Goldman Sachs is determined to destroy the world

It's still happening.  It's been happening all along.  Why would it have stopped when they were bailed out the last time?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Whaaaaat?

Chase Bank is forgiving all outstanding debt owed by customers of its two Canadian credit cards as it exits the country’s market.

Customers using the Amazon.ca Rewards Visa and the Marriott Rewards Premier Visa were pleasantly surprised to find the balance on their credit cards had been wiped clean.

The US-based bank, part of the firm JPMorgan Chase & Co, announced in March 2018 that it was closing its two Visa cards and leaving the Canadian credit card market after 13 years.

  Guardian

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Some good news

JP Morgan: Money laundry

The Swiss subsidiary of US bank JPMorgan Chase has been sanctioned by Switzerland’s financial regulator FINMA for money laundering and “seriously violating supervision laws,” according to the local weekly Handelszeitung.

[...]

The ruling was reportedly issued on June 30, but the regulator did not make it known as JPMorgan has been actively trying to prevent the publication.

[...]

It is two months since JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon slammed bitcoin, the world’s leading cryptocurrency, labeling it a fraud. According to Dimon, bitcoin could be useful “if you were a drug dealer or a murderer.”

[...]

At the time, the CEO predicted the eventual demise of the digital currency and pledged to fire any trader trading bitcoin for being stupid.

  RT

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Darker Still

You know the old joke: How do you make a killing on Wall Street and never risk a loss? Easy—use other people’s money. Jamie Dimon and his underlings at JPMorgan Chase have perfected this dark art at America’s largest bank, which boasts a balance sheet one-eighth the size of the entire US economy.

In the depths of the financial collapse, the bank had unloaded tens of thousands of toxic loans when they were worth next to nothing.

[...]

After JPMorgan’s deceitful activities in the housing market helped trigger the 2008 financial crash that cost millions of Americans their jobs, homes, and life savings, punishment was in order. Among a vast array of misconduct, JPMorgan engaged in the routine use of “robo-signing,” which allowed bank employees to automatically sign hundreds, even thousands, of foreclosure documents per day without verifying their contents. But in the United States, white-collar criminals rarely go to prison; instead, they negotiate settlements. Thus, on February 9, 2012, US Attorney General Eric Holder announced the National Mortgage Settlement, which fined JPMorgan Chase and four other mega-banks a total of $25 billion.

JPMorgan’s share of the settlement was $5.3 billion, but only $1.1 billion had to be paid in cash; the other $4.2 billion was to come in the form of financial relief for homeowners in danger of losing their homes to foreclosure.

[...]

A Nation investigation can now reveal how JPMorgan met part of its $8.2 billion settlement burden: by using other people’s money.

  The Nation

But of course they did.

Here’s how the alleged scam worked. JPMorgan moved to forgive the mortgages of tens of thousands of homeowners; the feds, in turn, credited these canceled loans against the penalties due under the 2012 and 2013 settlements. But here’s the rub: In many instances, JPMorgan was forgiving loans on properties it no longer owned.

[...]

JPMorgan no longer owned the properties because it had sold the mortgages years earlier to 21 third-party investors, including three companies owned by Larry Schneider.

And Schneider's companies have a lawsuit against JP Morgan in court now. Don't hold your breath for justice.

In a bizarre twist, a company associated with the Church of Scientology facilitated the apparent scheme. Nationwide Title Clearing, a document-processing company with close ties to the church, produced and filed the documents that JPMorgan needed to claim ownership and cancel the loans.

[...]

Like every financial CEO in the country, Dimon is obligated by law to sign a document every year attesting to his knowledge of and responsibility for his bank’s operations. The law establishes punishments of $1 million in fines and imprisonment of up to 10 years for knowingly making false certifications.

Like I said, don't hold your breath.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

The Russians! It's the Russians!

President Obama and his top national security advisers began receiving periodic briefings on the huge cyberattack at JPMorgan Chase and other financial institutions this summer, part of a new effort to keep security officials as updated on major cyberattacks as they are on Russian incursions into Ukraine or attacks by the Islamic State.

But in the JPMorgan case, according to administration officials familiar with the briefings, who would not speak on the record about intelligence matters, no one could tell the president what he most wanted to know: What was the motive of the attack? “The question kept coming back, ‘Is this plain old theft, or is Putin retaliating?’ ” one senior official said, referring to the American-led sanctions on Russia. “And the answer was: ‘We don’t know for sure.’ ”

More than three months after the first attacks were discovered, the source is still unclear and there is no evidence any money was taken from any institution.

