By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 28, 2021 ~ According to the 10-K (Annual Report) forms that JPMorgan Chase has filed with the SEC for years 2017, 2018, and 2019, it has bought back a total of $59.5 billion of its own common stock, thus inflating its share price by that sum of money. In 2019 the bank bought back a whopping 212,975,185 shares for $24.12 billion; 181,504,483 shares in 2018 for a total of $19.98 billion; and 166,557,198 shares in 2017 for $15.4 billion. Notice that the growth in the dollar amount of the buybacks grew by 56.6 percent from 2017 to 2019. Who benefitted tremendously from this boosting of the share price? Insiders. According to the proxy JPMorgan Chase filed with the SEC on April 7, Jamie Dimon, the Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, owns 9,385,141 shares of the bank’s common stock – the bulk of which … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 25, 2021 ~ Surfside is a town just north of Miami Beach, Florida. It was incorporated in 1935. At approximately 1:23 a.m. yesterday, part of a 12-story high-rise collapsed in the town leaving 99 people missing and four confirmed deaths as of early this morning. The condo building is known as Champlain Towers South and is located at 8777 Collins Ave. in Surfside. A report in USA Today has now left the whole town of Surfside on edge. According to the report, Shimon Wdowinski, a professor in the Department of Earth and Environment at Florida International University, co-published a study with Simone Fiaschi in April of last year that found that the condo building “had some kind of unusual movement,” and had been sinking at the rate of 2 mm per year during the course of the study, which looked at satellite data from … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 24, 2021 ~ If you’ve been following our reporting of JPMorgan Chase since Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon has been at the helm, you’re aware of one striking fact: this bank has a pattern of getting into bed with unsavory characters: Bernie Madoff, check. Racketeering traders, check. A sex trafficker of children, Jeffrey Epstein, check. Money launderers, check. The guy who bragged on his resume that he knew how to game electric markets, check. Despite an unprecedented record of five felony counts from the U.S. Department of Justice since 2014, to which it admitted guilt, and the reputational damage this has done to its brand, JPMorgan Chase’s asset management unit made the unusual decision last year to form a joint venture with an SFR (Single-Family Rental company) whose tenant complaints are so eye-popping that they fill pages on the internet and have been the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 23, 2021 ~ Yesterday the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis convened a hearing at 2 p.m. to receive testimony from Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell. The title of the hearing was “Lessons Learned: The Federal Reserve’s Response to the Coronavirus Pandemic.” During Powell’s opening statement, he said this: “Our emergency lending tools require the approval of the Treasury and are available only in unusual and exigent circumstances, such as those brought on by the crisis. Many of these programs were supported by funding from the CARES Act. Those facilities provided essential support through a very difficult year and are now closed.” It’s factually incorrect for the Fed Chairman to say that it can only make emergency loans with the approval of the Treasury. Months before there was any case of COVID-19 anywhere in the world the Fed was making hundreds of billions … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 22, 2021 ~ A preliminary prospectus has been filed with the SEC to bring Krispy Kreme, the doughnut retailer, back to trade in U.S. public markets. JPMorgan, Bank of America and Citigroup will be three of the four Lead Book-Running Managers on the deal according to the preliminary prospectus. Those same three Wall Street underwriters have the distinction of just last week being banned from participating in a big European Union bond offering because of their past cartel activity in Europe. Morgan Stanley is to be the fourth Lead Book-Running Manager on the deal. Krispy Kreme’s net losses have been escalating over the past three years according to its SEC filing. Net losses in 2020 were $60.9 million; $34 million in 2019; and $12.4 million in 2018. During the company’s prior history as a publicly-traded company, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged the company … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 21, 2021 ~ One thing is for sure. When the current stock market bubble does eventually crash, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell is not going to be able to sit before Congress and tell lawmakers that nobody could have seen it coming. Wall Street veterans have gone on record repeatedly in recent months to warn of a coming crash. Last week Michael Burry, who heads the hedge fund Scion Asset Management and was immortalized in “The Big Short” movie for making a fortune shorting subprime debt before it collapsed in the 2008 crash, took to Twitter with the latest of these warnings. (The Tweets were subsequently deleted after they were heavily publicized in the business media and retweeted.) On Tuesday, Burry Tweeted this: “People always ask me what is going on in the markets. It is simple. Greatest Speculative Bubble of All Time in … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 18, 2021 ~ Apparently, the mega banks on Wall Street thought that the Fed was never going to take away the punch bowl. And now the Fed has indicated that it’s thinking about thinking about doing just that. By taking away the punch bowl we mean trimming back its $80 billion in monthly purchases of Treasury securities and $40 billion in agency Mortgage-Backed Securities. And, at some point, actually starting to hike interest rates again. Fed Chair Jerome Powel made clear during his press conference on Wednesday that trimming the $120 billion in bond purchases monthly is now very much part of the FOMC discussions. Powell said this in answer to a question about when that trimming might start: “So I expect that we’ll be able to say more about timing as we see more data. Basically, there’s not a lot of more light … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 18, 2021 ~ How embarrassing it must be for Jerome Powell, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, that three of the largest banks in the U.S. that are supervised by the Fed, have been deemed not trustworthy enough by the European Commission that they were banned from participating in this week’s historic European Union bond offering. It is also egg on the face of the U.S. Department of Justice, which has been handing out deferred prosecution agreements to these same banks for felony counts like it’s a meter maid doling out parking tickets. JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and Bank of America were banned along with seven non-U.S. banks from participating in this week’s European Union bond offering. The syndicated offering is part of what will grow over the next five years to be a $969 billion COVID-19 recovery fund for the European Union, part of the plan … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 17, 2021 ~ Wells Fargo bank analyst Mike Mayo appeared on CNBC this morning to paint a rosy picture for how banks would be treating the Fed’s less than dovish statement yesterday. Mayo said this about the banks: “Back in the 70s or even 1994 the inflation caused unrealized securities losses, derivatives losses, asset/liabilities mismatches. So too much inflation is hell for banks. But we think what’s happening now is a dose of heaven. And so higher rates sooner can allow banks to finally earn more money on all those deposits that they’ve gathered. And so this means that assets reprice faster than their liabilities.” What actually priced much faster than either assets or liabilities were the share prices of the mega banks on Wall Street. The cheery words had barely left Mayo’s tongue before the biggest banks on Wall Street went into a … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 17, 2021 ~ On May 26 Bloomberg News reported that the U.S. Department of Justice had opened an investigation into Archegos Capital Management and its bank lenders. Archegos is the family office hedge fund that had blown up in late March, causing a total of more than $10 billion in losses to mega banks including Credit Suisse, UBS, Morgan Stanley and others. Archegos had obtained leverage of as much as 85 percent on its heavily-concentrated stock trades from some of its banks, in brazen violation of the Federal Reserve’s Regulation T which sets margin for stock trading at a maximum of 50 percent on opening trades. In addition, the banks were holding the stocks in their own names (while shifting losses and gains to Archegos under a derivatives contract called a swap) thus denying the public the knowledge of the true owners of these … Continue reading →