Search Results for: Jamie Dimon

Jamie Dimon’s New Business Model From Hell Could Take Down Wall Street — Again

By Pam Martens: June 14, 2012 If you want to trade securities at any brokerage firm in the U.S., you’ll need to study intensively for about three months, memorize dizzying rules and regulations, then take a six hour licensing exam. (The exam is so rigorous that it’s compared to the CPA exam. I don’t know if it’s fact or lore, but I was told exam rooms in past decades had puke buckets in the corners.  My room didn’t in 1986.) Then, you’ll need to get fingerprinted, pass a background check, register with a host of stock exchanges, make sure you have a supervisor who holds a principal’s license, get approved in each state in which you plan to conduct business, and take ongoing continuing education classes to keep your licenses.  Or, you could skip all of that and earn $14 million a year trading – without a license – stocks, … Continue reading

Occupy Wall Street Groups Demand Investigation of JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon

By Pam Martens: June 4, 2012 Occupy the SEC and Occupy Wall Street’s Alternative Banking Working Group are asking the  SEC to investigate Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, and make a criminal referral to the U.S. Department of Justice, if appropriate. This Wednesday, June 6th, at 5:30 p.m. EST, the two groups will march from Liberty Plaza to the offices of JPMorgan Chase, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and on to the Securities and Exchange Commission’s New York City office for a teach-in. The groups issued a statement, that read: “We are marching on June 6th because that date marks the 78th anniversary of the founding of the SEC in 1934. The SEC was created to enforce two basic principles: 1) public companies offering securities to investors must tell the truth about their business, the securities, and the risks involved in investing. 2) people who … Continue reading

Jamie Dimon: The More He Talks, the Less We Know

By Pam Martens: May 14, 2012 Jamie Dimon, the red-faced Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, who last week reported a $2 billion trading loss at the firm, has a rare quality.  He talks really fast, uses a lot of plain, folksy words, and leaves us dumber than when he started speaking. It feels like Dimon is hoping to talk fast enough and call himself stupid often enough that no one  notices that he hasn’t told us a thing we need to know: Like – exactly how did you lose $2 billion of your depositors’ money? Like – when will you cut your losses short and unwind this “stupid” trade? Like – why haven’t you already unwound this “stupid” trade? Like – how is this different from AIG Financial Products selling credit default insurance, collecting the big quarterly premiums on that insurance to boost revenues, profits and pay big bonuses … Continue reading

Wall Street Heads Spin Over Trump Weighing Dimon for Treasury and Restoring Glass-Steagall

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 11, 2016  Yesterday, CNBC announced that anonymous sources had told the cable business news outlet that Trump’s advisers were considering JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon for U.S. Treasury Secretary. The rumor nugget was quickly spread by other media outlets. The likelihood is that the rumor is coming from Jamie Dimon’s hyper-charged public relations machine rather than from Trump’s closest advisers. Should Dimon get the nomination from Trump he would have to appear before the Senate Banking Committee for his confirmation hearing. He would be facing hostility from progressive Senate Democrats on the Committee like Senators Elizabeth Warren, Sherrod Brown and Jeff Merkley for overseeing a Wall Street mega bank that has garnered an unprecedented three felony counts from the U.S. Justice Department in just the past three years while Dimon took home massive pay and bonuses. Two felony counts against the bank were for aiding … Continue reading

JPMorgan: The House that Jamie Built Looks Much Like the House That Sandy Built

By Pam Martens: March 15, 2013  Much of the investing public, and I would venture many members of the research team at the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations that compiled the 307 page report on JPMorgan’s $6.2 billion in losses from the London Whale trade, are unaware that the company’s Chairman and CEO, Jamie Dimon, learned at the knee of the mastermind of too-big-to-fail – former Citigroup Chairman and CEO, Sandy Weill. From 1982 to 1998, Dimon was Weill’s first lieutenant, rising to the rank of President of Citigroup.  Carl Levin, Chairman of the Subcommittee, released the stunning investigative report yesterday and, throughout, the level of arrogance toward regulators, the dishonesty and dissembling on earnings calls, the hiding of losses, and the specter of the imperial CEO conjured up images of the downfall of Citigroup and Weill’s role in creating the culture than burned down the house. It felt, alarmingly, like … Continue reading

