Search Results for: JPMorgan

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 13, 2021 ~ On January 7, Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, the Ranking Member of the Senate Banking Committee, released a statement indicating that he is to become the new Chair of that Committee. The announcement came as the Democrats are set to take control of the full Senate from Republicans as a result of the Georgia runoff. Yesterday, Brown went a step further and held a conversation with major media outlets to discuss the agenda he will set as the new Chair of Senate Banking. The formal appointment process making Brown the official Chair has yet to occur, thus Brown is the “presumed” Chair. We get the feeling that Senator Brown took the very wise and preemptive step of getting mainstream media to announce his Chairmanship yesterday because he clearly understood that Wall Street’s mega banks would be fighting behind the scenes … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 12, 2021 ~ Five-count felon JPMorgan Chase is shocked – shocked! – that corporate financing of “the people’s House” has led to corruption and instability in Washington. The Board of Directors of JPMorgan Chase obviously did not see money as a corrupting influence because it has boosted the pay of its Chairman and CEO, Jamie Dimon, to $31.5 million annually despite the fact that Dimon sat at the helm of this bank through its unprecedented five felony counts in a span of six years. The bank admitted to all five counts and got deferred prosecution agreements every single time from the U.S. Department of Justice. Not one of the myriad federal regulators of this bank demanded that Dimon step down as unfit to oversee a bank holding $2 trillion in depositors’ life savings as this six-year crime spree went unchecked. Now JPMorgan Chase, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 31, 2020 ~ Happy New Year’s Eve 2020 and welcome to a correctly skeptical America when it comes to Wall Street. Despite the President of the United States using his bully pulpit for the past four years to tell Americans how great the stock market is (see here, here and here, for example) Gallup polling shows that U.S. adults have consistently favored real estate as the better long-term investment over stocks. (See chart above.) In fact, in the April 1-14 poll that Gallup conducted this year, stocks reached their lowest score versus real estate since 2012. In the spring poll, which followed the sharp stock market selloff in March, 35 percent of adults rated real estate the better long-term investment versus 21 percent who voted for stocks. The perception that Wall Street is a rigged arena for the benefit of the one percent … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 29, 2020 ~ As Senator Bernie Sanders advocates for $2,000 pandemic relief checks for struggling Americans, Larry Summers is challenging the premise of $2,000 checks using ginned-up statistics that were dubiously published by Bloomberg News on Sunday. Larry Summers stepped into Robert Rubin’s post as Treasury Secretary under President Bill Clinton after Rubin left to make $15 million a year serving on Citigroup’s board. Citigroup was the Frankenbank that both Summers and Rubin made possible by advocating for the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act. That seminal piece of legislation from 1933 had successfully banned the combination of deposit-taking banks with Wall Street’s casino trading houses for 66 years until these two men and their ilk got Clinton to sign its repeal in 1999. At the November 12, 1999 signing ceremony for the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, the legislation that repealed the Glass-Steagall Act, Summers said … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 28, 2020 ~ Following the financial crisis of 2007 to 2010, President Obama signed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act into law on July 21, 2010. At the time, Democrats controlled both houses of Congress and could have put teeth into the law, had they chosen to do so. The Act did not reform Wall Street nor did it protect American consumers from the looting practices of the Wall Street banks. Dodd-Frank allowed Wall Street’s private justice system to continue, where both customers and employees must waive their rights to bring claims in a court of law; it allowed Wall Street banks to continue using depositors’ money to make wild gambles in derivatives; it permitted Wall Street banks to continue buying triple-A credit ratings from the ratings agencies for dodgy securitized products; it allowed the very same banks that blew … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 24, 2020 ~ Merry Christmas Eve 2020 and welcome to a rerun of the roaring 20s, complete with one-termer President Herbert Hoover in the White House, Wall Street running wild with unchecked corruption, and unprecedented income inequality. On Saturday, Bloomberg News attempted to outline the key components of markets gone bonkers “in this year of death, disease and economic calamity,” writing that the “Mania is laid bare in IPO surge, options boom and crypto fever.” In fairness, the nine reporters who worked on the story, none of whom received a byline but are noted at the bottom of the article, correctly compiled the observable earmarks of this bubble market. But they failed to dig into the dark underbelly of how we got here. Let’s start with the compromised Wall Street regulators in Washington. The Chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Jay Clayton, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 11, 2020 ~ Few Americans are aware that the central bank of the United States, the Federal Reserve, has its own trading desk in New York that interacts every business day with the trading desks of the giant Wall Street banks. When Americans think of massive trading operations, names like JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, UBS and Citigroup come to mind. But if we measure trading desks by the value of their portfolio holdings, these global banks are pikers compared to the Fed’s trading desk, operated by one of its 12 private regional banks, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (New York Fed). Using the New York Fed’s own annual reports to obtain the data, we can report that the New York Fed’s Trading Desk has grown from $576 billion in holdings of domestic securities as of December 31, 2008 (at the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 10, 2020 ~ If you suffer from chronic nightmares, experience migraine headaches from stress, or have anger management issues when confronted with abject stupidity, you probably want to avoid looking at the above graph that the Securities and Exchange Commission has created to show how one of the most critical financial markets in the United States functions. Or perhaps we should say, why it’s incapable of functioning when it’s most needed. The market is Wall Street’s Short-Term Funding Market which includes its integral repurchase agreement (repo) market. The repo market blew up in 2008 during the last financial crisis and required a Fed bailout. It blew up again on September 17, 2019 for reasons that have yet to be credibly explained and required at least $9 trillion in cumulative emergency loans from the Federal Reserve over the next six months. As we reported … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 8, 2020 ~ There has been a lot of bullish talk about the Dow Jones Industrial Average reaching 30,000 for the first time in history. But the underpinnings of the bellwether Dow index look a lot less rosy. Replacing three of the Dow Jones Industrial Average stocks on August 31 looked like a desperate move by S&P Dow Jones Indices, the folks that oversee that stock index. One of the stocks replaced, Exxon Mobil, had been a Dow component for 92 years, joining the Dow in 1928 under the name Standard Oil of New Jersey. Exxon was replaced with Salesforce, a company that only went public in 2004. Salesforce describes itself as a “customer relationship management platform,” explaining that “We help your marketing, sales, commerce, service and IT teams work as one from anywhere — so you can keep your customers happy everywhere.” … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 24, 2020 ~ Late yesterday afternoon, while the stock market was still open, three reporters at the Wall Street Journal penned an article with this opening statement: “President-elect Joe Biden plans to nominate former Federal Reserve Chairwoman Janet Yellen, an economist at the forefront of policy-making for three decades, to become the next Treasury secretary, according to people familiar with the decision.” Within the next half hour, every major newswire and many of the largest newspapers in the U.S. were repeating the Journal’s story. The Journal noted that the Biden camp wasn’t expected to make a “formal announcement” of the Yellen nomination until November 30. Nonetheless, the Journal decided it had the self-anointed right to stand in for the Biden transition team and make the announcement a week ahead of time. To induce a nice big stock market rally on the news (the … Continue reading →