Search Results for: JPMorgan

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 30, 2022 ~ JPMorgan Chase’s stock has lost 27 percent of its market value year-to-date through its June 29 closing price. But more disturbing than that is the above chart showing that the behemoth German lender, Deutsche Bank, has been trading like a clone of JPMorgan Chase for the past two months. Deutsche Bank’s stock price is down just one percentage point more than JPMorgan Chase year-to-date. JPMorgan Chase is the largest federally-insured bank in the United States. Looking like one is tied with an umbilical cord to Deutsche Bank has its perils on Wall Street. Let’s start with the raids on the Deutsche Bank’s headquarters, two of which coincided with dead bodies turning up. On November 29, 2018, Deutsche Bank’s headquarters in Germany were raided by 170 members of law enforcement. Prosecutors explained the action by stating that “Deutsche Bank helped customers found … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 29, 2022 ~ Last Tuesday, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) released its quarterly report on derivatives held at the megabanks on Wall Street. As we browsed through the standard graphs that are included in the quarterly report, one graph jumped out at us. It showed a measured growth in precious metals derivatives at insured U.S. commercial banks and savings associations over the past two decades and then an explosion in growth between the last quarter of 2021 and the end of the first quarter of this year. In just one quarter, precious metals derivatives had soared from $79.28 billion to $491.87 billion. That’s a 520 percent increase in a span of three months. (See Figure 18 at this link. The last ten years of the graph is shown above.) Having studied these quarterly reports since the 2008 financial crash, we … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 27, 2022 ~ When the cryptocurrency exchange, Coinbase, first offered its stock to the public on April 14, 2021, its S-1 Registration Statement that was filed with the SEC indicated that Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Citigroup were its financial advisors, along with Allen & Company. Most Americans would assume that if one is the financial advisor to a company going public for the first time, the financial advisor would know a considerable amount about that company’s business and future prospects. But as we reported last Wednesday, horror stories in the thousands about how Coinbase runs its exchange have been piling up in the publicly accessible database of the federal regulator, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Three business days after we published that information, Goldman Sachs finally put out a sell rating on the stock of Coinbase. The news came from Goldman Sachs before the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 24, 2022 ~ Add JPMorgan Chase, the biggest bank in the United States with an unprecedented five criminal felony counts since 2014, to the growing list of debacles of which the Fed has lost control. The Fed has its bank examiners pouring over the books of JPMorgan Chase on an ongoing basis, but somehow the bank’s dangerous book of derivatives has been allowed to spike by $14.42 trillion in the first quarter of this year, soaring from $45.84 trillion on December 31, 2021 to $60.26 trillion on March 31, 2022. That’s an increase of 24 percent in a three-month span. That information comes from page 18 of the newly-released report on derivatives in the banking system from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC). The Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 was supposed to stop the insanity of unfathomable amounts of risky derivatives being … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 1, 2022 ~ Wall Street On Parade was previously a big fan of Senator Sherrod Brown, the Chair of the Senate Banking Committee. Not so much anymore. Brown supported the nutty nomination of Saule Omarova to head the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the regulator of national banks, while attempting to spin the naysayers as part of a smear campaign. So far this year, the Senate Banking Committee has held hearings on tangential areas while ignoring the biggest threats to financial stability in the U.S.: the $200.18 trillion in notional derivatives (face amount) concentrated at just five Wall Street megabanks (JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America). There have been no subpoenas flying from the Senate Banking Committee as the Fed continues to cover up the largest trading scandal in its history and refusing to release to … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 25, 2022 ~ An attorney turned whistleblower who worked in compliance at JPMorgan Chase, Shaquala Williams, has named former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair as one of the parties receiving improperly processed “emergency payments” from the bank. Williams is suing the bank for retaliating against her protected whistleblowing activities by terminating her employment after she raised concerns about these payments to Blair and other serious compliance issues. (The case is Shaquala Williams v JPMorgan Chase, Case Number 1:21-cv-09326, which was filed last November in the Federal District Court for the Southern District of New York.) The new revelation naming Tony Blair was contained in a transcript of Williams’ deposition that was filed with the court last week. Prior to that, Blair had been referred to simply as “a high risk JPMorgan third-party intermediary for Jamie Dimon…” in the Williams’ complaint. The fact that Williams … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 2, 2022 ~ Last Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Justice, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) brought charges against executives at Archegos Capital Management, the family office hedge fund that was somehow able to trick the most sophisticated trading houses on Wall Street into giving it 85 to 90 percent margin debt on concentrated stock positions – one of which had been called a “fraud” in a detailed report. Archegos blew itself up with that margin debt in March 2021, leaving a handful of these sophisticated trading firms acknowledging losses of more than $10 billion dollars. The complaint filed by the Justice Department is the only complaint from the three federal agencies that names the Wall Street banks involved – although it paints the banks as hapless victims of the fraud instead of co-conspirators. (The SEC complaint … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 14, 2022 ~ JPMorgan Chase’s publicly-traded shares closed out 2021 with a share price of $158.35. At the closing bell yesterday, shares of JPMorgan Chase were at $127.30, a year-to-date price decline of 19.6 percent. That’s dramatically worse than its peer bank, Wells Fargo, and modestly worse than another peer bank, Bank of America. That performance is shocking because the Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon, is paid like a rock star by his Board, treated like a financial wizard by the business press, and perpetually brags about his bank’s “fortress balance sheet” in his musings to Congress and shareholders. But the share price performance is not shocking if one considers that one of the artificial props under the share price for the past five years has been Dimon’s crony Board of Directors authorizing giant share buybacks of the stock. According to … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 13, 2022 ~ On March 31, the Federal Reserve finally released a trove of secret transaction data revealing which Wall Street trading houses had to borrow hundreds of billions of dollars from a panoply of Fed bailout programs. One of those bailout programs was the Fed’s Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility (MMLF) which bought paper residing in the money market funds of large Wall Street firms that no one else on the street wanted to buy – or at least at a price that would prevent staggering losses for the funds, which are supposed to trade at a stable $1 per share price. We have begun to unravel the cryptic details of the MMLF, although the Boston Fed which administered the program for the Federal Reserve used a bag of tricks to make that process as difficult as possible for journalists. For example, … Continue reading →