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Recent Posts
- Report: “Flash Flooding Is the Number One Storm-Related Killer in the U.S.” Few Cities or Towns in America Are Built to Survive Its Wrath
- Hurricane Helene Dumped 20 Trillion Gallons of Rain, Destroying Entire Towns in Western North Carolina, Hundreds of Miles from any Coastline
- Half of All Deaths from Hurricane Helene Occurred 485 Miles North of Where It Made Landfall
- What Did Madoff, Jeffrey Epstein and Sanctioned Russian Mercenary Group, Wagner, Have in Common? They All Banked at JPMorgan Chase
- Deadly, Exploding Pagers Force the U.S. to Get Serious About Malware from China in U.S. Products that Are Potential National Security Threats
- Wall Street Has Moved Vast Sums of Its Trading to Its Federally-Insured Banks
- The Stock Market Had a Psychotic Episode After the Fed Rate Cut Yesterday, Plunging 479 Points from the Day’s High
- As Trump Launches a Crypto Firm, FBI Reports Crypto Fraud Has Exploded to $5.6 Billion; Representing Almost 50 Percent of All Financial Fraud
- Everything this Book Predicted on Wall Street Megabanks Ruling their Regulators Is Now Unfolding
- The Fed Just Kicked the Capital Increases for the Dangerous Megabanks and their Derivatives Down the Road for Years
- Intel, Boeing and U.S. Steel May Hold the Secrets to What’s Behind All the Talk of a U.S. Sovereign Wealth Fund
- Trump and Paulson’s Proposal: U.S. Sovereign Wealth Fund (or Another Grifter Bailout)
- A Wall Street Regulator Is Understating Margin Debt by More than $4 Trillion – Because It’s Not Counting Giant Banks Making Margin Loans to Hedge Funds
- After JPMorgan Threatens to Sue, the Fed Cuts Its Capital Requirement on the 5-Count Felon from a Planned 25 Percent Hike to Less than 8 Percent
- Three Megabanks Had Loans Outstanding of $1.832 Trillion to Giant Hedge Funds on March 31
- Jamie Dimon’s Washington Post OpEd Gets Pummeled at Yahoo Finance
- In the Span of 72 Hours, Four People Tied to a Hewlett-Packard Criminal Case Died in Two Separate Events
- Crypto Took Down Another Federally-Insured Bank and Just Handed Its CEO a 24-Year Prison Sentence
- All the Devils from 2008 Are Back at the Megabanks: Leverage, Off-Balance-Sheet Debt, Over $192 Trillion in Derivatives, Shaky Capital Levels
- New Study Says the Fed Is Captured by Congress and White House — Not the Megabanks that Own the Fed Banks and Get Trillions in Bailouts
- Data from the Fed’s Emergency Funding Program Shows Spring 2023 Banking Crisis Was Far Deeper than Americans Were Told
- These FDIC-Insured Banks Have Lost 69 to 40 Percent of their Market Value Year-to-Date
- Exposure at Hedge Funds Has Skyrocketed to Over $28 Trillion; Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Are at Risk
- We Charted the Plunge and Rebound in the Nikkei Versus Nomura and Citigroup; the Correlation Is Frightening
- Former U.S. Labor Secretary Says Billionaires Have No Right to Exist Because their Wealth Comes from Five Illegal or Bad Practices
- Citigroup Is Having a Helluva Summer: A Protest on Thursday Will Turn Up the Heat
- Nikkei Has Biggest Drop in History: Here’s What’s Causing the Global Market Selloff
- JPMorgan Is Tapping Illiquid Assets in its Global Collateral Program; the New York Fed Is Paying for Its Services
- Bank Regulators Issue Warnings on Fintech and Banking as Disasters Pile Up
- Donald Trump Gives a Speech on Not Letting China Win the Crypto Race – Not Realizing China Banned Crypto Mining and Transactions Four Years Ago
- The New York Fed Has Contracted Out Key Functions to JPMorgan Chase; We Filed a FOIA and Got These Strange Invoices
- On the Eve of Netanyahu’s Address to Congress, Senator Bernie Sanders Delivers a Breathtaking Assessment of His War Crimes
- Trump’s Sit-Down with Netanyahu at Mar-a-Lago Will Cost U.S. Taxpayers Millions While Profiting Trump’s Business
- Protecting Trump and His Jet-Setting Adult Children During His Presidency Cost Taxpayers Over $1 Billion
- A Congressman and a Doctor Reported a Woman Being Shot at Trump Rally: She’s Vanished from Official Reports
- Jamie Dimon Goes Missing from Earnings Call, After Dumping $183 Million of His JPMorgan Chase Stock Earlier this Year
- U.S. Senate Candidate Backed by Hedge Fund Billionaires Was Sitting in Front Row at Trump Rally as the Sniper Fired into the Bleachers
- Project 2025: The Fossil Fuel and Banking Money Behind the Madness
- The Fund Created to Unwind a Failing Megabank Has a Problem: There’s No Money in It
- Joe Biden Versus the New York Times
- Grand Jury Transcript in Jeffrey Epstein Case Is Released, Raising Questions about Epstein’s Darkest Secrets Being Protected in JPMorgan Cases
- The Supreme Court Crowns a King, Immunizing Future Criminal Acts Under Project 2025 – a Right Wing Manifesto
- The Debate Disaster and the Supreme Court’s “Chevron” Repeal Have a Money Trail Leading to Charles Koch
- Congressman Andy Barr Stacks a Hearing on the Fed’s Stress Tests with Lobbyists for Megabanks
- The Fed Posts Historic Operating Losses As It Pays Out 5.40 Percent Interest to Banks
- Goldman Sachs’ Bank Derivatives Have Grown from $40 Trillion to $54 Trillion in Five Years; So How Did Its Credit Exposure Improve by 200 Percent?
