Search Results for: JPMorgan

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 12, 2020 ~ Last week, the New York Times’ Emily Flitter, Jeanna Smialek and Stacy Cowley provided an excellent rundown of the dangerous rollbacks of regulations on the big banks by federal regulators appointed by Donald Trump. Today, in preparation for a hearing with these regulators, the House Financial Services Committee has released a Memorandum that further outlines how the safety and soundness of the biggest banks have been impacted by changes to regulations. Many of the rollbacks or watering down of the bank rules have occurred quietly or without the attention of mainstream media. Taken together, the rule changes are striking in their reckless disregard for the safety and soundness of a sector that blew itself up just 12 years ago, taking the U.S. economy and U.S. housing market down with it, while getting propped up with the largest taxpayer and Fed bailout in U.S. … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 10, 2020 ~ Yesterday was the first trading day for the stock market since the networks called the presidential election for Joe Biden on Saturday. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed up a whopping 834.5 points — which was actually near its lows of the day. The Dow was up 1,516 points shortly after the opening bell yesterday. The optimistic reaction in the Dow came from two pieces of news. Before the market opened, Pfizer announced that early data from it COVID-19 vaccine trial indicated that the vaccine may be 90 percent effective. That sent Dow futures soaring and a big move at the open of the market. The second piece of news being digested by the stock market was that the Democrats did not get the landslide victory that some polls had suggested. That suggested to the market, rightly or wrongly, that … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 2, 2020 ~ The U.S. stock market, as measured by the Dow Jones Industrial Average, lost 1,833.97 points last week. The Dow was down every day except Thursday, when it eked out a gain of 139.16. The market was reacting to the following bad news: soaring cases of COVID-19 in the U.S.; a reemergence of the virus in Europe causing business shutdowns there; the failure of the U.S. Congress to pass a new stimulus bill; and a sharply lower price for West Texas Intermediate (WTI), domestic crude oil – which signals a further slowdown in economic activity. (At 7 a.m. this morning, WTI was down further, with a $34 handle.) The stock market’s losses would have likely been greater last week were it not for an intervention staged by the Federal Reserve at 11:00 a.m. on Friday. Here’s what happened and why Americans … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 27, 2020 ~ Congresswoman Katie Porter has never met an overpaid Wall Street billionaire that she couldn’t reduce to a flummoxed whimperer within a few minutes. (See video clip below of Porter and Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, during an April 10, 2019 House hearing.) Porter has had the Chairman of the so-called “independent” Federal Reserve in her radar since he appeared at a House Financial Services Committee hearing on February 11 of this year. At the hearing, Porter held up a photo of Fed Chair Jerome Powell in black tie outside the mansion of billionaire Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon. Porter said this: “Can you imagine how attending a lavish party at Jeff Bezos’ $23 million home, along with Jared and Ivanka and the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon, might give off the sense to the public that … 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 21, 2020 ~ Turns out the federal government’s plan for dealing with a mega bank failure on Wall Street is no better conceived than the federal government’s plan for dealing with the worst pandemic since 1918. The Federal Reserve issued two press releases yesterday about “large banks.” One read: “Agencies finalize rule to reduce the impact of large bank failures.” The other read: “Agencies issue final rule to strengthen resilience of large banks.” Wait. What? Fed Chairman Jerome Powell has been telling anyone who would listen this year – from Congress to viewers of the Today show – that the large banks have been a “source of strength” during the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. If that were true (which we’ve questioned from the first time Powell said it) why is the Fed now worrying about a “large bank failure” and … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 19, 2020 ~ On May 2, 1985 the highest law enforcement officer in the United States, the head of the U.S. Department of Justice, Attorney General Edwin Meese, held a news conference to announce that the sixth largest brokerage firm on Wall Street, E.F. Hutton, was pleading guilty to 2,000 felony counts of wire and mail fraud. It had also agreed to pay criminal fines of $2 million and up to $8 million in restitution to the 400 banks it had defrauded. The fraud had lasted less than two years, from July 1, 1980 and February 28, 1982, and consisted of the following according to the Justice Department: “The essence of the charges was that Hutton obtained the interest-free use of millions of dollars by intentionally writing checks in excess of the funds it had on deposit in various banks.” On the following … 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: October 8, 2020 ~ Federal regulators are rapidly becoming bigger Dark Pools of information than those secretive stock exchanges run by the big banks on Wall Street. On Tuesday, September 29, when all eyes were focused on the presidential debate to occur that evening, the Justice Department issued a press release announcing the fourth and fifth felony counts against JPMorgan Chase in the past six years. In an unprecedented move, the Justice Department did not hold a press conference to explain why the country’s largest bank is allowed to perpetually commit felonies with no change in management. The bank admitted to the charges and was put on a three-year probation – its third such probation in six years. Jamie Dimon, the Chairman and CEO of the bank, who has presided over all five felony counts, was left in place at the bank. Yesterday, when … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 5, 2020 ~ Is the Chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Jay Clayton, a watchdog or a lapdog? If you judge him by his actions since taking office on May 4, 2017, it looks like the latter. That was easily predictable given that Clayton had represented 8 of the 10 largest Wall Street banks in the three years prior to taking his seat as Chair of the SEC. Clayton is also the man who is now attempting to elevate his role to that of the top criminal prosecutor in Wall Street’s home turf of Manhattan, by knocking Geoffrey Berman out of the job. That office is the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York where there are pending investigations related to both Donald Trump as well as Clayton’s former clients, the big banks on Wall Street. One person in … Continue reading →