Search Results for: JPMorgan

By Pam Martens: October 5, 2018 ~ Add the stock market to the growing list of things that are not normal in the U.S. We’ll get to the details of yesterday’s appearance of a rigged market in a moment, but first a small sampling of the other abnormal ways the U.S. is currently functioning. The U.S. has a President and Commander-in-Chief who is credibly accused by his own lawyer of engaging in political campaign fraud by paying hush money to women whose stories could have impacted the 2016 presidential election. The same President is credibly accused by the New York Times of engaging in tax fraud. That same man is also the subject of a criminal probe by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. And yet, Donald Trump is allowed to nominate a judge who will sit on the highest court in the land for a lifetime – a man who is, like … Continue reading →

  By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 4, 2018 ~ Yesterday’s Treasury market was a mess. So was the front page of the New York Times, which featured a montage of tax records evidencing tax scams by the Trump family. We think there’s a connection. The New York Times’ 14,000 word expose and exhibits effectively render Trump a lame-duck president. That means that the country is left with the unprecedented national debt created under his big tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy along with a billionaire Emperor devoid of either clothes or the aura of a self-man man. The outlook for mounting U.S. debt pushing up Treasury yields comes at the same time that the Federal Reserve is scaling back its crisis-era purchases of Treasuries and as the European Central Bank begins this month to halve its bond purchases. The Federal Reserve, using a previously released schedule, began … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 20, 2018 ~ Michael Bloomberg served three terms as New York City’s Mayor from January 2002 to January 2014. In 2009, the New York Times reported that Bloomberg had spent “$261 million of his own money” in order to get elected to those three terms as Mayor. When Bloomberg took office, there was a two-term limit in place which had been voted on in public referendums in 1993 and 1996. But two years before Bloomberg’s second four-year term ended, he asked the City Council to repeal the two-term limit to allow him to serve a third term. Because voters had already expressed their will in a public referendum twice, numerous members of the City Council felt it would be unethical for them to repeal that decision and that the matter should be determined by another voter referendum. But the City Council went forward … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 13, 2018 ~ For more than a century, the New York Times has championed some of the most despised men on Wall Street in their power grabs of other banks. The resulting mega bank concentration has crippled competition, crippled democracy in the U.S. and led to unprecedented wealth and income inequality in our nation. And yet, to many Americans, the New York Times is considered a progressive newspaper. It is notable that the New York Times was founded with big bank money. Adolph S. Ochs purchased the New York Times in 1896 for $75,000. John Pierpont Morgan Sr. of the powerful Wall Street bank, JPMorgan, provided $25,000 of that money. When the Times celebrated its 100th anniversary  in 1996, it noted that the Pierpont Morgan Library was exhibiting “the original letter Ochs wrote to his wife, Effie, describing a meeting he had with … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 12, 2018 ~ There is now a growing chorus of people trying to legitimize the U.S. central bank, the Federal Reserve, having the option of buying stocks in the next financial crisis. This is such a stunning and dangerous development that it deserves to be on the front page of every newspaper in America – before President Donald Trump attempts to sign an Executive Order authorizing it. (We’re only half-joking about that.) This is the highly suspicious timeline of the clamor to give the Fed carte blanche to do as it pleases when Wall Street blows itself up again: Tuesday, September 4, 2018: JPMorgan Chase sends a research report to its clients which includes this statement from Marko Kolanovic, a Senior Analyst at the bank:  “It remains to be seen how governments and central banks will respond in the scenario of a great liquidity … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 10, 2018 ~ There seems to be a growing amount of concern these days about another epic financial crash on Wall Street. That, in itself, is a concern. After all, we’ve had only two great crashes in the past 89 years: one from 1929 to 1933 and one from 2008 to 2009. Why is another crash on the tip of so many tongues today? Last week JPMorgan Chase released a lengthy research report in which its analyst Marko Kolanovic suggested that in the event of another major Wall Street crisis, the Fed should not only have its emergency powers restored to buy up toxic debt with abandon from Wall Street but that the Fed might also have to buy up stocks – an unprecedented action for the U.S. central bank – or at least unprecedented as far as the public knows. The outrage … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 4, 2018 ~ It’s time to ask this question: is Facebook wearing the friendly façade of a social media company while actually operating as a high tech citizen surveillance center? We’ll get to that in a moment, but first a look at what an actual citizen surveillance center looks like in New York City. In 2012 we broke the story that the intrepid CBS investigative program, 60 Minutes, had aired a fawning piece on the Lower Manhattan Security Coordination Center. That center is a high tech surveillance center built with over $150 million in taxpayers’ money that uses thousands of spy cameras owned by Wall Street banks together with thousands more owned by the New York City Police Department to spy on millions of law-abiding citizens in lower Manhattan. Data feeds from the cameras are routed to a central computer in the center … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 31, 2018 ~ On August 22 Bloomberg News reported that Goldman Sachs is shuttering two hedge funds run out of Asia with approximately $1.4 billion in total assets. Goldman Sachs isn’t shuttering the funds because the Volcker Rule restricts its ownership of hedge funds but because, according to the report, one Goldman partner running one fund is retiring and the other is starting his own fund. Yesterday, Bloomberg News reported that JPMorgan Chase’s asset management division is liquidating “a $1 billion credit hedge fund” known as the Palm Lane Credit Opportunities Fund. The article said that “JPMorgan didn’t give a reason for the decision and a spokeswoman for the fund declined to comment.” A filing by Palm Lane Credit Opportunities Fund on August 24 of this year at the SEC, shows the hedge fund registered offshore in the Cayman Islands, and says its first … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 28, 2018 ~ It’s not every day that one sees the names Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren and Republican Senator John McCain as the leading co-sponsors on the same piece of legislation. But that’s exactly what happened on July 11, 2013, two years later on July 7, 2015,  and again last year on April 6. Together with Maria Cantwell (D-Washington) and Angus King (I-Maine), the four last year re-introduced the 21st Century Glass-Steagall Act, an updated version of the Banking Act of 1933, which was also known as the Glass-Steagall Act. Senator McCain passed away on August 25, without seeing the passage of the legislation. If enacted, the legislation would separate traditional banks that hold deposits that are insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) – and ultimately backstopped by the U.S. taxpayer – from the investment banks on Wall Street that underwrite … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 27, 2018 ~ The Kansas City Fed’s annual symposium in Jackson Hole is typically a dry affair with central bankers and economists expounding on theories that are incomprehensible to the average working person — whose focus is on making their monthly mortgage payment, saving for their children’s college tuition and building a nest egg for retirement. This past weekend’s event, however, produced one highly relevant paper for the average Joe. Professor Antoinette Schoar of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) spoke on the effect of investments by “JP Morgan Chase, Citi, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America into AI [artificial intelligence], machine learning and big data,” stating that their investments are “a multiple of all other banks.” Schoar warned that the “emergent Fintech technologies” that result from these large investments “might in fact reinforce concentration in the industry given the enormous economies of … Continue reading →