Search Results for: JPMorgan

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 →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 1, 2018 Yesterday we reported that the Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Jay Clayton – the man ostensibly in charge of providing financial transparency to the American people – has tens of millions of dollars in family net worth tied to a Delaware company specializing in providing secrecy to corporate entities. (This actually makes sense for an administration packed with billionaires with lots of tax haven accounts.) On the heels of that confidence-draining news comes the Financial Secrecy Index for 2018 which names the United States the 2nd worst country for facilitating financial secrecy and illicit money flows, just behind Switzerland. The accompanying report from the Tax Justice Network on the U.S. specifically calls out the state of Delaware, noting the following: “The U.S. provides a wide array of secrecy and tax-free facilities for non-residents, both at a Federal level and … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 30, 2018 The benchmark 10-year U.S. Treasury yield touched 2.7 percent on Monday and as of 8:16 a.m. this morning it has returned to that level. The sharp rise in Treasury yields produced a 177 point drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average yesterday. As of 10:07 a.m. this morning, the Dow had lost an additional 334 points. Many market watchers see even more dangerous headwinds for the stock market if the 10-year Treasury reaches a 3 percent yield. (See our analysis: Rising Treasury Yields Pose Risk for Those Over-Weighted in Stocks.) The recent market action suggests that investors are about to get a serious investing lesson in the concept of supply and demand. According to research from the major Wall Street banks, there is going to be a stunning doubling of the net issuance of U.S. Treasury securities in the current Federal … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 25, 2018 U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin opened his mouth at the base of the snow-covered mountains of Davos, Switzerland yesterday during the World Economic Forum and sent an instant chill through currency markets around the world. After Mnuchin made the highly inappropriate remark that a weak dollar would be good for U.S. trade prospects, the U.S. Dollar plunged to a three-year low. Anyone who knew in advance that Mnuchin was going to make such a comment could have cleaned up in currency trades yesterday. Two U.S. banks (JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup) and two foreign banks (Barclays and RBS) were charged with felony counts on May 20, 2015 for their roles in rigging foreign currency markets. Mnuchin is a former 17-year veteran of Goldman Sachs and should have known better than to make such a remark at an event covered by 500 journalists … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 23, 2018  President Donald Trump’s White House Counsel, Don McGahn, has a long history of gutting campaign finance laws to the benefit of corporations. His wife, Shannon McGahn, also an attorney, has a long history in efforts to roll back financial regulations on Wall Street. They have become corporate America’s favorite power couple in Washington. We’ll get to the details in a moment but first some necessary background on how campaign finance law was brazenly corrupted at the U.S. Supreme Court. In 2011, half of our research team (Pam Martens) filed an explosive exclusive with CounterPunch (which we now carry in our archives at Wall Street On Parade). The article revealed that a sitting justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas, had been entertained by billionaire Charles Koch and his wife, Elizabeth, at their lavish private club, the Vintage Club, in Indian … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 18, 2018 To understand how the U.S. central bank, known as the Federal Reserve, is influencing the froth of the stock market, you need to take a few moments to understand the interaction of bond yields with stock prices. Sophisticated investors who predominate in the markets compare the yield on bonds to the cash dividend yield on stocks to determine which is a better value. Following the financial crash of 2008, the Federal Reserve began buying up Treasury bonds and mortgage-backed bonds in the marketplace to the overall tune of more than $3 trillion. This has driven down bond yields and provided an artificial boost to the stock market. The Fed’s assets swelled from $914.8 billion at the end of 2007 to $4.5 trillion in 2014 from its bond buying program. In just the single year of 2013 the Fed’s assets mushroomed by … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 12, 2018 On Wednesday, the House Financial Services Committee held a hearing on a topic of critical importance to all Americans: restructuring the Federal Reserve into a modern day central bank instead of a captured regulator controlled by the very banks it purports to supervise. Dean Baker, the Senior Economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, presented an important assessment of reforms needed at the Fed but you will be hard pressed to find any mainstream media coverage of his testimony. Instead, President Trump’s characterization yesterday of Haiti and African nations as “sh**hole countries” is dominating the news. How much critical work is falling by the wayside because mainstream media, dependent on ratings, elects to pursue only the most sensational stories – which they have no shortage of finding under President Trump. Congress began its latest push to reform the Federal … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 11, 2018 The arrogance of the captured Wall Street regulators in Washington grows exponentially with each passing day. The only Wall Street bank which has admitted to three criminal felony charges – all coming within the past three years – has been allowed to send one of its trading executives to head a key post at Wall Street’s top cop – the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Failing up continues to be the business model in the nation’s capitol. The Trump administration, in its continuing Swamp-filling mandate from the billionaires behind the dark curtain, has elevated Brett Redfearn as Director of the Division of Trading and Markets at the SEC. Redfearn has worked at JPMorgan Securities from November 2004 to October 2017 when he was named to the new SEC post. In 2014 the U.S. Justice Department slapped JPMorgan with two criminal felony … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 10, 2018 On Monday, Institutional Investor’s Jonathan Kandell wrote a fascinating profile of Citigroup. He tried in every conceivable way to be kind to the company but the facts just kept getting in his way. Interestingly, the official name of the behemoth bank holding company, Citigroup, appears just once in the article. Its homey, cuddly moniker, “Citi,” appears 84 times. As the bank’s public relations legions attempt to erase the stain of Citigroup’s performance during the 2008 financial crisis and its Frankenbank birth in 1998 in violation of the Glass-Steagall Act and Bank Holding Act of 1956, changing the bank’s name is likely in the cards. When Sandy Weill and John Reed proposed to merge the disparate parts of Weill’s Travelers Group, which owned an insurance firm (Travelers), investment bank (Salomon Brothers) and retail brokerage (Smith Barney) with Reed’s Citicorp, parent of the … Continue reading →