Search Results for: JPMorgan

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 3, 2021 ~ The House Financial Services Committee is showing a decidedly gutsy streak under the Chairmanship of Congresswoman Maxine Waters. No less than four hearings this month will take a deep dive into the underpinnings of an out of control Wall Street. The kickoff begins this Thursday with the Committee’s third hearing on the wild trading action in shares of GameStop and other meme stocks. GameStop trades on the New York Stock Exchange but its trading pattern has looked more like that of a penny stock operated out of a boiler room – raising serious questions about the integrity of U.S. markets. On January 28, 2021 GameStop hit an intraday peak of $483, bringing its run from a share price of $18.84 on December 31, 2020 — a gain of 2,465 percent for a struggling brick and mortar retail outlet that sells video … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 30, 2021 ~ During Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell’s press conference this past Wednesday, he took a question from Brian Cheung of Yahoo Finance. The question was: “It seems like to people on the outside who might not follow finance daily, they’re paying attention to things like GameStop, now Dogecoin. And it seems like there’s interesting reach for yield in this market to some extent — also Archegos. So, does the Fed see a relationship between low rates and easy policy to those things, and is there a financial stability concern from the Fed’s perspective at this time?” As part of Powell’s long, meandering answer, he said this: “Leverage in the financial system is not a problem.” Within a second or so, Powell repeated himself: “Leverage in the financial system is not an issue.” (Read the full transcript here.) Either Powell has not read … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 27, 2021 ~ This morning, UBS reported that it had experienced a hit in the first quarter of $774 million related to its exposure to the implosion of the family office hedge fund, Archegos Capital Management. That brings the tally thus far to more than $10 billion in losses to the global mega banks that have acknowledged losses from their relationship with Archegos. The only thing surprising to us about the Archegos announcement from UBS was that it didn’t take a bigger hit. According to the stock positions reported by UBS on its 13F filing with the SEC for the quarter ending December 31, 2020, it had significant exposure to seven of the same stocks that Archegos had arranged swap contracts on with its numerous prime brokers: ViacomCBS, Discovery, Tencent Music Entertainment Group, Vipshop Holdings, iQIYI Inc., Baidu, and GSX Techedu. (For how these … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 26, 2021 ~ On Wednesday, March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 to be a pandemic. From that point on, through March 23, the share price performance of the Standard & Poor’s 500 began to diverge dramatically from the share price performance of the mega banks on Wall Street. (See chart above.) From the start of the year in 2020, the S&P 500 fell a little more than 30 percent through March 23 while Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan Chase were down from 40 to 50 percent. Citigroup was down by a stunning 56 percent. (Citigroup had closed at $79.89 on December 31, 2019. By the close of trading on March 23, 2020, it was a $35.39 stock.) We compared these bank stocks to the S&P 500 because the companies that make up the S&P 500 index are … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 23, 2021 ~ According to the most recent 13F filings made with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the biggest banks on Wall Street are each sitting on hundreds of billions of dollars of stock positions – which we are now learning include highly leveraged stock positions for hedge funds called family offices. The purpose of the SEC’s 13F filing is to provide transparency to the public as to the beneficial owners of publicly-traded stocks. Institutions holding more than $100 million in assets are supposed to file the 13F. But as the public learned to its horror over the past month, a reckless family office hedge fund called Archegos Capital Management built up stock positions estimated at $100 billion by borrowing about $90 billion of that from a handful of the largest Wall Street banks. Archegos had been in operation since 2013, but had never … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 21, 2021 ~ On Tuesday, March 30, Senator Elizabeth Warren provided the following statement to CNBC regarding the blowup of the Archegos Capital Management hedge fund. “Archegos’ meltdown had all the makings of a dangerous situation — largely unregulated hedge fund, opaque derivatives, trading in private dark pools, high leverage, and a trader who wriggled out of the SEC’s enforcement.” All of the elements of that statement were well known at that point, except one. No one in mainstream media at that time, or since, was talking about Wall Street’s Dark Pools in connection with the implosion of Archegos. (Dark Pools are opaque, thinly regulated trading platforms that function much like private stock exchanges operating inside the biggest banks on Wall Street. Through some twisted reasoning by the SEC, the banks are even allowed to trade shares of their own bank’s stock.) Warren is … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 19, 2021 ~ We’ve been closely monitoring the Senate Banking and House Financial Services Committees for the past 15 years. We can think of no other time when the Committees issued a joint statement to announce they were hauling the most powerful men on Wall Street to testify, without offering a scintilla of information on the topic of the hearing. The press statement simply indicated that the Senate Banking Committee would hold its hearing on Wednesday, May 26 at 10 a.m. and the House Financial Services Committee would hold its hearing the following day on Thursday, May 27 at 12 noon. The announcement indicated that the following CEOs are scheduled to testify: Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase; David Solomon of Goldman Sachs; Jane Fraser of Citigroup; James Gorman of Morgan Stanley; Brian Moynihan of Bank of America; and Charles Scharf of Wells Fargo. The … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 14, 2021 ~ Bernard (Bernie) Madoff, mastermind of the largest Ponzi scheme in history, died this morning at the Federal Medical Center in Butner, North Carolina. He was serving a 150-year prison sentence. Madoff would have been 83 on April 29. A source told the Associated Press that Madoff had died of natural causes. Madoff ran his scheme undetected by regulators and law enforcement for more than four decades until he began to run out of money to meet client redemption requests during the financial crash of 2008 and confessed to his sons. The sons turned him in to the FBI. The case became a national scandal that tarnished both the reputation of the SEC as well as JPMorgan Chase. The public learned that Harry Markopolos, a financial expert, had been sending detailed written reports to the SEC for years (in 2000, 2001, 2005, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 13, 2021 ~ When Jerome Powell, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, appeared for an interview this past Sunday night on the CBS investigative program, 60 Minutes, he asserted complete ignorance of the amount of margin debt currently being used to inflate the stock market to one new historic high after another. The exchange between Powell and 60 Minutes host, Scott Pelley, went as follows: Pelley: “The securities industry has reported that $814 billion has been borrowed by people investing in the stock market, borrowed against their portfolios. That’s a 49 percent increase over last year. “And the last time it grew that much was in 2007, before the Great Recession. And the time it grew that much before that was 1999, just before the dot com implosion. At what point does the Federal Reserve start to rein in this speculative bidding up of … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 12, 2021 ~ The CBS “investigative” program, 60 Minutes, gave Wall Street a pass again last night. This time around 60 Minutes’ host Scott Pelley interviewed Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell. The Fed, and by extension, Powell, are in charge of supervising the holding companies of the mega banks on Wall Street, including those involved just two weeks ago in loaning out their balance sheets to the tune of tens of billions of dollars to a hedge fund run by a man previously charged with insider trading and stock price manipulations. The man is Sung Kook (Bill) Hwang and the hedge fund is Archegos Capital Management. (Fed-supervised mega banks loaning out their balance sheets to hedge funds for nefarious purposes was previously exposed in 2014 in an in-depth report and hearing by the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. The practice has clearly metastasized … Continue reading →