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Recent Posts
- Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” Is a Grotesque Giveaway to Fossil Fuel Billionaires While Adding $3.3 Trillion to Nation’s Debt
- Senator Chris Murphy Charges that Trump “Has Opened a Channel for Bribery”
- Congressman Casten: Trump’s Assault on the Rule of Law Is Causing Capital Flight Out of U.S. by Foreign Investors
- Trump’s Approval Rating Drops to 80-Year Low; IMF Says U.S. Tariffs Now Exceed the Highs During the Great Depression
- Nasdaq Has Lost More than 3,000 Points Since Trump’s First Full Day in Office in 2025; the Pain Has Barely Begun
- The Bond Crisis Last Week Was a Global No-Confidence Vote in U. S. President Donald Trump
- Trump’s Tariff Plan Guts $5 Trillion in Stock Value in Two Days; Senator Warren Calls for Emergency Action Before Markets Open on Monday
- Trump’s Attacks on Big Law, Universities, and the Media Have a Common Goal: Silence Dissent Against Authoritarian Rule
- Trump Administration Gives All Clear to Laundering Money through Shell Companies and Bribing Foreign Officials
- Four Megabanks on Wall Street Hold $3.2 Trillion in Uninsured Deposits – Which May Explain Senator Schumer’s Pivot to the GOP to Stop a Government Shutdown
- Here’s What Came Crashing Down Yesterday for Trump’s “Genius” Guy, Elon Musk: Tesla Stock, Access to Twitter (X), His Years of Secret Calls with Putin
- After Banning the Associated Press, Trump Is Now Targeting Specific Journalists That He Wants to See Fired
- Closely Watched Atlanta Fed Model Predicts Negative U.S. Growth in First Quarter
- Trump’s Gangster Diplomacy Makes Front Page Headlines Around the Globe
- Who Benefits Alongside Elon Musk If He Succeeds in Killing the CFPB: the Megabanks on Wall Street that Underwrite His Tesla Stock Offerings
- In Trump 1.0, the State Department Used Taxpayer Money to Publish a Book Elevating Elon Musk to a Superhero; It Was Funded by USAID, the Agency Musk Wants to Quickly Shut Down
- News Host Joy Reid Raises Threat of Trump Selling U.S. to Putin; Ten Days Later Her Show Is Cancelled
- Elon Musk’s DOGE Appears to Be Violating a Court Order; It Has Taken Down Hundreds of YouTube Videos that Educate Americans on How to Avoid Being Swindled
- Barron’s Releases Audio of Jamie Dimon Cursing Out His Workers at a Town Hall, as Dimon Plans to Dump Another One Million JPM Shares
- There’s One Federal Investigative Agency that Neither Trump nor Elon Musk Can Touch: It Just Opened an Investigation into DOGE
- Elon Musk’s Companies Were Under Investigation by Five Inspectors General When the Trump Administration Fired Them and Made Musk the Investigator
- Donald Trump Gives the Greenlight to Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase to Return to Bribing Foreign Officials
- After Tech Geeks Built a Back Door to Loot Billions from FTX, Republicans Refuse to Investigate What Elon Musk’s Tech-Squad Did Inside the U.S. Treasury’s Payment System
- Former Prosecutor, Now U.S. Senator, Informs Tesla That CEO Musk May Be Violating Federal Law and to “Preserve All Records”
- Trump’s Hedge Fund Guy Is Now Overseeing the U.S. Treasury, IRS, OCC, U.S. Mint, FinCEN, F-SOC, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
- As Elon Musk Begins Shutting Down Payments to Federal Contractors, a Strange Money Trail Emerges to His Operatives Inside the U.S. Treasury’s Payment System
- JPMorgan Chase Charged by Yet Another Internal Whistleblower with Cooking the Books
- We Asked Google’s AI Search Model, Gemini, Questions About the Fed and Wall Street Megabanks: It Got the Answers Dead Wrong
- With Trump and Melania’s Crypto Coins Likely to Raise Legal Challenges, Why Didn’t Trump Fire the SEC’s Inspector General in His Purge of IGs?
- Fossil Fuel Industry Could End Up Paying Tens of Billions for LA Wildfires and Deceiving the Public on Climate Change for Decades
- It’s Being Called the Biggest Grift by a President in U.S. History: Trump and First Lady Launch their Own Crypto Coins
- Trump Plans to Install a Fracking CEO to Head the Energy Department and Declare a National Emergency on Energy to Gain Vast Powers
- Fossil Fuel Money Played a Role in the Los Angeles Fires and the Push to Install Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense
- When It Comes to Wealth Retention in Retirement, Concrete May Be the New Gold
- Wall Street Watchdog Warns “Clock Is Ticking on a Coming Catastrophic Financial Crash”
- Wall Street Is Sending the Same Message to Americans on Fossil Fuel Financing that It Sent on Cigarettes: Drop Dead
- In a Six-Week Span, this Dark Pool with a Curious Past Traded 3.7 Billion Shares
- Wall Street’s Lobby Firm Hired Eugene Scalia of Gibson Dunn to Sue the Fed for Jamie Dimon
- Postmaster General Louis DeJoy Made $561,051 in Compensation in 2024, as Mail Costs Spiked and Delivery Deteriorated
- Fed Chair Jay Powell Sends a Bold Message to Trump and Tanks the Dow by 1123 Points
- The Head of Fixed Income at T. Rowe Price Makes the Scary Case for the 10-Year Treasury to Spike to 6 Percent
- $663 Billion in Cash Assets Have Gone Poof at the Largest U.S. Banks
- Donald Trump to Ring Bell at New York Stock Exchange Today as Hit List Posters Appear in Manhattan Targeting Wall Street CEOs
- Trump Has a Slush Fund to Prop Up the Dollar – Will He Use It to Prop Up Bitcoin Instead?
- A CEO Assassination; a Billionaire Heiress/NYPD Commissioner; a Secret Wall Street Spy Center – Here’s How They’re Connected
- Despite More than 1600 Tech Scientists Signing a Letter Calling Crypto a Sham, Trump Names a Crypto Cheerleader for SEC Chair
- The Fed Rings a Warning Bell: Hedge Funds and Life Insurers Are Reporting Historic Leverage
- Trump’s Nominee for FBI Director, Kash Patel, Has Businesses Financially Intertwined with Trump
- Donald Trump Is at Risk of Getting Named in a Fossil Fuels Conspiracy Lawsuit
- Trump Is Having Difficulty Getting a Lawyer to Accept the Nomination for SEC Chair: Here’s Why
Search Results for: Epstein
French Fears Ignite Selloff in U.S. Megabanks and Foreign Peers

