Search Results for: JPMorgan

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 11, 2019 ~ What a difference a day makes. On April 9, the day before JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon was to testify at a House Financial Services Committee hearing along with six of his fellow mega bank CEOs, his legions of publicists and handlers still thought there might be a presidential run in his future. Today, not so much. You know just how torturous the day was for Dimon when the worst part wasn’t his being forced to admit that his bank previously accepted African-American slaves as collateral for loans. That line of questioning came from Congressman Al Green of Texas. Green said that his ancestors were slaves and asked Dimon if it was true that JPMorgan Chase had released information in 2005 “indicating that it directly benefited from slavery” and had made loans using slaves as collateral. Dimon said he believed … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 10, 2019 ~ At 8:00 a.m. yesterday, Politico’s Ben White and Aubree Eliza Weaver dropped the news nugget that the nonprofit watchdog, Better Markets, would be releasing one day ahead of today’s House hearing with the CEOs of the largest banks on Wall Street a report titled: “The RAP Sheet for Wall Street’s Biggest Banks’ Crime Spree,” which promised to detail, for the first time, “that of the more than $29 trillion in total bailouts, the six biggest banks in the country (Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, and Wells Fargo) received more than $8.2 trillion, or nearly one-third of the total bailouts provided to the entire financial system.” Wall Street On Parade has been reporting since 2012 that of the secret $16 trillion bailout loans made at almost zero interest rates by the Federal Reserve during the financial … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 9, 2019 ~  The Democrats are now in charge at the U.S. House of Representatives’ Financial Services Committee and they’re proving that they’re not afraid to take on the legions of Wall Street lobbyists and lawyers in order to do their job for the American people. Tomorrow, Democrats on the Committee will be grilling the CEOs of seven of the largest Wall Street banks. The Republican Committee members, if history is any guide, will be lauding the bankers based on talking points delivered by the banks’ public relations and lobbying firms. Democrats took over the House in January and Congresswoman Maxine Waters became the Chair of the House Financial Services Committee at that time. Waters has served on this Committee for the past 28 years – a period in which she has observed unending frauds against the investing public by the mega banks … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 8, 2019 ~ Steve Eisman is one of the central characters in the Michael Lewis bestselling book, The Big Short. In the movie of the same name, Steve Carell portrays Eisman’s role under the name Mark Baum. During the financial crisis of 2008, Eisman was working for FrontPoint Partners LLC, a hedge fund unit of Morgan Stanley which has been widely acknowledged to have made a boatload of money shorting subprime collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) filled with subprime residential mortgages. In other words, Eisman and FrontPoint were hoping to profit on American homeowners being unable to pay their tricked-up mortgages and being thrown out on the street. But according to Lewis, Eisman was not just shorting subprime drek – he was also shorting the teetering Wall Street banks, which were, by the way, holding trillions of dollars in Federally insured deposits of Moms … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: April 4, 2019 ~ Dear Engaged Citizens in Australia: As both the interim and final report from your Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry has confirmed, the good, decent, hardworking people of Australia are under attack from their own banking system in a manner reminiscent of an attack from a foreign invader that wants to destroy the will and financial resources of the citizens in order to gain absolute control of the country. Americans, more than any other people in the world, can understand and relate to the precarious predicament in which you now find yourselves. The devious vices and devices of your banksters to transfer the meager savings of the common man and woman to their own greedy pockets have been laid bare by your Royal Commission. But just as happened here in the United States following the report of … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: April 1, 2019 ~  The most recent 10Ks (annual reports) filed by the largest Wall Street banks covering their financial condition as of December 31, 2018, provide the strongest argument thus far for Congress to enact legislation to separate the Federally insured, deposit-taking commercial banks from the trading casinos on Wall Street. In other words, Congress needs to restore the Glass-Steagall Act, which kept the U.S. financial system safe for 66 years until its repeal in 1999. If the average American knew that the very same banks that blew up the U.S. economy, devastated the housing market, crashed the stock market, threw millions of Americans out of work just a decade ago were warning in their own 10K legal filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission that the same thing could happen again at any moment, there would be mobs with pitchforks in the street. But because corporate … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: March 26, 2019 ~ The House Financial Services Committee, chaired by Democrat Maxine Waters,  has announced a hearing scheduled for 9:00 a.m. on Wednesday, April 10, titled Holding Megabanks Accountable: A Review of Global Systemically Important Banks 10 Years after the Financial Crisis. The title of the hearing is certain to bring sweat to the brows of the CEOs of the five largest Wall Street banks that still hold monster amounts of derivatives: JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley. Have the CEOs of the mega banks agreed to testify or have they offered up a subordinate to launch a charm offensive at the hearing? Or will it simply be progressive academics opining on how dangerous the banks remain or Koch-funded think tanks arguing for more deregulation of the bloated behemoths? Details on who will testify have not yet been provided. There’s no … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 25, 2019 ~ JPMorgan Chase’s CEO, Jamie Dimon, gave a CNN interview last week in which he said that the U.S. economy is “fundamentally anti-poor.” Two weeks before that, Dimon boasted in an OpEd for CNN that was co-authored by his fellow Board Member, Mellody Hobson, that the bank was doing all kinds of wonderful things to address the wealth gap among African Americans in the U.S. Under Dimon’s tenure as top dog of JPMorgan Chase over the past 13 years, the bank has excelled at settling its crimes on the cheap, launching a big public relations offensive, then being charged with more crimes, settling on the cheap, and spending more on its public relations offensive to massage both the bank’s and Dimon’s reputation. Many of the charges against JPMorgan Chase relate directly to ripping off Americans who can least afford it. In … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: March 24, 2019 ~ The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the Federal regulator of national banks, which includes the largest banks on Wall Street, quietly issued its quarterly report on trading in cash instruments and derivatives on Friday. The report contained a shocker: stock (equity) trading had plunged 88.6 percent in the fourth quarter of 2018 versus the fourth quarter of 2017 on a consolidated basis at the bank holding companies, which includes the results of their commercial and investment banks. Equally stunning, stock trading was down an even more staggering 91.7 percent from the third quarter of 2018. (See chart above from the report.) This bombshell statistic is something that we have not heard a peep about from either the Wall Street banks on their earnings calls or the business media. In fact, Wall Street banks have been telling business media that their … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 21, 2019 ~ The real drama in the market yesterday was not the 2:00 p.m. release of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) statement to hold rates steady but what happened about twenty minutes into the press conference that began at 2:30 p.m. when Fed Chairman Jerome (Jay) Powell began to answer questions from an intrepid group of reporters. The youthful, fresh-scrubbed faces from well-known media outlets presented a paradoxical contrast to the gritty questions they lobbed at the man who clearly understood that losing his cool could tank the stock market. But despite Powell’s calm exterior, the stock market didn’t like the questions or the responses from Powell. Opacity is treasured by the masters of today’s stock market. Too much transparency or honesty sends hedge funds and dark pools running for the safety of Treasury notes. Not only did the Dow Jones … Continue reading →