Search Results for: Jamie Dimon

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 →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 12, 2014 Sometimes we have to pinch ourselves to make sure we are not sleepwalking in a Dickensian dream. Earlier this week we heard Senator Elizabeth Warren tell a Senate Banking session how JPMorgan’s CEO, Jamie Dimon, got a $8.5 million raise after craftily negotiating away all of the bank’s crimes with the payment of billions in shareholders’ money. (Two of those crimes, by the way, were felony counts for aiding and abetting Bernie Madoff in his Ponzi scheme – also craftily settled under a deferred prosecution agreement with the Justice Department, which effectively puts the bank on probation for two years.) Last night, the Wall Street Journal informed the public that, apparently, none of this criminal activity at JPMorgan has dulled President Obama’s fondness for its CEO Jamie Dimon, who has recently been undergoing treatments for throat cancer.  The Journal reported: “During … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 10, 2014 Sparks were flying yesterday in what is typically a snooze-worthy Senate session. It felt like alien body snatchers had decided to remove the zombies and return the real U.S. Senators to their chairs on the Senate Banking Committee. Senators, right and left, asked tough, probing questions of the nation’s banking regulators, leaving many squirming in their chairs. The session was so unusual that Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat from Massachusetts, and Senator Richard Shelby, a Republican from Alabama, closed out the session in complete agreement that there is something seriously broken about the justice system in America. Senator Warren told the hearing that in the past year, three of the nation’s largest banks — JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and Bank of America — have admitted breaking the law and settled the claims for $35 billion. The Senator continued: “As Judge Rakoff of … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: April 22, 2014 There is now overwhelming evidence that Wall Street firms have entered a race to the bottom in high-tech trading wars. To grab the best programming talent, Wall Street firms are paying top dollar for the best and brightest coders and developers and potentially sapping the ability of other U.S. industries – those that make real products – to compete. Just this month, Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan, told the firm’s shareholders in his annual letter that JPMorgan employs “nearly 30,000 programmers, application developers and information technology employees who keep our 7,200 applications, 32 data centers, 58,000 servers, 300,000 desk-tops and global network operating smoothly for all our clients.” According to Anish Bhimani, Chief Information Risk Officer at JPMorgan Chase, in an interview published at the Information Networking Institute (INI) at Carnegie Mellon, JPMorgan has “more software developers than Google, and more technologists than Microsoft…we get … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: April 15, 2014 In the past two years, two of the most senior, long-tenured and talented women at JPMorgan, Ina Drew and Blythe Masters, have bid adieu to the bank and its CEO, Jamie Dimon, under less than ideal circumstances. Questions are now emerging as to whether Dimon required that these senior supervisors hold proper industry licenses for the work they performed for the bank. Ina Drew, the former head of the Chief Investment Office, who supervised the traders responsible for losing $6.2 billion of the bank’s deposits in exotic derivatives trading in London, resigned from the firm over that firestorm on May 14, 2012. Drew had been with JPMorgan and its predecessor banks for 30 years. In Drew’s testimony before the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations on March 15, 2013, Drew told the hearing panel that beginning in 1999, she “oversaw the management of the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: April 10, 2014 Too-big-to-fail Wall Street mega banks are now one part bank, one part legal defense and one part confidence-game. JPMorgan’s Chairman and CEO, Jamie Dimon, whose career has now survived more scandals in the past two years than most business titans ever see in a lifetime, has penned a masterful 32-page head-fake to shareholders. Dimon tells shareholders that the company has “consistently shown good financial performance” while distancing himself from the $30 billion the company has paid out in fines and settlements for a rash of misdeeds since January 2013. The word “fortress” appears five times in the letter with the oft-expressed “fortress balance sheet” morphing additionally into the “fortress control system” and the “fortress company.” Dimon’s photo appears alongside the letter, clad in a navy jacket and blue shirt. Next year he might want to complete the fortress analogy by donning a Knight’s metal … Continue reading →