Search Results for: JPMorgan

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 10, 2020 ~ President Donald Trump is bringing a pea shooter to a gunfight. If you look carefully at the charts on this page from yesterday’s trading bloodbath, it’s clear that there is a deep financial crisis playing out. The idea that this can be remedied with a payroll tax cut is the stuff of tooth fairies. And this crisis didn’t begin with the coronavirus. Headlines about the virus did not start appearing in the U.S. until January of this year. But the Federal Reserve began making hundreds of billions of dollars each week in cheap loans to Wall Street’s banks on September 17, 2019 — the first time it had done this since the 2008 financial crisis. You can earmark September 17, 2019 as the actual date that this Financial Crisis II got underway. All of the toothless financial reforms of the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 9, 2020 ~ We knew Fed Chair Jerome (Jay) Powell was not on solid footing last Tuesday when he answered a question at his press conference from Washington Post reporter, Heather Long. She wanted to know how he felt about “rising concern about credit markets and possible insolvencies and defaults either from businesses or individuals from the coronavirus.” Powell answered Long with this: “financial markets are functioning in an orderly manner and all that sort of thing.” That wasn’t true then and it certainly isn’t true as of noon today. The Fed Chair neglected to mention to Long that beginning on September 17, 2019, as a result of disorderly market functioning, it had started pumping out hundreds of billions of dollars in super-cheap loans each week to trading houses on Wall Street – the first time it had made such repo loans since … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 6, 2020 ~ Yesterday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average of 30 large cap companies closed with a loss of 969.5 points or 3.58 percent. That was bad enough but the losses among the biggest Wall Street banks outpaced the Dow losses by a significant margin. Typically, JPMorgan Chase is one of the better performers among the Wall Street banks in the midst of a big selloff. But not yesterday. It closed with a loss of 4.91 percent – a loss larger than Goldman Sachs (- 4.77 percent), which has a large criminal fine hanging over its head. The news that Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, had heart surgery on Thursday was not reported until after the stock market had closed. The losses among the other mega banks on Wall Street yesterday were equally unsettling. Morgan Stanley lost 5.86 percent; Citigroup … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 28, 2020 ~ Going into Thursday morning, February 27, this was the situation on Wall Street: The stock market, as measured by the Dow Jones Industrial Average, had already lost a total of more than 2,000 points in the prior three days of trading; Stock futures were showing a big loss at the open of trading on Thursday; News reports had proliferated overnight of the coronavirus spreading around the globe as well as a case in California suggesting it was now loose in the community. For most folks, that would have been enough bad news to digest with their morning coffee. But it wasn’t for the folks at Goldman Sachs. At 8:12 a.m. yesterday morning, CNBC ran the above graphic and headline: “Goldman sees zero earnings growth for US companies this year because of coronavirus.” Bank of America also apparently felt it was … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 27, 2020 ~ During the financial panic of 1907, John Pierpont Morgan corralled the money men of New York together and convinced them to join him in bailing out teetering financial institutions in order to calm the panic in the markets. His plan worked. Flash forward to today. Jamie Dimon is Chairman and CEO of the bank that bears John Pierpont Morgan’s name: JPMorgan Chase. The bank is the largest federally-insured bank in the U.S. with $1.6 trillion in deposits. It has more than 5,000 bank branches across America accepting the life savings of moms and pops. But JPMorgan Chase is also the largest trading and derivatives house on Wall Street – a dangerous, combustible mix as it proved so well in 2012 when it lost $6.2 billion of depositors’ money making wild gambles in derivatives in London. On Tuesday of this week, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 25, 2020 ~ If the federal government wants to quarantine the most dangerous threat to the financial health of the United States, it will impose a lockdown and decontamination of the federally-insured banks that are holding tens of trillions of dollars in derivative trades. Yesterday, the stock market rout outed the worst of these actors. While the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell a hefty 1,031.61 points, that was only a 3.56 percentage point loss. The S&P 500 was off by 3.35 percent. The decline in the broader averages looks tame compared to what happened to some of the biggest banks on Wall Street and their derivative counterparties. Morgan Stanley tanked by 5.23 percent; Citigroup was off by 5.12 percent; while Bank of America closed down 4.74 percent. JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs magically trimmed their losses during the trading day, closing down 2.69 … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 21, 2020 ~ At 10:52 a.m. yesterday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average which was trading at a level of 29,348, began a bungee-style plunge. By 11:32 a.m. the market landed with a thud at a level of 29,013. Then the stock market began an equally inexplicable climb, closing the day down just 128 points. This is what is known as a “Flash Crash,” a sudden plunge in the market with no reliable explanation. No one on Wall Street has yet to offer a convincing explanation for the plunge. An early attempt to pass it off to worries about the coronavirus was easily dispelled because the news report of rising infections from the virus came much earlier than the plunge in the market. Our chart research also shows that the plunge was not related to the coronavirus because Procter & Gamble, a component of … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 19, 2020 ~ Paul Krugman, the New York Times columnist who won the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, is back to pedaling his Big Lie that Wall Street banks were not responsible for the financial crash of 2008 or the ensuing housing crash. This time he’s told such a doozie of a lie that there is no longer any doubt that he’s on a mission to restore Wall Street’s credibility, even if he has to rewrite the history of the financial crash and every official report that’s been published on it. The latest Big Lie from Krugman appeared in yesterday’s print edition but first appeared in the digital edition on Monday under a different headline, “Have Zombies Eaten Bloomberg’s and Buttigieg’s Brains?” In a very clever sleight of hand, Krugman is complaining, correctly so, about the fact that presidential candidate Michael … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 18, 2020 ~ HSBC has become the latest bank with a big Wall Street footprint to announce job cuts. After announcing that its 2019 profits fell by about a third, it said it would cut 35,000 jobs over the next three years. Some of the job cuts are expected to fall within its investment banking business in the U.S. The HSBC news comes amid a steady drumbeat of similar news on Wall Street. In July of last year, another European bank with heavy derivative ties to Wall Street, Deutsche Bank, confirmed plans to cut 18,000 jobs. In the same month, Bloomberg News reported that Citigroup would be cutting hundreds of trading jobs. Then in September Commerzbank announced it would trim 4300 jobs. That news was followed by CNN reporting in December that Morgan Stanley would cut 1500 jobs. This is by no means … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 14, 2020 ~ Congresswoman Katie Porter opened a hornet’s nest on Tuesday during a House Financial Services Committee hearing where Fed Chair Jerome Powell answered questions. As we reported, Porter held up a photo of Powell in black tie attending a lavish party for billionaires and politicians at the Washington D.C. home of one of the richest men in the world, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. As it turns out, that wasn’t even the worst part of the story. The real jaw dropper is that the Bezos party was the after-party for a secretive private club’s annual dinner. The so-called Alfalfa Club is a 107-year old, invitation-only club that bars the press from attendance and banned membership of blacks and women for the bulk of its existence. Fed Chair Powell is a member of that club. More on that shortly, but first some background. … Continue reading →