Search Results for: JPMorgan

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 7, 2019 ~ One or more U.S. or foreign banks that are primary dealers to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York is in need of longer-term loans that they are unable to get anywhere else – at least at an affordable rate of interest. That’s the only reasonable conclusion that can be drawn from the Fed’s announcement on Friday that it is extending its money pumping program to Wall Street until at least November 4 and will be offering an additional $310 billion cumulatively in term loans (most for 14-days at a time) as well as offering at least $75 billion daily in overnight loans. The Fed’s money sluicing operation that began abruptly on September 17 is taking on the distinct appearance of its machinations during the early days of the 2008 crash – a time when it also refused to name … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 4, 2019 ~ Yesterday, the House Financial Services Committee released its hearing schedule for October. There is not a peep about holding a hearing on the unprecedented hundreds of billions of dollars that the Federal Reserve Bank of New York is pumping into unnamed banks on Wall Street at a time when there is no public acknowledgement of any kind of financial crisis taking place. Congressional committees should have been instantly on top of the Fed’s actions when they first started on September 17 because the Fed had gone completely rogue from 2007 to 2010 in funneling an unfathomable $29 trillion in revolving loans to Wall Street and global banks without authority or even awareness from Congress. The Fed also fought a multi-year court battle with the media in an effort to keep its giant money funnel a secret. According to Section 1101 … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 30, 2019 ~ Last week, as the Fed was carrying out hundreds of billions of dollars in emergency loan operations on Wall Street for the second week in a row – the first such operations since the financial crisis – Deutsche Bank’s headquarters office in Frankfurt, Germany was being raided by police for the second time in less than a year. That’s not the sort of thing that inspires confidence among depositors to keep their money in your bank. Deutsche Bank has been a constant headache for the U.S. financial system because it is heavily intertwined via derivatives with the big banks on Wall Street, including JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America. It has become the dark cloud on the horizon in the same way Citigroup cast a negative pall in the early days of the financial crisis … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 27, 2019 ~ The Federal Reserve Bank of New York first initiated its emergency overnight loans to Wall Street this year on Tuesday, September 17, starting off at the rate of $75 billion daily. It then increased its loans by adding, in addition to the $75 billion daily, 14-day term loans in the amount of $30 billion to be offered three times this past week. But after the demand for the first 14-day loan was more than double the $30 billion offered, the New York Fed boosted the next term loans to $60 billion and increased its overnight loans to $100 billion. What will next week bring? When Wall Street can get super cheap loans from the Fed in the tens of billions of dollars with no questions asked by Congress, it will continue upping its demands until the Fed is once again … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 25, 2019 ~ It was only a matter of time until the public perception of the Federal Reserve having to funnel billions of dollars a day to Wall Street banks as an emergency source of liquidity started to impact the share prices of those same banks. It all caught up with the mega banks yesterday as every single one of their stocks closed in the red. Notably, the German bank, Deutsche Bank, that is heavily interconnected to the behemoths of Wall Street through derivatives, lost the most ground yesterday, closing down 2.70 percent at $7.58 – just $1.14 above its all-time low of $6.44 that it set on August 15. The U.S. banks that were named as being heavily interconnected to Deutsche Bank via derivatives in a 2016 report from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) closed as follows yesterday: Goldman Sachs lost 2.67 percent; … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 24, 2019 ~ Last Friday the Federal Reserve Bank of New York made it clear that its interventions in the overnight repo lending market were going to be a longer-term action. Call it what you will, the Fed has effectively returned to quantitative easing (QE) where it buys up Treasuries, Federal agency debt and agency mortgage-backed securities (MBS) from financial institutions in exchange for loans. According to the New York Fed, the program has now been extended to at least October 10 and likely thereafter in one form or another. The Fed will be pumping in $75 billion daily in overnight repo loans while infusing $30 billion in 14-day term loans three times this week for a total of $90 billion in term loans. The fact that there is one or more financial firms needing $30 billion on a two-week basis and can’t … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 19, 2019 ~ Following a lack of liquidity on Wall Street, which necessitated the Federal Reserve having to provide $53 billion on Tuesday and another $75 billion on Wednesday to normalize overnight lending in the repo market, the Chairman of the Fed, Jerome (Jay) Powell held his press conference at 2:30 p.m. yesterday. The press gathering followed both a one-quarter point cut in the Fed Funds rate by the Fed yesterday as well as the first intervention by the Fed in the overnight lending market since the financial crash. (The Fed had to intervene again this morning, making another $75 billion in repo loans available.) The week’s unsettling events should have provided the basis for reporters to fire questions at the Fed Chair along the following lines: (1) Did the overnight repo lending rate jump to an historical high of 10 percent on … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 18, 2019 ~ Yesterday felt a little like that scene from the 1946 movie “It’s a Wonderful Life” starring Jimmy Stewart. There’s a run on Stewart’s bank because his absent-minded Uncle Billy loses the cash he was sent off to deposit on behalf of the bank. The bank examiners discover there’s money missing and rumors spread. The rumors that spread yesterday were not that money was missing at a Wall Street bank but that liquidity was missing. It had dried up to the point that the major Wall Street banks could not, or would not, handle the demand for loans called overnight repurchase agreements (repos) that were coming their way. (Repos are a short-term form of borrowing where corporations, banks, brokerage firms and hedge funds secure loans by providing safe forms of collateral such as Treasury notes.) The oversized demand for the repos … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 17, 2019 ~ Yesterday, three traders at JPMorgan Chase, the bank headed by Jamie Dimon, got smacked with the same kind of criminal felony charge that was used to indict members of the Gambino crime family in 2017. The charge is racketeering and falls under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act or RICO. According to the Justice Department, the traders engaged in a pattern of rigging the gold, silver and other precious metals markets from approximately May 2008 to August 2016. One of the traders, Michael Nowak, was actually a Managing Director at the bank and the head of its Global Precious Metals Desk. The other two traders are Gregg Smith and Christopher Jordan. RICO is typically used to indict mobsters – which makes its use against employees of the largest bank in America a very disquieting event. But even more disquieting … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 13, 2019 ~  During last evening’s Democratic debate, Senator Bernie Sanders said this: “You’ve got three people in America owning more wealth than the bottom half of this country.” According to Politifact, Sanders is basing this claim on a 2017 study done by the Institute for Policy Studies which put the richest three Americans’ wealth as follows (based on the Forbes list of billionaires at that time): Bill Gates of Microsoft with $89 billion; Jeff Bezos of Amazon with $81.5 billion; and Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway with $78 billion — for a total of $248.5 billion. That wealth figure contrasts with the $245 billion owned by the bottom 50 percent of Americans according to the 2016 Survey of Consumer Finances conducted by the Federal Reserve. (The Fed’s survey is conducted every three years and the 2019 study has not yet been released.) But … Continue reading →