Search Results for: JPMorgan

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 8, 2018 The U.S. Senate is about to set in motion the next financial crash on Wall Street but you would never know it from watching cable news channels CNN or MSNBC last evening. Both news channels obsessed for endless hours over the Trump-Russia scandal and a hush money payoff to porn star Stormy Daniels, neglecting one of the most critical topics of the day: what was happening on the Senate floor this week. Some of the most informed Democratic voices in the U.S. Senate are making impassioned and heartbreaking appeals to their colleagues this week on the floor of the U.S. Senate to vote down Senate bill S.2155, which carries the Orwellian title: “The Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief and Consumer Protection Act.” The bill is a Republican/Wall Street lobbyist masquerade to ostensibly help small community banks but will effectively gut enhanced oversight … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 5, 2018 Today’s front page of the print edition of the New York Times has articles on the Oscars, the election in Italy, Ben Carson’s reign at HUD and the death of an elderly Briton who once broke the four-minute mile among numerous other less than urgent news pieces. What it does not have on its front page is any headline showing concern that the seminal piece of Wall Street reform legislation of the Obama era, which already has enough loopholes to set off champagne corks on K Street, may be dismantled this week by a vote in the Senate. The move would come in the midst of the 10th anniversary of the greatest Wall Street collapse and economic catastrophe since the Great Depression, both of which were underpinned by casino capitalism — Wall Street banks making obscenely leveraged bets for the house … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 1, 2018 Last evening, the front page digital edition of the New York Times dropped another bombshell in what increasingly feels like a badly scripted daily soap opera that could perhaps be called “As the White House Turns” or “Days of Our Messed Up Lives.” The Times report focused on big loans that were made to Jared Kushner’s family business by two financial firms after he met at the White House with executives from those firms. There was a $184 million loan from private equity firm Apollo. There was also a $325 million loan by mega Wall Street bank Citigroup shortly after a visit by Citigroup’s CEO Michael Corbat to Kushner’s office at the White House in the spring of 2017. Despite nepotism laws governing the Executive Branch, Kushner is both the son-in-law to President Trump as well as a Senior Advisor. Despite … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 27, 2018 MarketWatch’s Tomi Kilgore reported on February 13, 2018 that JPMorgan analyst Stephen Tusa “became even more bearish” on General Electric (which has been a component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average since its creation in 1896). Kilgore reports further that the JPMorgan analyst had “slashed his stock price target to $14” from his previous target of $16. Only Deutsche Bank’s stock analyst, John Inch, says Kilgore, has a lower target, at $13. JPMorgan, along with all of the other major Wall Street firms, is still allowed to issue research ratings on stocks despite the firms being charged by the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2003 in the epic research scandal on Wall Street. Yesterday morning, as the Dow was on its way to closing up a whopping 399 points, GE plunged to a nickel below the JPMorgan analyst’s prediction, touching an … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 24, 2018 On Thursday, the President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, William C. Dudley, held a press conference to effectively tell Puerto Ricans to suck it up as they attempt to recover from an epic humanitarian crisis caused by Hurricane Maria, which devastated infrastructure and wiped out electricity to the entire Island in September. When it comes to corrupt Wall Street banks that are in the process of failing, the Federal Reserve can always find trillions of dollars to funnel into the banks’ coffers at almost zero interest rates to prop them back up. It does that through its power to electronically create money out of thin air. Take, for example, the $16 trillion it secretly lavished on Wall Street banks and their foreign counterparts during the financial crash of 2007 to 2010. For deviant banks and their shareholders, the … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 21, 2018 Nothing buttresses Senator Bernie Sanders’ position that fraud on Wall Street is not a bug but a feature better than the news last week that the Citigroup Board was bumping up CEO Michael Corbat’s pay by 48 percent to $23 million for 2017. Corbat has sat at the helm of the bank since October 2012 as the bank has paid more than $12 billion in fines and restitution for serial abuses of the public and investors, including its first criminal felony count in more than a century of existence. The felony count came on May 20, 2015 from the U.S. Department of Justice over the bank’s involvement in a bank cartel that was rigging foreign currency markets. Numerous other charges against the bank have focused on money-laundering. Citigroup’s long history of involvement in money-laundering also gives the appearance of being a … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 20, 2018 On February 14, the week after the Dow Jones Industrial Average experienced two separate days of more than 1,000-point losses, the House Financial Services’ Subcommittee on Capital Markets, Securities and Investment convened a hearing to discuss various legislative proposals to return to the wild west era of derivatives trading on Wall Street. (Many, including Wall Street On Parade, believe that we’ve never left that era – the risks have simply been hidden behind a dark curtain. See related articles below.) One lonely voice for sanity on the witness panel, which was stacked with industry trade groups, was Andy Green, Managing Director at the Economic Policy Center for American Progress. Green’s written testimony stated that the legislative proposals “slice, dice, or otherwise poke holes – sometimes large holes – in the firewalls placed in the derivatives markets by post 2008 reforms….” Green … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 16, 2018 In towns across America there are laws that prevent government officials from meeting secretly. Typically, the officials must first publish a notice to the public with the date and time of the meeting; circulate the notice in a widely read publication and post the notice on the official website in order to give the public advance notice and the ability to attend the meeting or hearing. The ability of the U.S. public to attend government meetings; hear firsthand what is being done with taxpayers’ dollars; ask questions about any perceived conflicts that might exist; and file Sunshine law requests for documents is how citizens hold government officials accountable. When we lose that, we lose the entire concept of America as a country of the people, by the people and for the people. Thus, any effort at all to whittle away at … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 14, 2018 On Monday, an anonymous whistleblower sent a letter via his lawyer to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) charging that traders were manipulating the stock market volatility index known as the VIX. The whistleblower said that a flaw exists in the VIX that “allows trading firms with sophisticated algorithms to move the VIX up or down by simply posting quotes on S&P options and without needing to physically engage in any trading or deploying any capital.” The Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) where VIX options and futures trade, quickly denied the claims. This whistleblower claims come at a time when billions of dollars are blowing up around the globe because traders placed wrong-way bets that the VIX would maintain the low volatility levels it has enjoyed over multiple years as a result of low … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 6, 2018 In little more than a week, $4 trillion in global stock market value has vanished as quickly as a snow cone in July. The heretofore uncanny calm of a U.S. stock market setting regular new highs was punctured Friday with a 665.7 point selloff in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. That was followed by yesterday’s bungee dive in late afternoon that took the Dow down 1597 points followed by a quick partial retracement that left the Dow down 1,175 points on the day. (That plunge and retracement brought back memories of the Flash Crash of 2010. See charts above and our coverage: Flash Crash Report Raises Flags on Quasi Stock Exchanges Inside Wall Street Firms.) On a point loss basis, yesterday’s decline was the largest in Dow history. On a percentage basis, it paled in comparison to the 22.6 percent decline … Continue reading →