JPMorgan Chase

Bankers Tell It Like It Is

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LibertyGold&SilverBlog  March 4 2014 (Thanks, Gary)

Top 10 Quotes That Reveal Their Crimes

bankstersThe alternate financial media has been abuzz of late with bizarre stories of the alleged suicides of prominent members of world banking and finance. Over recent weeks, between eight and twelve (some say as many as twenty) successful traders and managers involved with FOREX trading and other derivative currency speculation, have conveniently “decided” to throw themselves from the roof tops of a variety of JP Morgan Chase banks in London, Hong Kong, and New York. Another top banking official, William Broeksmit, former executive at Deutsche Bank, was found hanged in his London home.

And others with strong connections to investment banking and the Federal Reserve itself have likewise met unusual deaths. Michael Dueker, former vice president of the St. Louis branch of the Federal Reserve, was found at the bottom of a fifty foot embankment below where he had just parked his car in Tacoma, Washington. The cause of death is still undetermined. The strangest of these deaths was Richard Talley, a former investment banker with Drexel Burnham Lambert who was alleged to have shot himself with a nail gun at least ten times in his Centennial, Colorado, home.

The keen observer will note that a great number of these deaths have occurred in tandem with the extensive multinational regulatory agency investigations of egregious fraud, price fixing, and “front run” trading in the FOREX markets and in the LIBOR index. These markets are gigantic and it is hard for the novice to comprehend the magnitude of money that is involved in daily transactions for both of these. The weekly volume on the FOREX market alone is excess of $20 trillion.

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The Mobsters Of Wall Street

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NationofChange  February 17 2014

jimHightowerAssume that you ran a business that was found guilty of bribery, forgery, perjury, defrauding homeowners, fleecing investors, swindling consumers, cheating credit card holders, violating U.S. trade laws and bilking American soldiers. Can you even imagine the kind of punishment you’d get?

How about zero? Nada. Nothing. Zilch. No jail time. Not even a fine. Plus, you still get to stay on as boss, you get to keep all the loot you gained from the crime spree, and you even get an $8.5 million pay raise!

Of course, you and I would never get such outrageous, absurd, kid-glove pampering by legal authorities. But, then, we’re not the capo of JPMorgan Chase, America’s biggest bank and a crime syndicate that apparently is too big to jail.

Jamie Dimon is the slick, vainglorious, silver-haired boss of the JPMorgan house of banksters. This CEO has fostered a culture of thievery during his years as a top executive at JPMorgan, leading to a shameful litany of crime. Yet, federal prosecutors have bowed to the politically connected Wall Streeter, refusing to ruffle his feathers with even a single criminal charge.

Meanwhile, one of the scams that Dimon directly supervised produced a $6 billion loss for shareholders in 2012. And his reign of mismanagement and illegalities cost the bank’s shareholders another $20 billion in federal fines last year, resulting in a 16 percent drop in profits. You might think the bank’s board of directors would at least slap Jamie’s wrist for the loss of those billions of dollars, but no — in January, they rewarded him, raising his pay by some 70 percent to a sweet $20 million!

The New York Times noted that, “To ordinary Americans,” such a reward for poor performance “may seem curious.” Curious? Uh-uh.

Try incomprehensible, insane and immoral. Wall Street’s haughty elites continue to demonstrate that they’re common mobsters — only not so ethical.

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The Mega Banks’ Most Devious Scam Yet

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RollingStone  February 12 2014

Banks are no longer just financing heavy industry. They are actually buying it up and inventing bigger, bolder and scarier scams than ever

WallStreetPigCall it the loophole that destroyed the world. It’s 1999, the tail end of the Clinton years. While the rest of America obsesses over Monica Lewinsky, Columbine and Mark McGwire’s biceps, Congress is feverishly crafting what could yet prove to be one of the most transformative laws in the history of our economy – a law that would make possible a broader concentration of financial and industrial power than we’ve seen in more than a century.

But the crazy thing is, nobody at the time quite knew it. Most observers on the Hill thought the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 – also known as the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act – was just the latest and boldest in a long line of deregulatory handouts to Wall Street that had begun in the Reagan years.