  NYT

No, but it sure is good for a Red Scare tactic.  Gee, a huge cyberattack with no money taken and no one claiming responsibility.  Hmmm.

We’re finally getting Russia back into the role of Evil Enemy #1. It seemed downright ridiculous when Condi Rice kept harping on Russia as the world’s villain and our need to combat its attempts to take over the world, when the more likely truth is that Russia is a major block in our path to doing it. Condi’s probably drooling over what the Obama administration has been able to do in that regard.

The F.B.I. has begun a criminal inquiry into the attacks, and the Secret Service has been involved as well. But the scale and breadth of the attacks — and the lack of clarity about the hackers’ identity or motive — show not only the vulnerability of the most heavily fortified American financial institutions but also the difficulty, despite billions of dollars spent in detection technology, in finding the sources of attack.

And because it is so difficult to trace an attack to its source, it is next to impossible to deter one, security industry experts said.

But we can still say it was the Russians.

If you haven’t already, please listen to ex-CIA Russian expert Ray McGovern’s interview regarding the Ukraine/Russia issue.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Where Have All the Bankers Gone?

A popular myth persists that there were wholesale suicides after the 1929 Great Crash. Centre-left economic historian, JK Galbraith, skewered this theory when he analyzed the statistics in the wake of the Wall Street Crash, which preceded the great depression.

Nearly a century later, a remarkable uptick in banker suicides has raised questions with at least 6 suspicious deaths in recent weeks. Two men jumped from the top of JP Morgan skyscrapers alone (one each in London and Hong Kong).

[...]

Pending toxicology reports on a third JPMorgan death, and even if we dismiss the death of a Tata motors MD in Thailand, a remarkable number of dubious deaths/suicides have occurred in recent weeks, alongside some unexplained disappearances.

  RT

Hate to see them go.

And about that myth - wholesale suicides?  Hey, six in a few weeks seems like a pretty big deal. 

There are many things wrong with contemporary finance which need fixing (especially those dubious links with government), but the premature demise of fellow humans is not something to celebrate here.

Well, excuuuuuuuuse me.  Who's celebrating?  I just don't feel all that sorry.

Ultimately, all banks have a surfeit of candidates at the top and many talented personnel are squeezed out. Stress driving insecurity builds alongside a gradual realization that outside the (perversely) competitive but cosseting investment bank environment, many managers simply cannot envisage coping. In a world where the taper terror and a decade of dismal government have led us to the brink of ongoing crisis, it is easy to see why sadly, some are driven to take their lives.

Okay. So where does that leave the unexplained disappearances? Did those bankers take the money and run?  Were they "removed" from the possibility of spilling the beans?

However, with the euro crisis festering, emerging markets in chaos and no clear understanding of western economic resilience to tapering...one thing ought to be clear: Bankers have never been more insecure.

Gee, I feel bad for them.

Yet another dark cloud is looming over global banks as officials examine their behavior in the massive foreign exchange market, threatening to deal a new blow to earnings and reputations.

Regulators in the U.S., Europe and Asia are in the early stages of investigating whether traders at the world's top banks manipulated foreign exchange benchmarks to profit at the expense of their clients.

Goldman Sachs (GS, Fortune 500), Citigroup (C, Fortune 500), JP Morgan (JPM, Fortune 500), Deutsche Bank (DB), Barclays (BCS), Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), UBS (UBS) and HSBC (HBCYF) are among the firms in their sights.

  Money, Nov. 2013

More than 20 traders across Wall Street have either been put on leave, suspended or fired since the foreign exchange investigations were formally announced in October.

  Reuters, Feb 5, 2014

And what are they keeping from us this time? All that’s gone before could well have just been the beginning cracks.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Banksters in the News

The European Commission has slapped record fines of 1.7 billion euro on eight major banks for manipulating lending rates that play a key role in the global economy. The penalties will add to already escalating costs for leading global lenders.

The EU fines marks the latest to be levied on banks and financial institutions for making profits or masking their problems by fraudulently rigging the rates that reflect the cost of lending money to each other.

The banks fined are Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, Royal Bank of Scotland, JPMorgan, Barclays, Societe Generale, UBS and RP Martin, the EC said in a statement.

[...]