Prince Jamie, His Court Jesters, and His Royal Palaces

 By Pam Martens: June 16, 2012 As the Prince took his chair in the stately chambers correctly called Senate Banking (this is where jesters whose campaigns are paid with banking money meet to bestow gifts on their benefactors – gifts like the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act to deregulate Wall Street) six brave citizens yelled out against him.  Citizen Tighe Barry of Code Pink, who regularly beseeches his empire to stop killing and making war, called out loudly that Prince Jamie was a crook, a predator and should be sent to jail. He said, “These guys are not the job creators, they’re the job destroyers.” Young citizen Rob Wohl joined four fellow citizens from Occupy Our Homes.org, shouting “stop foreclosures now.” Citizen Deborah Harris, a former paramedic who said she lost her home due to unethical business practices by the Prince’s bank, said: “I told him to face up to the little people, like me, … Continue reading

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

Jerome Powell (Thumbnail)

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 15, 2024 ~ A fascinating new academic paper has been released. Its title is “The Myth of Fed Political Independence.” Its premise is this: “The much-vaunted independence of the Federal Reserve is a myth. The Fed is not the bastion of sound monetary policy. Rather, it is just another politically coopted agency of the federal government.” The study asserts further that “Something like the Stockholm syndrome seems to describe the institutional relationship that exists between the U.S. Congress and the White House (the captors), and the Federal Reserve (the captives). The paper is written by Thomas Joseph Webster, Professor Emeritus of Economics at Pace University’s Lubin School of Business, who has written extensively on the Fed and the role that its quantitative easing has played in ballooning budget deficits, the national debt and inflation. Dr. Webster previously worked as an international economist with the … Continue reading

Former U.S. Labor Secretary Says Billionaires Have No Right to Exist Because their Wealth Comes from Five Illegal or Bad Practices

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 7, 2024 ~ Robert B. Reich, the former U.S. Labor Secretary under President Bill Clinton, a bestselling author and Professor Emeritus at UC Berkeley, penned an essay in May on why billionaires should not exist. Reich declares that there are only five ways someone can become a billionaire.  (Reich narrates his essay in the video below, complete with cool graphics.) Reich lists the following five methods of becoming a billionaire: (1) exploit a monopoly; (2) exploit inside information; (3) buy off politicians; (4) defraud investors; (5) get money from rich relatives. You are likely thinking that there is nothing wrong with inheriting wealth from a rich relative. But if the money is inherited from a billionaire relative, it means that he or she likely got that wealth through one of the first four methods. Thus, dirty money is simply moving from generation to generation. … Continue reading

The New York Fed Has Contracted Out Key Functions to JPMorgan Chase; We Filed a FOIA and Got These Strange Invoices

New York Fed Headquarters Building in Lower Manhattan

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 29, 2024 ~ The New York Fed, which has bank examiners engaged in supervising JPMorgan Chase, has also repeatedly provided bailout funds to JPMorgan Chase; was supervising JPMorgan Chase when it lost $6.2 billion of deposits from its federally-insured bank by gambling in derivatives on its London trading desk; allowed JPMorgan Chase’s Chairman and CEO, Jamie Dimon, to previously sit on the New York Fed’s Board of Directors, even as he faced the $6.2 billion derivatives trading scandal; and the New York Fed has exclusively used JPMorgan Chase to hold, as custodian, more than $2.3 trillion of the Federal Reserve’s Mortgage-Backed Securities (MBS) for the past 15-1/2 years – despite JPMorgan Chase admitting to five felony counts brought by the criminal division of the U.S. Department of Justice during that time. If there was an admitted felon in your neighborhood, would that be your … Continue reading

The Fed and FDIC Wake Up Suddenly to the Threat of Derivatives, Flunking the Four Largest Derivative Banks on their Wind-Down Plans

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 24, 2024 ~ Since the financial crash of 2008 and the Fed’s multi-trillion dollar bank bailouts that followed, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) has been waving a giant red flag every quarter in its “Bank Trading and Derivatives Activities” reports. For sixteen years the OCC has been reporting that just four megabanks are responsible for more than 80 percent of the trillions of dollars in bank derivatives. As the chart above shows, as of December 31, 2023, Goldman Sachs Bank USA, JPMorgan Chase Bank N.A., Citigroup’s Citibank and Bank of America held a staggering total of $168.26 trillion in derivatives out of a total of $192.46 trillion at all U.S. banks, savings associations and trust companies. That’s four banks holding 87 percent of all derivatives at all 4,587 federally-insured institutions in the U.S. that existed as of December 31, 2023. … Continue reading