it was upping these loans to $690 billion a week – again, months before any report of COVID-19 anywhere in the world. Earlier in October 2019, the Fed had also announced that it would be buying back $60 billion a month in Treasury bills. Within a span of six months, the Fed had pumped out a cumulative $9 trillion in loans to Wall Street’s trading houses, according to its own spread sheets, with no peep as to which Wall Street firms were getting the bulk of that money. It’s more than a year later and the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 23, 2021 ~ At the end of last Thursday’s 4-hour long hearing on the forces behind the wild trading in shares of New York Stock Exchange-listed GameStop, Congressman Jesus (Chuy) Garcia of Illinois asked Citadel hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin how much money was managed by his hedge fund. Griffin replied: “We manage approximately $35 billion dollars of assets.” Garcia than suggested that Citadel was systemically important. Since this might be construed to mean that Citadel should be under heightened regulatory oversight, Griffin quickly responded with this: “I believe that our hedge fund would not be in the category as systemically important. With $30-some billion of equity it is simply not at the scale or magnitude of a JPMorgan, Bank of America, Wells Fargo.” To make a proper assessment as to whether Citadel is a little minnow swimming peacefully with the Dolphins or … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 18, 2021 ~ The billionaire hedge fund titan of Citadel LLC and its market-making/trade execution arm, Citadel Securities, delivered a load of horse pukky in his written testimony to the House Financial Services Committee. Griffin is slated to appear as one of six witnesses at the hearing scheduled at noon today to examine the trading in shares of GameStop in January. GameStop is the brick-and-mortar video game retailer whose stock soared from $18.84 on December 31 of last year to an intraday high of $483 on January 28 – an unprecedented run of 2,465 percent in four weeks by a struggling retail outlet. The stock price then quickly plunged back to earth. It closed yesterday at $45.94. GameStop is listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Its shares are not supposed to trade like a penny stock operated out of a boiler room. … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 16, 2021 ~  Rewarding bad behavior with obscene pay is the sine qua non of Wall Street. Thus it’s a remarkable event to see a CEO of a mega Wall Street bank get punished with a 21 percent pay cut.  Michael Corbat is slated to retire this month as Citigroup’s CEO and be replaced by Jane Fraser, the first woman CEO of any major Wall Street bank. (The news would be more welcome if the areas that Fraser previously supervised at the bank did not have all those fines and sanctions.) The Board delivered an unusual kick in the pants to Corbat on his way out the door. It cut his compensation for 2020 by $5 million from what he had been awarded for 2019. Corbat’s total compensation went from $24 million in 2019 to $19 million for 2020. The announcement was made in … Continue reading →