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 12, 2024 ~ Yesterday, The Hill published an OpEd by the man who, literally, wrote the book on the megabanks: Arthur E. Wilmarth, Jr., Professor Emeritus of Law at George Washington University Law School. Wilmarth raised critical points on why these megabanks continue to pose unacceptable levels of risk to U.S. financial stability and need to dramatically boost their equity capital – notwithstanding their fierce lobbying and propaganda battle to overturn the proposed new capital rules by bank regulators. The forces of the universe seemed to align with Wilmarth’s gutsy OpEd yesterday. In a display of just how dangerously interconnected with derivatives these megabanks remain, their share prices tanked in tandem yesterday despite the S&P 500 and Nasdaq indexes each setting a new record high. The contagion among the megabanks spread after French President Emmanuel Macron called snap parliamentary elections for June 30 and … Continue reading
A Former Exec at Citibank Raises Alarm Bells in Federal Court Over Failed Risk Controls Inside the Bank

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 5, 2024 ~ Kathleen Martin, a former Managing Director at Citigroup’s federally-insured bank, Citibank N.A., has sued the bank and her former boss, Anand Selva, in federal court in Manhattan. According to Martin’s lawsuit, she was hired for the express purpose of making sure that Citibank complied with a Consent Order from a federal banking regulator. Instead, Martin alleges, she was fired in retaliation for refusing to file false information with that regulator. The first thing you need to know about Citigroup/Citibank is that it is a recidivist megabank – serially charged for wrongdoing by its regulators while also being perpetually bailed out by the Fed. This particular saga of sticking its finger in the eye of its regulator began on October 7, 2020 when the federal regulator of national banks, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), slapped a $400 … Continue reading
Freakonomics and Frankenbanks: JPMorgan Chase Sucked Up 18 Percent of All Profits of 4,568 FDIC-Insured Banks in the First Quarter

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 3, 2024 ~ Last Wednesday, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) released its quarterly banking profile for the quarter ending March 31, 2024. A key piece of data released at that time was the net income (net profits) for all 4,568 FDIC-insured banks in the United States. That tally came in at $64.2 billion. We decided to see just how concentrated those profits have become at a handful of behemoth banks on Wall Street – which also dangerously operate as trading casinos. We had no problem knowing where to start. We picked the largest and riskiest bank in the United States, JPMorgan Chase. The publicly-traded JPMorgan Chase & Co., which includes its sprawling trading operations around the globe as well as the FDIC-insured bank, had previously reported net income for the first quarter of $13.4 billion. A handy page at the FDIC, using the … Continue reading
Academic Study Provides Hard Numbers to the Sick, Revolving Door Culture at Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Citigroup

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 30, 2024 ~ On January 18, 2019 the Cambridge University Press published a stunning research paper from the Journal of Institutional Economics. The paper provides the hard numbers to support the thesis that federal banking and securities regulators have arrived at a deep understanding and acceptance that the more connections they acquire while working in government and the more prominent their position becomes – the fatter their future paycheck will be once they make the leap to a megabank on Wall Street. The authors call what the “public servants” are selling to their prospective Wall Street employers “bureaucratic capital.” The authors then provide the hard data in the chart below, showing that Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Citigroup are light years ahead of their peers in monetizing public service to fatten their own bottom lines and create an influence network. (The structure of that influence … Continue reading
After Weeks of Howling by MAGA Republicans for the Chair of the FDIC “to Resign,” a Democrat Delivers the Decisive Stab in the Back