Wall Street had spent much of that era arguing that America’s banks needed to become bigger and badder, in order to compete globally with the German and Japanese-style financial giants, which were supposedly about to swallow up all the world’s banking business. So through legislative lackeys like red-faced Republican deregulatory enthusiast Phil Gramm, bank lobbyists were pushing a new law designed to wipe out 60-plus years of bedrock financial regulation. The key was repealing – or “modifying,” as bill proponents put it – the famed Glass-Steagall Act separating bankers and brokers, which had been passed in 1933 to prevent conflicts of interest within the finance sector that had led to the Great Depression. Now, commercial banks would be allowed to merge with investment banks and insurance companies, creating financial megafirms potentially far more powerful than had ever existed in America.

All of this was big enough news in itself. But it would take half a generation – till now, basically – to understand the most explosive part of the bill, which additionally legalized new forms of monopoly, allowing banks to merge with heavy industry. A tiny provision in the bill also permitted commercial banks to delve into any activity that is “complementary to a financial activity and does not pose a substantial risk to the safety or soundness of depository institutions or the financial system generally.”

Complementary to a financial activity. What the hell did that mean?

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Crime Does Pay For Banksters

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JonathanTurley  January 26 2014

JamieDimonIn the past we have discussed the allegedly illegal and fraudulent practices of the Big Banks that helped bring the economy into Recession, but until now, we have not seen such a blatant example of how it pays for Big Banks to break the rules and get ahead at the same time.  As you may recall, JP Morgan Chase Bank recently agreed to a $13 Billion dollar settlement with the Justice Department for allegedly defrauding customers.  That sounds like a big number, but that was only part of the total fines and penalties JP Morgan Chase was liable to pay in 2013 due to its less than honorable business practices.

It may surprise you that after agreeing to the $13 Billion settlement and having to pay other large fines, the CEO of Chase is getting a big raise. An $8.5 Million dollar raise!

“Jamie Dimon, chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, will be paid $20 million for his work in 2013, restoring most of the $11.5 million cut directors imposed a year earlier following the company’s embarrassing derivatives loss.  The sum includes a base salary of $1.5 million, plus $18.5 million of restricted stock, the company said in a public filing on Friday.  Dimon was paid $11.5 million for 2012, half of his $23 million compensation in each of the prior two years, according to company filings.   The raise, decided by the board of directors, comes after JPMorgan annual profits fell 16 percent in 2013 as the company agreed to pay out some $20 billion to settle legal claims from government agencies and private investors.” CNBC

I guess I am just naïve to think that if the bank I was in charge of was on the verge of civil and criminal charges and I had brokered the deal to “limit” the costs to the bank to $13 Billion in the one case, that maybe the Board of Directors might ask for my resignation, if not firing me on the spot.  After all, as the CNBC article quoted above states, the profits of the bank fell 16 percent!

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Why Did The Justice Department Kill The Madoff Subpoena Against JPMorgan?

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WallStreetOnParade  December 31 2013

Attorney General Eric Holder Testifying Before the House Judiciary Committee on May 15, 2013
Attorney General Eric Holder Testifying Before the House Judiciary Committee on May 15, 2013

Since December 16, major business media have failed to dig deeper into a potentially blockbuster story involving the Justice Department’s refusal to honor a Wall Street regulator’s request for a subpoena against JPMorgan Chase to obtain Madoff related documents the firm was refusing to turn over. JPMorgan Chase was Madoff’s banker for the last 22 years of his fraud. The Trustee in charge of recovering funds for Madoff’s victims, Irving Picard, said in a filing to the U.S. Supreme Court this Fall that JPMorgan stood “at the very center of Madoff’s fraud for over 20 years.”

It’s a big story when a serial miscreant like JPMorgan – which has promised its regulators to change its jaded ways in exchange for settlements – risks obstruction of justice charges by denying one of its key regulators internal documents. It becomes an explosive story when the Justice Department, the highest law enforcement agency in the land and the regulator’s only source of help in enforcing a subpoena for the documents, sides with the serial miscreant instead of the regulator.

The story began on December 16 when Scott Cohn of CNBC posted a story with this headline: “Feds Probe JPMorgan Interference in Madoff Case.” The article revealed that the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), a JPMorgan Chase regulator and part of the U.S. Treasury Department, had been so riled by JPMorgan’s refusal to turn over documents related to what its employees knew about the Madoff fraud that it referred the matter to the Treasury Department’s Inspector General.

The article quotes Richard Delmar, legal counsel to the Inspector General, who explains that Continue reading →