Search Results for: JPMorgan

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 7, 2019 ~  If you needed more proof that the United States is heading in the direction of a dystopian authoritarian state, it arrived last Thursday, May 2, when the Chief Judge for the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York wrote a decision finding that the U.S. Justice Department had outsourced a criminal investigation to the target of the investigation – Deutsche Bank – and Deutsche Bank’s outside law firm, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison. Making the matter all the more interesting, the Chief Judge who wrote the decision, Colleen McMahon, formerly worked for Paul Weiss for 19 years, rising to the rank of partner. She remains, according to this profile, close friends with a number of former and current Paul Weiss lawyers. Judge McMahon’s takedown of the government’s cozy relationship with Deutsche Bank and Paul Weiss has … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 6, 2019 ~ In May 2012 when New York Times reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin wrote his severely factually-challenged analysis of whether the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act had led to the Wall Street collapse in 2008, he seemed to have an agenda of undermining Elizabeth Warren, then running for her first U.S. Senate seat from Massachusetts, in her push to restore the Glass-Steagall Act. That legislation, which was formally known as the Banking Act of 1933, created Federal insurance on deposits held in commercial banks while barring those banks from being under the same roof with the Wall Street casino – that is, high risk securities underwriting and trading firms known as investment banks and broker-dealers. The legislation grew out of two intense years of Senate investigations from 1932-1934 which concluded that the “unsavory and unethical” practices by Wall Street securities trading firms … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 3, 2019 ~ During the question and answer period of Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell’s press conference on Wednesday, Michael McKee of Bloomberg News asked the Chairman the following question: “I’m curious about the financial conditions that you see out there. The minutes of the March meeting tell us a few officials worried about financial stability risks. Was there a broader discussion at this meeting? Any consensus on whether such risks are growing as the markets hit new highs and we do see some instability in short-end trading. Is it possible that rates are too low at this point?” Powell answered the first part of the question as follows: “…I’d say that the headline really is that while there are some concerns around nonfinancial corporate debt, really the finding is that overall financial stability vulnerabilities are moderate on balance and, in addition, I … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 2, 2019 ~  There is a little noticed audio tape of an interview conducted on August 5, 2010 by investigators for the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC), a body convened under the Fraud Enforcement Recovery Act of 2009 to investigate the 2008 financial collapse on Wall Street. The interview is with Rodgin (Rodge) Cohen, Senior Chairman of Sullivan & Cromwell, the preeminent go-to lawyer on Wall Street. Cohen makes a number of eyebrow-raising admissions during his interview. First, in response to a question, Cohen concedes that he was personally involved in the amendment contained in the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Improvement Act (FDICIA) that changed the Fed’s emergency lending powers under Section 13(3) of the Federal Reserve Act. That one-sentence amendment to Section 13(3) was interpreted by the Federal Reserve from December 2007 to mid-2010 as giving it carte blanche to shovel $29 … Continue reading →

  By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 29, 2019 ~ In what can only be described as a new low in defining deviancy down on Wall Street, Thomson Reuters’ International Financing Review (IFR) reported this past weekend that some of the biggest names on Wall Street have returned to creating and/or trading synthetic collateralized debt obligations (Synthetic CDOs). The products were a major factor in bringing the U.S. financial system to the brink of failure in 2008. Synthetic CDOs also resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars in fines and reputational damage to these same Wall Street behemoths as investigators found that the firms were allowing hedge funds to pick “crap” subprime mortgage bonds to stuff in the CDOs in order to make windfall profits for the hedge fund, which shorted (bet against) the CDOs. The Wall Street firms had full knowledge of what the hedge funds were doing … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 25, 2019 ~ Anyone who thought that Commerzbank was going to agree to a merger with Deutsche Bank while the latter was under multiple investigations in the U.S. for money laundering and questionable loans to the President of the United States, a man who was himself under a criminal probe until last month, was likely off their meds. Why Commerzbank allowed the speculation of a merger to proceed this long is the real question. At any event, both banks confirmed this morning that merger talks have ended with a spokesperson for Commerzbank saying this: “After careful analysis it became apparent that such a combination would not be in the interests of either bank’s shareholders or other stakeholders.” The breakdown of merger talks comes on the heels of a report on CNN last evening that Deutsche Bank has “begun the process of providing financial … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 22, 2019 ~   Based on data that Wall Street On Parade has newly compiled, there is a strong suggestion that the Federal Reserve conspired with at least three of the largest Wall Street firms to hide their teetering condition from the public during the financial crisis, despite the fact that these were all New York Stock Exchange listed companies with a duty to reveal material, adverse financial information to the public in a timely fashion. If Maxine Waters wants to leave her mark in history as Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, she will subpoena records from the Federal Reserve on its biggest and dirtiest bailout program, known as the Primary Dealer Credit Facility (PDCF). She and her colleagues must then demand answers from Fed witnesses during the hearing Waters has scheduled for May 16 at 10:00 a.m. The upcoming hearing … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 18, 2019 ~ Lily Tomlin once famously said “No matter how cynical you get, it is impossible to keep up.” When it comes to Wall Street, that particularly rings true. Just take the case of what happened to the trading of Boeing’s stock by Dark Pools the week after the second crash of its new 737 Max 8 jet in a nose-down dive on March 10. The biggest Wall Street banks are (insanely) allowed by Federal regulators to own and operate unregulated quasi stock exchanges called Dark Pools where they trade New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq listed stocks between themselves, in the dark. The only speck of sunshine comes three weeks after the trading when the banks’ self-regulator, FINRA, posts totals for the week for each Dark Pool. There is no information on who’s on the buy and sell side or what … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 17, 2019 ~ On July 21, 2011, when the GAO released its audit of the Federal Reserve’s secret $16.1 trillion in bank loans during the financial crisis, a foreign bank ranked number 9 on the list of the largest borrowers. The loans went not just to the largest banks on Wall Street but to foreign derivative counterparties to the Wall Street banks. The foreign bank that ranked 9 on the list of the largest borrowers was Germany’s largest bank, Deutsche Bank, which took $354 billion in revolving loans from the U.S. Federal Reserve. According to an article in the Financial Times last week “Germany’s federal and state governments have spent €70bn on bailing out banks since the financial crisis, according to an estimate by Gerhard Schick, head of lobby group Finance Watch.” The figure of  €70bn is about 79 billion U.S. dollars. Why … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 16, 2019 ~ According to today’s New York Times, Democrats now in charge of the House Intelligence and Financial Services Committees, have issued subpoenas to Deutsche Bank,  JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup, related to the President’s finances and/or Russian money laundering. We’d like to suggest that while that may well be a fruitful avenue of inquiry (see Russian Bank Chairman Met with Kushner, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase), it does not rise to the level of national security risk posed by the derivative interconnectedness of those same banks. The President’s approximate $300 million in loans from Deutsche Bank and its ties to Russian money laundering, pales in comparison to trillions of dollars in interconnected derivative exposure of these same banks. Americans saw what can happen when Congress ignores repeated red flags about derivatives. From 2008 through 2010 when derivatives and subprime debt … Continue reading →