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 21, 2024 ~ Yesterday, at 10:08 a.m., Senator Sherrod Brown, a Democrat from Ohio and the Chair of the Senate Banking Committee, sent out a shocking emailed statement to the press indicating that Brown was “calling on the President to immediately nominate a new Chair who can lead the FDIC at this challenging time and for the Senate to act on that nomination without delay.” By 6:27 p.m. the Associated Press was reporting that Martin Gruenberg would step down as Chair of the FDIC and President Joe Biden would announce his nomination to replace him “soon.” The Brown statement was a gut punch to every engaged American and journalist who actually understands what’s at stake here. It was not only a back stab to Gruenberg, it was a back stab to Brown’s highly-respected colleague on the Senate Banking Committee, Senator Elizabeth Warren, who has … Continue reading
Billionaire-Owned Media Has Gone Full Throttle to Save Fellow Billionaire, Jamie Dimon

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 22, 2024 ~ The Washington Post Editorial Board appears to have sipped the same kool aid as Bloomberg News. As we’ve frequently reported in the past, Bloomberg News has spent the better part of the last decade attempting to brainwash the public into believing that the head of JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon, is a respected statesman of Wall Street. (See here, here, and here.) In reality, JPMorgan Chase has admitted to an unprecedented five criminal felony counts with Dimon at the helm and paid fines in the tens of billions of dollars for an additional crime wave that rivals an organized crime family. Billionaire Michael Bloomberg, the former Mayor of New York, is the majority owner of Bloomberg LP, the owner of Bloomberg News. In 2016, Michael Bloomberg even co-authored an opinion piece with Dimon. The same year, the New York Post reported that JPMorgan Chase was … Continue reading
Almost 10,000 U.S. Banks Have Disappeared Since 1985, Leaving 4 Mega Banks Controlling 39 Percent of Bank Assets

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 26, 2024 ~ According to Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) data, there were 14,417 federally-insured banking institutions in the U.S. in 1985. As of December 31, 2023, the FDIC reports there are only 4,587 remaining. The vast majority of the 9,830 banks that have disappeared since 1985 did not fail – they were merged with other banks. Today, just four banks control $9.3 trillion in consolidated bank assets or 39 percent of all bank assets. Those four banks are JPMorgan Chase with $3.395 trillion in consolidated assets; Bank of America with $2.540 trillion; Wells Fargo with $1.7 trillion; and Citigroup’s Citibank with $1.685 trillion. (All asset figures are as of December 31, 2023 and come from the Federal Reserve’s statistical release of the largest banks.) The political clout of these mega banks is such that one of them, JPMorgan Chase, has been allowed to commit … Continue reading
JPMorgan’s Federally-Insured Bank Is Fined $348 Million for Losing Track of “Billions” of Trades

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 18, 2024 ~ On Thursday of last week, two of JPMorgan Chase Bank’s federal regulators fined the riskiest bank in the United States $348 million dollars for engaging in “unsafe and unsound banking practices” for failing to supervise “billions” of trades on at least 30 global trading venues. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) fined JPMorgan Chase Bank $250 million while the Federal Reserve fined the bank $98.2 million. The OCC said the misconduct occurred since at least 2019. The Fed said the bank had engaged in the misconduct over the span of nine years, from 2014 to 2023. The key outrage embedded in these charges – that mainstream media failed to point out in its coverage last week – is that this “trading” activity did not occur at the registered brokerage firm of JPMorgan, which has properly licensed traders and trading … Continue reading
Jamie Dimon and Nine of His Top Executives at JPMorgan Chase Have Dumped Over $150 Million of their JPMorgan Stock in Last Two Months

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 26, 2024 ~ According to Form 4 filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission by corporate insiders, ten of the key executives at the largest bank in the United States, JPMorgan Chase, have dumped more than $150 million in common stock in the bank this year. The sales come as the bank’s stock has been hitting all time highs while the scandals at the bank are also hitting unprecedented levels. The largest seller by far was the Chairman and CEO of the bank, Jamie Dimon. According to his Form 4, on February 22 of this year, Dimon sold 737,420 shares of the bank’s common stock for $135 million. The newly promoted Troy Rohrbaugh, who is now Co-CEO of JPMorgan Chase’s Commercial and Investment Bank (CIB), sold 75,000 shares on February 22 of this year for $13.7 million. Stacey Friedman, General Counsel at the bank, sold … Continue reading
JPMorgan Says Its “Trading Venues” Are Under Investigation While It’s Still on Probation for Prior Trading Crimes

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 20, 2024 ~ Last Friday, ahead of a three-day weekend when bad news could be expected to evaporate into the ether by the next news cycle, JPMorgan Chase dropped a bombshell in its 10-K (annual report) filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The bank, which has admitted to an unprecedented five criminal felony counts since 2014, said its “trading venues” were under investigation by three unnamed regulatory bodies. This is a very serious matter for this particular bank because three of its prior felony counts involved rigging markets. The bank admitted to rigging foreign exchange markets in 2015 and to rigging, for more than eight years, the precious metals and U.S. Treasury markets in an agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice in September 2020. Two of the precious metals traders involved in the 2020 case, Gregg Smith and Michael Nowak, are sitting in … Continue reading