Search Results for: JPMorgan

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 14, 2019 ~ Yesterday Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell testified before the Joint Economic Committee of Congress. Only one Congressman, Kenny Marchant (R-TX), had the courage to ask Powell about the Fed’s intervention in the repo loan market beginning on September 17. Since that time the Fed has been pumping hundreds of billions of dollars each week (that the New York Fed creates electronically out of thin air) into its 24 primary dealers on Wall Street. These primary dealers are not commercial banks that might be inclined to use the funds to make loans to local businesses or to consumers to buy a house and help their local economies. No, 23 of the 24 primary dealers are stock brokerage firms and investment banks that engage in leveraged bets in the stock, bond, commodities, and derivatives markets. The 24th is a foreign bank. (See … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 10, 2019 ~ Jamie Dimon was interviewed by Lesley Stahl this evening on the CBS investigative news program, 60 Minutes. The gist of Dimon’s argument is that candidates for President, such as Senator Elizabeth Warren, should stop vilifying him simply because he’s “successful.” Dimon also wants the public to know that it’s “dead wrong” to think he’s not a “patriot.” Dimon is a bit more than “successful” when it comes to the pile of money he has accumulated. According to Forbes, Dimon is worth $1.6 billion. The bulk of that money has come from stock grants while serving as Chief Executive Officer of the largest bank in the U.S., JPMorgan Chase, since December 31, 2005 as well as Chairman of the Board since December 31, 2006. Unfortunately, there is a very substantive argument against Dimon being a patriot and a very persuasive argument … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 8, 2019 ~ Jelena McWilliams is a Trump appointee who currently serves as the Chairwoman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the federal agency responsible for insuring the deposits of commercial banks and savings associations in the United States. McWilliams also knows her way around Wall Street. Her resume at the FDIC states that “Before entering public service, she practiced corporate and securities law at Morrison & Foerster LLP in Palo Alto, California, and Hogan & Hartson LLP (now Hogan Lovells LLP) in Washington, D.C.” As a corporate lawyer, McWilliams “represented publicly and privately-held companies in mergers and acquisitions, securities offerings, strategic business ventures, venture capital investments, and general corporate matters.” McWilliams put her Wall Street savvy to work from 2012 to 2017 in the positions of deputy staff director, chief counsel and senior counsel to the U.S. Senate Banking Committee where … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 5, 2019 ~ The Fed is in deep fear, while also in deep denial, about what happened last December. Its fear is that it could happen again this December. Its denial is that its lax supervision of the Wall Street mega banks is largely responsible for the mess. The stock market news on December 24 of last year was not what folks want to be reading about on Christmas Eve. The Dow Jones Industrial Average had plunged 653 points on Christmas Eve and headline writers across major media were declaring the month to have been the worst December for stocks since the Great Depression. But the declines in the broader stock market averages paled in comparison to the December carnage that occurred in the share prices of the mega banks on Wall Street and, to the Fed’s consternation, the insurance companies that are … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 4, 2019 ~ Corporate America is increasingly sending conflicting messages to its top executives: engaging in relationships with subordinates, consensual or otherwise, will cost you your job – but criminal acts involving looting the public, not so much. Steve Easterbrook, the CEO of the fast food chain, McDonald’s, was fired by his Board yesterday for engaging in a consensual relationship with an employee, in violation of company policy. The Board of the largest bank in the United States, on the other hand, JPMorgan Chase, has not fired its Chairman and CEO, Jamie Dimon, despite the following occurring on his watch: $6.2 billion in losses from a high-risk gamble with derivatives in London in 2012 – using, mind you, the deposits of its federally-insured bank. Then came 2014 when the bank was charged for its role in the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme. The Madoff … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 1, 2019 ~ Fed Chairman Jerome Powell had a Greenspan moment on Wednesday during his press conference. He made several Goldilocks statements about the banks that are going to come back to haunt him just as former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan’s Alice in Wonderland remarks to Congress in the leadup to the greatest financial crash since the Great Depression have now made him appear to have been either lying to Congress or dangerously out of touch. It took just a few moments for us to pull up some charts to disprove the statements made by Powell. Powell stated the following during the Q&A portion of the press conference: “So, we monitor financial stability risks very carefully all of the time. It’s what we do since the financial crisis, as I’ve mentioned before. Currently, we don’t see large imbalances. This long expansion is notable … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 31, 2019 ~ Yesterday, following the announcement of another 1/4 point interest rate cut by the Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell held a press conference at 2:30 p.m. It proved to be an embarrassing and shameful example of New York City-centric business journalism. Seven business journalists from leading business news outlets that cover Wall Street asked questions in the first 23 minutes of the press conference. Not one of these reporters asked about the liquidity crisis on Wall Street that has resulted in the Fed offering $690 billion a week to 23 Wall Street securities firms and one foreign bank as well as a newly launched “don’t call it QE4” operation by the Fed to buy up $60 billion a month in Treasury bills from Wall Street dealers. The Fed began its repo loan interventions on September 17 of … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 29, 2019 ~ On January 19, 2011, the Federal Reserve released a video on YouTube to quell the public uproar over its unaccountable money creation operations. The spokesman for the Fed in the video was their Senior Adviser at the time, Steve Meyer, now an Adjunct Professor of Finance at The Wharton School. The Fed was in the middle of its second round of quantitative easing (QE2) and Meyer states this: “The Fed will not keep buying large amounts of securities on an ongoing basis.” The Fed was so intent on conveying the “temporary” nature of its unprecedented actions that it put that statement by Meyer on the screen. (See screen shot above.) Meyer then immediately adds this about the Fed: “Its purchases are a temporary measure to help the economy recover.” But the Fed’s purchases were not temporary. On September 13, 2012 … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 25, 2019 ~ Memories are apparently very short at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The SEC seems to have forgotten that a run on money market funds holding bank commercial paper set off a panic after the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy filing on September 15, 2008. The government had to step in and guarantee the funds. Despite those disastrous days, the SEC has allowed money market funds being sold in the U.S. to hold a staggering $642 billion in the instruments of foreign banks, as of September 30, 2019. It categorizes those instruments as: certificates of deposits, time deposits, sponsored asset-backed commercial paper, and repurchase agreements (repos) where the bank is the counterparty. On top of the $642 billion in the instruments of foreign banks, the money market funds are holding another $292 billion in the instruments of U.S. banks, bringing the total … Continue reading →

WSOP Staff: October 25, 2019 ~ Yesterday, the headline above appeared at CNBC. The headline writers there must be living in an alternative reality. Let us remind CNBC viewers what 2019 is actually shaping up to be: it’s the year that the highest priced stock in the price-weighted Dow Jones Industrial Average, Boeing, can’t figure out how to safely fly the plane, the 737 Max, that it has sold to airlines around the world. The stock charts of two of the biggest IPOs of the year, Uber and Lyft, look like crash landings themselves. Another much hyped IPO, WeWork, couldn’t achieve liftoff because its Chairman and CEO was engaging in shady self-dealings with the company. And yet, despite Adam Neumann’s disastrously failed management of his company, SoftBank paid him $1.7 billion to take a hike as thousands of about-to-be fired workers looked on in disgust. And, we should add, despite … Continue reading →