Search Results for: JPMorgan

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 16, 2018 ~  On November 9 of last year, a mere six months ago, we asked the question: “Does Jerome Powell Hear the Alarm Bells from Flattening Yield Curve?” Jerome Powell is, of course, the new Chairman of the Federal Reserve — the U.S. central bank and the body in which the United States has entrusted its monetary policy, for better or worse. We wrote at the time: “As of 7:48 a.m. this morning, the spread between the 10-year Treasury Note (yielding 2.33 percent) and 30-year Treasury Bond (yielding 2.81 percent) is even smaller, at a meager 48 basis points or less than half of one percent. “It is a serious commentary on the bizarre financial times in which we live that a fixed income investor would be rewarded with less than half a percent of additional income to add 20 years of … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 11, 2018 ~  There’s a guy in Manhattan who’s sleeping about as well as Michael Cohen these days. That’s the broker at Morgan Stanley Smith Barney who opened the brokerage account for Donald Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen. According to a document posted at the Twitter page of Michael Avenatti, the lawyer for porn star Stormy Daniels, this fellow may have some explaining to do to the Feds if he didn’t file a Suspicious Activity Report (SAR) with the U.S. Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, known on the street as FinCEN. Avenatti’s document shows the following regarding a Morgan Stanley Smith Barney account: “From  July 13, 2017 through  September  8,  2017,  Mr. Cohen deposited three checks in the amounts of $505,000,  $250,000, and $250,000 in his Morgan  Stanley account. “Each deposit was remitted from an account held at First Republic Bank in the name … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 9, 2018 ~  Three years ago this month the U.S. Department of Justice brought felony charges against two of the largest Wall Street banks, JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup, for their involvement in rigging foreign currency markets. On the same date, two foreign banks, Barclays PLC and the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), were charged with felonies in the same matter. A fifth bank, UBS, was charged with a felony for its role in rigging the interest rate benchmark known as Libor. All five banks pleaded guilty to the charges. Citigroup was fined $925 million by the Justice Department for its foreign currency conduct that ran from as early as December 2007 until at least January 2013, roughly five years. JPMorgan was fined $550 million for rigging activity that ran from as early as July 2010 to January 2013, about two and a half … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 4, 2018 ~ On January 26 of this year, the Dow Jones Industrial Average set a record high of 26,616.71. It has been backing and filling since then but the trend line has been decidedly down. Yesterday, the Dow closed at 23,930.15 – almost 2700 points lower than its high set in January, despite the passage of a massive corporate welfare tax cut and hundreds of billions of dollars in announced stock buybacks. (Just this week, Dow component Apple announced it would be implementing a new $100 billion share repurchase program.) Yesterday, the Dow closed just barely in positive territory after having been down almost 400 points intraday. But, notably, big Wall Street bank stocks such as JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley all closed the day in the red. These banks share a common feature – and … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 30, 2018 ~  Tonight, at 7 p.m., Wall Street historian and author, Nomi Prins, will be speaking at The Strand bookstore at 828 Broadway in New York City. (See admission details here.) The appearance marks the launch of her latest book, Collusion: How Central Bankers Rigged the World, set for release tomorrow. While former FBI Director James Comey’s new book, A Higher Loyalty, has been getting lots of attention on cable news, Collusion is a far more important book. America can recover from a disastrous presidency, the topic of Comey’s book. But America might not be able to fully recover from another epic financial crash brought on by disastrous central bank policy – the subject of Prins’ book. Collusion not only proves that the 1 percent got bailed out while the 99 percent got sold out as a result of policies of the U.S. … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 26, 2018 ~  There is a great deal of hand-wringing in the U.S. media today over the plight of Deutsche Bank, the big German financial firm that has a hefty presence on Wall Street. Its first-quarter net profit slumped by 79 percent, it replaced its CEO of less than three years, John Cryan, this month with new CEO Christian Sewing whose game plan revolves around “painful” cuts. On September 15, 2008, a key moment in the 2008 financial collapse on Wall Street when Lehman Brothers filed bankruptcy, Merrill Lynch was forced into the arms of Bank of America and Citigroup teetered toward insolvency, Deutsche Bank’s shares closed the day at $58.80 (equivalent price adjusted for a subsequent stock split). Yesterday, its shares closed at $14.60 on the New York Stock Exchange. Not only has it not recovered from the financial crash but it’s … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 25, 2018 ~  Wall Street knows something that the rest of us don’t. Based on past experience, when Wall Street keeps secrets it never works out well for the rest of us. We’re thinking about the time Wall Street banks colluded on rigging prices on the Nasdaq market; or the time they rigged their research departments and told us to buy stocks that they were secretly callings dogs and crap; or the time they got S&P and Moody’s to give them triple-A ratings on subprime pools of debt while keeping it a secret that they had internal reports showing the loans didn’t meet their origination standards — and then they went out and secretly shorted that debt while continuing to sell it to their customers as a good investment. Yesterday, something decidedly weird happened as U.S. stock markets were being pummeled. Three of … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 24, 2018 ~  The U.S. Department of Justice has had an ongoing investigation into the potential rigging of the U.S. Treasury market by big banks on Wall Street for the past three years according to a series of past media reports. And yet, no formal charges have been brought. Lots of Wall Street watchers are wondering why – especially since private law firms have brought very specific charges in the matter into Federal court. There are only so many times the Justice Department can charge the largest Wall Street banks with felony counts for rigging markets before the public catches on that it’s a feature not a bug of their business model. Continuous rigging charges could lead to growing public demands and newspaper editorials to break up these serially-charged behemoths at a time when members of Congress – who depend on the largess … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 23, 2018 ~ If there’s any plaintiff’s law firm in America that should know racketeering when it sees it, it’s Cohen Milstein. It’s sued the major Wall Street banks repeatedly with a solid win rate for colluding to rig pretty much anything that trades. On Friday, in the same Federal District Court where its Wall Street actions are litigated, the Southern District of New York (SDNY), it filed its bombshell RICO lawsuit on behalf of the Democratic National Committee (DNC). The lawsuit does not name President Donald Trump as a defendant but it does name prominent members of his presidential campaign, including his son, Donald Jr., and son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, and advisers, Roger Stone and George Papadopoulos are also named, as are the Russian intelligence service, Russian Federation, several Russian operatives, Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. The lawsuit … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 20, 2018 ~  Make no mistake about it, the Big Law firms that played a major role in the Wall Street corruption that led to the financial crash of 2008 and have been burying corporate crimes through their crony ties to Washington for decades, are desperate to put their own man in the White House in 2020. On Tuesday, former Attorney General, Eric Holder, who headed the U.S. Department of Justice in the Obama administration, appeared on the MSNBC program, “All In with Chris Hayes.” Holder told Hayes that he was considering a run for the President of the United States in 2020 but had not made a final decision. (See video below.) Obviously, if Holder ran, it would be as a Democrat, something that is certain to enrage the progressive wing of the party. Holder effectively transplanted his pals from his law … Continue reading →