Search Results for: Federal Reserve

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 23, 2019 ~ U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin appeared yesterday before the House Financial Services Committee. You know it was a bad day for the Secretary when the low point was not Congressman Stephen Lynch’s request to the Chair, Maxine Waters, to have Mnuchin held in contempt for not following the statute that calls for the IRS to turn over tax returns on any American when requested by an authorized Committee of Congress. Mnuchin has said he will not turn over the tax returns of the President of the United States, which are under subpoena by Congress. (The Internal Revenue Service, which holds these tax returns, is an agency of the U.S. Treasury.) Waters said she will seek the advice of the Committee’s counsel on the contempt request. A number of Democratic members of the Committee intensely questioned Mnuchin on  his myriad deregulatory … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 21, 2019 ~ After chasing the super rich for a century, JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs are now offering no minimum accounts. As we will explain shortly, their motives may not be all that altruistic. In March of 2016, the Wall Street Journal’s Emily Glazer reported that clients of JPMorgan Chase’s Private Bank “will be required to have at least $10 million in investible assets, twice the current minimum of $5 million.” What smells like real money to Goldman Sachs has also been eight-figures and higher. In 2013, the New York Times reported that Goldman had a $10 million minimum to manage private wealth and was booting out its own employees’ accounts if they were less than $1 million. High net worth individuals are what each of the mega Wall Street banks look for since the more money the bank invests, the more fees it generates … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 17, 2019 ~ At a House Financial Services Committee hearing yesterday, Republicans attempted to marshal arguments for why U.S. banks needed more relief from regulatory oversight. Those arguments weren’t helped by the news of the day. As the hearing got underway, headlines were being promulgated around the globe that JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and three foreign banks had been fined $1.2 billion by the European Commission for rigging foreign exchange markets. The U.S. Department of Justice leveled criminal felony charges on the same two U.S. banks in 2015 for rigging the same market. Both banks admitted to the charges at that time. A decade after the greatest financial crash in the United States since the Great Depression; after the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation has failed miserably in stopping the ongoing crime spree by Wall Street’s largest banks; and as radical right-wing members of Congress … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 15, 2019 ~ The House Financial Services Committee, Chaired by Democratic Congresswoman Maxine Waters, has been doing the heavy lifting for Congress when it comes to oversight of the mega banks on Wall Street. After grilling the CEOs of these banks on April 10, the Committee will convene again tomorrow to grill the Federal regulators of these serially charged mega banks. The witness list includes: Rodney Hood, Chairman, National Credit Union Administration; Jelena McWilliams, Chairman, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC); Joseph Otting, Comptroller, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC); and Randal Quarles, Vice Chairman of Supervision, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. The Committee has released a very impressive Memorandum, which lays out the Frankenbank framework that exists in the United States today. For example, consider this one sentence from the Memorandum: “U.S. G-SIBs [Global Systemically Important Banks] made … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 15, 2019 ~ According to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the regulator of national banks, as of December 31, 2018 JPMorgan Chase Bank NA (the Federally-insured bank backstopped by U.S. taxpayers) held $2,212,311,000,000 ($2.2 trillion) in equity derivatives. Equity is another name for stock. The OCC also reported that all commercial banks in the U.S. held a total of $3.374 trillion in equity derivatives at the end of last year, meaning that for some very strange reason, JPMorgan Chase holds a 65.5 percent market share of bank trading in this derivatives market. Those trillion dollar figures are notional amounts, meaning the face value. The OCC defines “notional” like this: “The notional amount of a derivative contract is a reference amount that determines contractual payments, but it is generally not an amount at risk. The credit risk in a derivative … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 8, 2019 ~  For years now, Wall Street On Parade has been pointing out to our readers that the Wall Street mega banks remain dangerously interconnected, despite the fact that those interconnections stopped banks from lending to one another in 2008; resulted in the largest government bailout of Wall Street in U.S. history; and ended up taking down the U.S. housing market and global economy. Whenever there is a major selloff in the broader stock market, the Wall Street mega banks typically bleed far more than the major stock indices. Yesterday, however, something curious and potentially noteworthy happened. The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 473.3 points or 1.79 percent and the following Wall Street banks traded in line with that decline: JPMorgan Chase actually lost a little less than the Dow with a decline of 1.63 percent. Bank of America and Goldman Sachs … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 6, 2019 ~ In May 2012 when New York Times reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin wrote his severely factually-challenged analysis of whether the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act had led to the Wall Street collapse in 2008, he seemed to have an agenda of undermining Elizabeth Warren, then running for her first U.S. Senate seat from Massachusetts, in her push to restore the Glass-Steagall Act. That legislation, which was formally known as the Banking Act of 1933, created Federal insurance on deposits held in commercial banks while barring those banks from being under the same roof with the Wall Street casino – that is, high risk securities underwriting and trading firms known as investment banks and broker-dealers. The legislation grew out of two intense years of Senate investigations from 1932-1934 which concluded that the “unsavory and unethical” practices by Wall Street securities trading firms … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 3, 2019 ~ During the question and answer period of Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell’s press conference on Wednesday, Michael McKee of Bloomberg News asked the Chairman the following question: “I’m curious about the financial conditions that you see out there. The minutes of the March meeting tell us a few officials worried about financial stability risks. Was there a broader discussion at this meeting? Any consensus on whether such risks are growing as the markets hit new highs and we do see some instability in short-end trading. Is it possible that rates are too low at this point?” Powell answered the first part of the question as follows: “…I’d say that the headline really is that while there are some concerns around nonfinancial corporate debt, really the finding is that overall financial stability vulnerabilities are moderate on balance and, in addition, I … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 2, 2019 ~  There is a little noticed audio tape of an interview conducted on August 5, 2010 by investigators for the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC), a body convened under the Fraud Enforcement Recovery Act of 2009 to investigate the 2008 financial collapse on Wall Street. The interview is with Rodgin (Rodge) Cohen, Senior Chairman of Sullivan & Cromwell, the preeminent go-to lawyer on Wall Street. Cohen makes a number of eyebrow-raising admissions during his interview. First, in response to a question, Cohen concedes that he was personally involved in the amendment contained in the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Improvement Act (FDICIA) that changed the Fed’s emergency lending powers under Section 13(3) of the Federal Reserve Act. That one-sentence amendment to Section 13(3) was interpreted by the Federal Reserve from December 2007 to mid-2010 as giving it carte blanche to shovel $29 … Continue reading →