Search Results for: JPMorgan

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 12, 2020 ~ On May 30, with little mainstream media attention, four European academics published a report on how some of the largest Wall Street banks (all of whom received massive amounts of secret Federal Reserve bailout money during the 2007 to 2010 financial crash) were shamelessly gaming the system again. Rather than complying with the derivatives regulations imposed under the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation of 2010, the Wall Street mega banks had simply moved much of their interest rate derivatives trading to their foreign subsidiaries that fall outside of U.S. regulatory reach. This is known as regulatory arbitrage: seeking the most lightly regulated jurisdiction to ply your dangerous trading activity. (Think JPMorgan’s London Whale fiasco.) The European academics are Pauline Gandré, Mike Mariathasan, Ouarda Merrouche and Steven Ongena. The paper is titled: “Regulatory Arbitrage and the G20’s Global Derivatives Market Reform.” The researchers discovered … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 11, 2020 ~ On January 31 of this year, researchers for the Federal Reserve released a study that showed that the largest banks operating in the U.S. have been gaming their stress test results by intentionally dropping their exposure to over-the-counter derivatives in the fourth quarter. The fourth quarter data is the information used by the Federal Reserve to determine surcharges on capital for Global Systemically Important Banks, or G-SIBs. The report, “How Do U.S. Global Systemically Important Banks Lower Their Capital Surcharges?,” was written by Jared Berry, Akber Khan, and Marcelo Rezende. We decided to evaluate this claim for ourselves, using the quarterly derivative reports provided by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the regulator of national banks. The data was appalling. The largest Wall Street banks not only dropped their level of derivatives by trillions of dollars in the fourth … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 4, 2020 ~ David Sirota has read the collective mind of progressives when it comes to Presidential candidate Joe Biden. On August 1 Sirota Tweeted: “Give us an anti-Wall Street Treasury Secretary and AG [Attorney General], and you can have your sh*tty VP…On the other hand, give us a sh*tty Treasury Secretary and AG and try to paper it over with a good VP, and you’ve basically given everyone the big middle finger.” There is growing concern about Biden among progressives because he has made the decidedly ill-advised move of using the infamous Larry Summers as an advisor. Summers is the man who played an outsized role in the creation of Frankenbanks on Wall Street in 1999 with his push to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act and the deregulation of derivatives in 2000 as Treasury Secretary in the Clinton administration. Carrying on the proud … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 29, 2020 ~ The very reliable GDPNow forecasting model provided by researchers at the Atlanta Fed was just updated this morning and currently predicts that Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in the United States contracted by a jaw-dropping -32.1 percent on a seasonally-adjusted, annualized rate in the second quarter. The public will get the official number from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) at the U.S. Department of Commerce at 8:30 a.m. tomorrow morning.  It’s expected that the second quarter GDP number will be the largest decline since quarterly GDP records began being compiled by the BEA in 1947. It is also expected that the number will be exponentially worse than any quarter during the Great Recession of 2007 to 2009. As the chart above indicates, after the precipitous economic declines in April and May, resulting from the effects of business closures and layoffs … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 28, 2020 ~ Last Friday, the New York Times officially embarked on what we have been expecting – an attempt to rewrite the current, ongoing Wall Street bank bailout. We were so certain that an alternative reality was going to emerge at the Times, that we had the foresight to create an archive of Wall Street On Parade articles (122 so far) that document every major bailout step the Fed has taken since September 17, 2019 – five months before the first COVID-19 death was reported in the United States. One of our articles, published on January 6, 2020, shows that before the first COVID-19 case had even been reported in the U.S., the Fed had pumped more than $6 trillion cumulatively into the trading units of the largest Wall Street banks — not hedge funds, that the Times now attempts to blame … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 27, 2020 ~ As Americans wake up each day to the new dystopian normal and reports of another corporate or Wall Street bailout (no doubt at the urging of the corporate lobbyists that have embedded themselves in the Trump administration), there is widespread agreement that big corporations have too much power and control in America. America was founded on blowback to the tyrannical restraints on average Americans’ lives by King George III. Now we have multinational corporations pushing us around while bleeding the U.S. Treasury, mushrooming the national debt, and thus creating an even greater dystopian threat to our children’s generation who will inherit that crippling debt pile. Against this backdrop comes a very welcome new book from David Dayen: Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power. Dayen is Executive Editor of American Prospect and one of the most admired and prolific … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 24, 2020 ~ On June 24 Bloomberg News reporters Lisa Lee and Shahien Nasiripour dumped a bucket of cold water on Fed Chairman Jerome Powell’s official narrative that the mega Wall Street banks are “well capitalized” and a “source of strength” in the pandemic. The Federal Reserve, and particularly the New York Fed which wore blinders leading up to Citigroup’s blow up in 2008, are walking a delicate tight rope in reassuring the public that all is well under their watch versus what any first year accounting major can see is happening on the mega banks’ balance sheets. The Bloomberg News article revealed the following about the dividends and stock buybacks at Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, and Wells Fargo: “From the start of 2017 through March, the four banks cumulatively returned about $1.26 to shareholders for every $1 they reported in net … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 22, 2020 ~ When it comes to the crime families of New York, they literally do catch and kill people who can’t be trusted to keep the secrets of their criminal operations. When it comes to the superrich in New York, they’re more inclined to “catch and kill” the story, rather than the accuser. (Jeffrey Epstein’s untimely death last year may be an exception.) On October 11, 2017, Jim Rutenberg, writing for the New York Times about the aiders and abettors to Harvey Weinstein’s sexual assaults, explained the catch and kill strategy as follows: “There is also another dynamic at play, involving something akin to a protection racket. This is the network of aggressive public relations flacks and lawyers who guard the secrets of those who employ them and keep their misdeeds out of public view.” Keeping the secrets out of public view … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 21, 2020 ~ Today marks the 10th Anniversary of the enactment of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, named after its two sponsors, former Senator Christopher Dodd (D-CT) and former Congressman Barney Frank (D-MA). The massive piece of legislation was signed into law on July 21, 2010 by President Barack Obama at a time when Democrats controlled both houses of Congress – meaning there was no excuse not to put tough Wall Street reform legislation in place. While the progressive wing of the Democrats was demanding the restoration of the Glass-Steagall Act, which would have completely separated the federally-insured, deposit-taking banks from the Wall Street casino (the trading firms known as investment banks and broker-dealers), the Wall Street wing of the Democrats didn’t want to upset their big political campaign donors on Wall Street. The result was that the Wall … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 16, 2020 ~ It’s no wonder that American citizens are receiving just a tiny snippet of critical news from mainstream media. Federal regulators have set a new low in withholding documents that the public and the media are entitled to under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). These censored documents could inform us on what’s really driving policy decisions in Washington. Take our latest FOIA brush with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Foreign central banks and sovereign wealth funds are required under law to report their publicly-traded U.S. stock positions no later than 45 days after the end of each calendar quarter. This is done on Form 13F, which is filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, if those stock holdings reach $100 million or more. The central bank of Israel, known simply as the Bank of Israel, has not been doing … Continue reading →