Search Results for: Jamie Dimon

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 13, 2017 Jamie Dimon became Chief Executive Officer of JPMorgan Chase on December 31, 2005. An inordinate amount of frauds have been perpetrated inside his bank since that time, none of which the eagle-eyed Dimon spotted. But Dimon says he knows a fraud when he sees one outside of his bank. Yesterday, he took on the cryptocurrency known as Bitcoin, calling it a fraud. At a banking conference on Tuesday, Dimon said that “Bitcoin will eventually blow up. It’s a fraud. It’s worse than tulip bulbs and won’t end well.” We’re not saying Dimon is wrong about Bitcoin. In fact, more than three years ago Wall Street On Parade compared Bitcoin to the tulip bulb bubble and explained in crystal clear terms how it differs from a real currency, such as the U.S. dollar. But we are saying that Dimon’s super sleuth nose … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 4, 2016 Yesterday, building on the momentum afforded her by a series of articles in the New York Times, Hillary Clinton asked the audience at a campaign stop in Toledo, Ohio: “What kind of genius loses a billion dollars in one year.” Clinton was referring to the New York Times revelation on Sunday that Donald Trump’s 1995 tax return showed a loss of $916 million. (See video clip below.) If Hillary really wants to know what kind of genius can lose a billion dollars in one year or $6.2 billion in the case of traders at JPMorgan Chase, she should ask the bank’s CEO Jamie Dimon. The $6.2 billion London Whale loss at JPMorgan Chase is far more scintillating a feat since it involved wild derivative gambles in London in 2012 using the taxpayer-backstopped, insured savings deposits at the largest bank in the U.S. The … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 22, 2016 A mere three months after JPMorgan Chase and three of its competitors (Citicorp, Barclays and the Royal Bank of Scotland) pleaded guilty to a felony charge of conspiring to rig foreign currency trading and paid criminal fines totaling over $2.5 billion, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon, began meeting in secret with his competitors in the asset management field. On February 1 of this year, the Financial Times reported that “secret summits” had been held beginning in August 2015 between “asset management bosses” including Jamie Dimon, Abby Johnson of Fidelity, Larry Fink of BlackRock, and Tim Armour of Capital Group. The article went on to report that Dimon and Warren Buffett had convened the sessions at JPMorgan’s headquarters in New York to discuss “a statement of best practice on corporate governance.” Secret meetings between competitors, regardless of what they are … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 3, 2016  JPMorgan Chase’s perpetually controversial Chairman and CEO, Jamie Dimon, was in Bournemouth, Dorset on the south coast of England this morning to reassure his workers that he wasn’t there to tell them how to vote in the upcoming June 23 referendum on whether Britain should leave the European Union (the so-called “Brexit” or British Exit vote). He then proceeded to tell the sober-faced workers that if they voted for Brexit, he might axe upwards of 4,000 jobs across their country. Dimon first stated to the crowd of workers:  “I cannot and will not tell the British people how they should vote in this….” A few minutes later, he qualified that by telling the workers how many jobs he might have to cut if Brexit happened: “I don’t know if it means 1,000 jobs, 2,000 jobs, it could be as many as … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 17, 2016  Yesterday we read two articles: one made our blood boil, the other broke our hearts. Let’s start with the first. Bloomberg News seems to be on a roll with Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase. First it put him on the cover of its relaunched Bloomberg Markets magazine and then followed up with a Bloomberg TV promotion for the article, suggesting that Jamie Dimon is all about the customer – a concept so divergent from the facts on the ground that we devoted a column to it in March. Neither the article nor the TV promotion mentioned the fact that under Dimon’s leadership, the bank was been charged with three criminal felony counts between 2014 and 2015 for decidedly non-customer friendly behavior while simultaneously rewarding Dimon with obscene pay. Yesterday, former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, whose net … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 13, 2016 Donald Trump’s brash, unfiltered mouth, which he is leveraging to stay in the media spotlight 24/7, may be taking root in broader society. On Wednesday, Jamie Dimon, the Chairman and CEO of the largest bank in the U.S., with buttoned-down, old money clients, called a fellow banker a “jerk” during an on-air conversation at CNBC. Dimon’s school boy rhetoric was directed at Camden Fine, President and CEO of the Independent Community Bankers Association, who has accused Dimon of attempting to “link the interests of megabanks to community banks in order to mitigate the political heat” that is on the Wall Street behemoths. After Dimon’s “jerk” insult on CNBC, Fine said in a statement to CNBC that Dimon’s remarks “reflect Wall Street’s inability to take responsibility for the economic crisis it caused and the taxpayer-funded guarantee against failure it continues to enjoy.” … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 2, 2016 Two interesting things happened this week in Jamie Dimon’s world: two gutsy attorneys, Helen Davis Chaitman and Lance Gotthoffer, published a book comparing JPMorgan Chase to the Gambino crime family, explaining how the bank could and should be prosecuted under RICO statutes for serial frauds against the investing public. Taking a diametrically different tack, Bloomberg Markets magazine editor, Joel Weber, fawned over Dimon in a Bloomberg TV interview, repeatedly asserting that Jamie Dimon is all about the customer. This Bloomberg video is so hilarious we had to watch it several times to make sure it wasn’t satire.  As Weber makes his case that Dimon is all about the customer, his Bloomberg colleague, Stephanie Ruhle, is having none of it, reminding the obviously star-struck Weber that the big banks are hated in this country for good reason. Instead of acknowledging the serial frauds … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 3, 2015  The General Accountability Office (GAO) released a sobering study yesterday that looks at how much 55-64 year olds have been able to set aside for retirement. The short answer is: excruciatingly too little. Why that is happening can best be summed up by a headline out this morning at Bloomberg News: Jamie Dimon Becomes Billionaire Ushering in Era of the Megabank. The GAO study found the following: Approximately 55 percent of households age 55-64 in America have less than $25,000 in retirement savings, including 41 percent who have zero. Most of the households in this age group have some other resources or benefits from a Defined Benefit plan, but 27 percent of this age group have neither retirement savings nor a Defined Benefit plan. For the 59 percent of households age 55-64 with some retirement savings, the GAO study estimates that … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 21, 2015 After more than 200 years of operation, yesterday JPMorgan Chase became an admitted felon. That action for foreign currency rigging came less than two years after the bank was charged with two felony counts and given a deferred prosecution agreement for aiding and abetting Bernie Madoff in the largest Ponzi fraud in history. The felony counts came amid three years of non-stop charges against JPMorgan Chase for unthinkable frauds: from rigging electric markets to ripping off veterans to charging credit card customers for fictitious credit monitoring and manipulating the Libor interest rate benchmark. Against this backdrop of a serial crime spree on the part of employees on multiple continents and coast to coast in the United States, JPMorgan released a statement yesterday regarding the bank pleading guilty to a felony charge for engaging in the rigging of foreign currency trading, calling … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 1, 2015 Barron’s should have published its gushing cover story on Jamie Dimon’s stewardship of JPMorgan today – as an April Fool’s joke. The nation’s largest bank is operating under a deferred prosecution agreement until at least next January for two felony counts it received in the Madoff swindle, the largest Ponzi scheme in history.  It’s under a current criminal investigation over potential rigging of the foreign exchange markets with the New York Times reporting on February 10 that federal prosecutors had informed JPMorgan and three other banks “that they must enter guilty pleas to settle the cases.” Barron’s sister publication, the Wall Street Journal, reported on February 24 that JPMorgan is one of the 10 banks being investigated by the U.S. Justice Department for potential rigging of gold and other precious metals. Against that backdrop, Barron’s comes up with this: JPMorgan is … Continue reading →