Search Results for: Epstein

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 30, 2024 ~ While many other countries mandate that publicly-traded companies rotate their audit firms after a maximum number of years, there is no such requirement in the United States at the present time. The 10-K (annual report) that JPMorgan Chase filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on February 21, 2023 carried this statement under the auditor’s name of PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP (PwC): “We have served as the Firm’s auditor since 1965.” Let that settle in for a few moments as we take a quick tour through the last 10 years of JPMorgan Chase’s history under the same Chairman and CEO, Jamie Dimon, and the same audit firm. In 2013, after the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations found that JPMorgan Chase had lied to its regulators while gambling in derivatives in London using depositors’ money from its federally-insured bank and losing $6.2 billion, the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 25, 2024 ~ Last Thursday, 12 Democrats in the U.S. Senate sent a deeply insightful letter on a subject most Americans have never discussed around their kitchen table: adequate capital levels at the Wall Street mega banks that came close to bringing down the U.S. financial system in 2008. Before that financial crisis was over – the worst since the Great Depression of the 1930s – millions of hardworking Americans had lost their jobs and millions more had their homes taken in foreclosure. If the U.S. is going to avoid a replay of that crisis, Americans are going to have to start having these critical conversations about the structure of Wall Street mega banks around the kitchen table. Americans are going to have to start engaging in the battle to shape the future of American democracy and more equitable wealth distribution, which requires dramatic reform … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 23, 2024 ~ Gerald Epstein is Professor of Economics and a Founding Co-Director of the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. A book he has spent the past decade researching and writing comes out today from the University of California Press: Busting the Bankers’ Club: Finance for the Rest of Us. Anticipation of this book’s release has caused some sweaty brows in the halls of Congress, on Wall Street, at Big Law, and in the economics community. That’s because Epstein is naming names – the names of the people who have sold out American democracy and the public interest by becoming sycophants for, or actual members of, the Bankers’ Club. The Chairman of the Bankers’ Club is the Federal Reserve, writes Epstein. That’s because the Fed has strongarmed its way to becoming both the supervisor of the Wall Street mega … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 18, 2024 ~ On February 10, 2014, the non-profit watchdog, Better Markets, took a bold and historic action. It filed a federal lawsuit against the highest law enforcement agency and officer in the United States – the U.S. Department of Justice and the man who sat at its helm, Attorney General Eric Holder. The lawsuit challenged a $13 billion out-of-court settlement that had been agreed to by the Justice Department and the Wall Street mega bank, JPMorgan Chase, over its sale of toxic mortgages. Better Markets wrote on its website that this was at the time “The largest settlement in U.S. history from a single entity by more than 300%” and that it “granted JP Morgan blanket civil immunity for years of alleged, but undisclosed, pervasive, egregious and knowing fraudulent and illegal conduct that contributed to the 2008 financial crash and the worst economy since the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: January 17, 2024 ~ Anat Admati, Professor of Finance and Economics at Stanford Graduate School of Business, and German economist Martin Hellwig, have performed a public service to all Americans with their newly released, updated and expanded book The Bankers’ New Clothes: What’s Wrong with Banking and What to Do about It. It puts the interlocking web of corruption that is mistakenly referred to as the U.S. banking system into a pristinely documented and highly readable book. Let us first explain those men without pants on the book jacket. That provocative graphic comes from the storyline in the Hans Christian Andersen tale “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” Tailors offer to make the emperor magical clothes that will be visible only to smart people and invisible to the stupid and unfit. When the emperor’s ministers go to inspect the clothes, they see nothing, but they are fearful of being called … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 16, 2024 ~ Jamie Dimon is the Chairman and CEO of the largest federally-insured, taxpayer-backstopped bank in the United States, JPMorgan Chase. Through much of Dimon’s tenure, JPMorgan Chase has also been designated as the riskiest bank in the United States by its regulators. And despite its unprecedented criminal history, the U.S. Department of Justice keeps handing the bank deferred-prosecution agreements or non-prosecution agreements with the casualness of a carnival barker tossing out penny candy. Dimon’s Board of Directors is too compromised itself to reform the bank and fire Dimon. (See here, here and here.) So all that remains as a potential restraint on this criminally-inclined banking behemoth is the bank’s federal regulators. On July 27 of last year, the Federal Reserve, FDIC and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) – JPMorgan Chase’s bank regulators — released a proposal to require higher capital levels … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 10, 2024 ~ There’s only one thing more dangerous than the largest bank in the United States, JPMorgan Chase, being charged with (and admitting to) five criminal felony counts by the U.S. Department of Justice since 2014 and a host of other fraud charges by federal regulators. What is more dangerous is having government officials look the other way at this recidivist history of crime at the nation’s largest bank. In May, federal banking regulators allowed JPMorgan Chase to get even bigger, despite its unprecedented crime wave, by handing it the failed First Republic Bank in a sweetheart deal. Yesterday, we learned from online documents that the Comptroller of New York State has turned over a vast amount of the financial affairs of the fourth largest state in the country to this banking house of crime. (See related articles below.) According to a New York … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 28, 2023 ~ The year 2023 will go down in U.S. banking history as the year in which the fastest bank runs in U.S. history occurred, producing the second, third and fourth largest banking failures in U.S. history in the span of seven weeks.  Losses of more than $32 billion from these failed banks hit the Federal Deposit Insurance Fund (FDIC). Adding to the regulatory hubris, the largest and riskiest bank in the U.S., JPMorgan Chase, was allowed by its compromised regulators to become even riskier by gobbling up the failed First Republic Bank while JPMorgan Chase got an unexplained $50 billion 5-year loan from the FDIC at an undisclosed interest rate to sweeten its purchase of the failed bank. And, what good is a banking crisis if the Fed can’t pony up yet another bank bailout fund, this time with loans of up to … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 26, 2023 ~ On July 20, 2021 the U.S. Senate voted 56-44 to confirm Kenneth Polite (pronounced Po-leet) to head the most powerful criminal law enforcement office in the United States, the Criminal Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. The vetting of this candidate immediately raised red flags at Wall Street On Parade. Despite Polite owing more than $1.5 million in debts according to his financial disclosure form and public mortgage records; paying over 18 percent interest on an outstanding balance on a credit card; 19.99 percent interest on a personal loan; and then accepting a job where his income was going to be slashed by approximately 77 percent – not one Senator on the Senate Judiciary Committee asked a single question about Polite’s unusual financial obligations during his confirmation hearing on May 26, 2021. In addition, Polite was coming from the law firm of Morgan, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 19, 2023 ~ From 2010 through 2014, the most intractably corrupt industry in America – Wall Street – was the perpetual focus of the Senate Permanent Subcomittee on Investigations. The late Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) Chaired that Subcommittee throughout that span of time. Then Levin retired from the Senate in January 2015 and Wall Street’s name disappeared from hearings of that critical Subcommittee from 2015 through 2023 – a span of nine years. Wall Street did not become less corrupt from 2015 through 2023 to warrant it falling off the hearing schedule of the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. In fact, Wall Street became more corrupt. Financial watchdog, Better Markets, wrote the following in its detailed report in October on Wall Street mega banks’ unending crime spree: “For years, Better Markets has been tracking the enforcement actions against the nation’s six largest banks (the … Continue reading →