- The Fed and FDIC Wake Up Suddenly to the Threat of Derivatives, Flunking the Four Largest Derivative Banks on their Wind-Down Plans
- Is the Stock Market Setting Investors Up for a Tech Bust Similar to the Dot.com Bust?
- Chase Bank Customers Are Reporting a Wave of Wire Fraud in their Accounts; the Bank Won’t Make Good on the Looted Funds
- The Senate Race in Ohio Is the Sickest in U.S. History in Terms of Billionaire Money from Outside the State
Search Results for: Epstein
Jamie Dimon Hires Dodd-Frank Hatchet Man to Weigh Suing the Fed Over Proposed Capital Rules
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
New York State Has Turned Over a Vast Amount of Its Financial Affairs to 5-Count Felon JPMorgan Chase
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
A Big Picture Look at Our Major Wall Street Corruption Stories of 2023
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
The DOJ Took More than Two Years to Answer a FOIA on Its Criminal Division Head; Three Days Before Christmas 2023 We Got a Troubling Disclosure
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
From 2010 through 2014, the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations Focused on Crime on Wall Street; Since Then – Head in the Sand
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
Jamie Dimon to Testify at Senate Banking Hearing; Don’t Expect His Bank’s Financing of Sex Trafficking or 5 Felony Counts to Come Up
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 5, 2023 ~ Tomorrow at 9:30 a.m., the CEOs of the eight mega banks on Wall Street will take their seats at a hearing called by the Senate Banking Committee as part of its annual nod to the pretense that it is providing oversight of these inscrutable Frankenbanks. Among the gang of eight will be Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, the largest bank in the United States with a rap sheet that makes a mockery of U.S. rules for maintaining the safety and soundness of banks. JPMorgan Chase is an enigma wrapped in the surreal details of five felony counts, shrouded in the deepening intrigue of why crime boss Jamie Dimon is allowed to remain at the helm of this federally-insured bank despite his presiding over the worst banking scandals in U.S. history. The scandals at this bank have evolved from … Continue reading
Gutting Big Bank Capital Rules? What’s Really Behind Republicans’ Feigned Outrage Over Sexual Harassment at FDIC
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 20, 2023 ~ Last Tuesday the U.S. Senate Banking Committee convened for a hearing to take testimony from the key federal banking regulators – ostensibly to get more clarity on why the second, third and fourth largest bank failures in U.S. history had occurred this past Spring and to learn what regulators were doing to restore public confidence in the banking sector. But instead of dealing with critical banking issues like the safety and soundness of the U.S. banking system, one Republican Senator after another used big chunks of their allotted time to talk about a Wall Street Journal article that had conveniently appeared just the day prior with the clickbait headline: (Paywall) “Strip Clubs, Lewd Photos and a Boozy Hotel: The Toxic Atmosphere at Bank Regulator FDIC.” While the allegations of sexual harassment at the FDIC are serious and should spark a thorough … Continue reading
Report: During Spring Banking Crisis, Banks Borrowed Over $1 Trillion from Federal Home Loan Banks — $100 Billion More than During the Crash of 2008
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 8, 2023 ~ Yesterday, the regulator of the Federal Home Loan Bank system, the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), released a report on its recommended changes going forward. The report was in response to the questionable conduct of the Federal Home Loan Banks in the leadup to the banking crisis this past spring. The core mission of the 11 regional Federal Home Loan Banks is to “provide liquidity to their members to support housing finance and community development through all economic cycles.” In short, the Federal Home Loan Banks are supposed to make it possible for banks to provide home mortgages to low-income folks. The banks that failed this spring were engaged in crypto (Silvergate and Signature Bank), providing loans to the super wealthy (First Republic Bank), and in the case of Silicon Valley Bank, it was more of a Wall Street IPO pipeline. … Continue reading
WeSuck: First Came the Hype; then Came Adam Neumann’s Self-Dealing; then Came the IPO Scandal; Now Comes the Bankruptcy
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 3, 2023 ~ WeWork, the flexible-office-space company, is the quintessential proof that you can’t put lipstick on a pig forever. On Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal reported that WeWork “ is planning to file for bankruptcy as early as next week….” On October 5, the credit ratings agency Fitch downgraded WeWork’s long-term debt deeper into junk bond territory after WeWork elected to withhold interest payments on its debt that were due Oct. 2. Year-to-date, the publicly-traded stock of WeWork has lost 98 percent of its value. Its shares were trading for pennies in August on the New York Stock Exchange when the financial wizards at the company came up with the idea to do a 1-for-40 reverse stock split in early September to put a little lip gloss on the pig. Yesterday, the stock closed at $1.11, which would mean that it actually closed at … Continue reading
Jamie Dimon Craters Bank Stocks on Friday with Plans to Sell One Million Shares of JPMorgan Chase; Warren Buffett Isn’t Smiling
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 30, 2023 ~ Last Friday, at 6:32 a.m. ET, headlines started rolling with the news that Jamie Dimon, the long-tenured Chairman and CEO of the largest bank in the United States, JPMorgan Chase, was going to start selling a significant part of his sizeable stock holdings in the bank next year. The revelation came in an 8K filing with the SEC and noted that he and his family “currently intend to sell 1 million shares,” leaving open the door that he and his family might decide to sell more. The 8K filing also stated that “This is Mr. Dimon’s first such stock sale during his tenure at the company.” The reality is that Dimon, his wife and his Trusts held over 10 million common shares of JPMorgan Chase in 2017 according to SEC filings and now they hold 8.6 million shares, according to a May … Continue reading