The fines from the EU are the first time a US bank has been involved in the rate-rigging scandal, as Citigroup has been fined 70 million pounds.

[...]

The Libor rate is seen as an indicator of a lender’s stability. Put simply, the stronger the bank, the lower the interbank lending rate it has.

Barclays, RBS, UBS, Rabobank and brokerage ICAP have already paid out a total of $3.5 billion in fines to settle the accusations related to Libor rate-rigging, the Financial Times reported.

[...]

Manipulation of the Libor rate is one of the largest scandals to hit the finance industry in recent years.

It forced both Barclays CEO Bob Diamond and chairman Marcus Agius to resign. Barclays’ new chief Anthony Jenkins has now insisted that employees sign a “code of honor” to avoid future rigging scandals.

  RT

Code of honor amongst banksters. Like the code of honor amongst thieves, I suppose.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

And Hillarity Ensured

I almost couldn't believe it when I heard that JP Morgan Chase was going to do a live Twitter Q&A with the public – you know, all those people around the world they've been bending over and robbing for, oh, the last decade or so. On the all-time list of public relations screw-ups, it's hard to say where this decision by America's most hated commercial bank (with apologies to Bank of America, which probably finishes a 49ers-like very close second this year) to engage the enraged public on Twitter ranks. For sure, anyway, it's right up there with Abercrombie and Fitch's rollout of thong underwear for 10 year-olds and the $440,000 afterparty AIG executives threw for themselves at the St. Regis Resort in Monarch Beach, California after securing a federal bailout.

[...]

Only on Wall Street would a bank that's about to pay out the biggest settlement in the history of settlements unironically engage the public, expecting ordinary people to sincerely ask one of their top-decision makers for career advice. The notion that this was their idea of reaching out to the public in a moment of public relations crisis – we'll take questions now on how you can become just as successful as us! – was doomed to be hilarious, and it turned out to be that and more.

Chase trotted out Vice Chairman Jimmy Lee to be pushed into the social media buzz-saw. [...] From the public's perspective, Lee basically represents the banker who foreclosed on your house and the guy who liquidated your factory in a deal financed by junk bonds, all in one.

Unsurprisingly, the public barraged him with abusive Tweets, and the bank ultimately had to cancel the Q&A.

  Rolling Stone

Go have a laugh: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/chases-twitter-gambit-devolves-into-all-time-pr-fiasco-20131115

And be sure and check out Stace Keach’s video reading of the Tweets. It’s in the article.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

And Speaking of Chase Bank

Federal authorities plan to arrest two former JPMorgan Chase & Co employees on suspicion that they tried to conceal the size of the investment bank's $6bn trading loss last year, according to a published report.

  alJazeera

No, There's Nothing Wrong with Our Financial System. Why Do You Ask?

A piece in the Wall Street Journal dug up yet another damning fact about Jamie Dimon's J.P. Morgan Chase. This time, reporters got hold of an internal bank survey of its credit-card collections suits. It turns out that Chase's own survey found that huge numbers of lawsuits filed by the bank contained errors.

From the article:

The bank studied roughly 1,000 lawsuits and found mistakes in 9% of the cases, said people familiar with the review.

"Any rate above zero is high," said one person familiar with the bank's conversations with regulators.

The story is actually far worse than is being described in the papers. It involves allegations of a rather complicated scam tied to secondary sales of credit-card debt – it's easier to sell credit card debt when a judgment has already been obtained, so it seems companies like Chase will go to great lengths, including mass robosigning and other abuses, to obtain judgments.

Chase is the headline target of these new investigations, but most analysts believe the same exact things go on at other banks and credit companies.

  Matt Taibbi

Yeah, I think you can take THAT to the bank, so to speak.

And then we have this:

It turns out that in recent times, if you paid them an extra subscription fee of a few thousand dollars a month, Thomson Reuters would allow you access to the Consumer Confidence data a full two seconds earlier than the rest of its subscribers – at 9:54:58 a.m., as opposed to 9:55:00 exactly.

[...]

The two-second head start allows high-speed traders to plunge into the markets en masse and retreat all the way back again before most of the world sees this market-altering economic data.

[...]

There's a reason why high-frequency trading is such a lucrative business. With the tiniest head start on market-moving data, computerized traders can make giant piles of money.

[...]

Deutsche Borse sells access to its Chicago Business Barometer three minutes early to anyone willing the relatively modest sum of 2,000 Euros a year.

Meanwhile, the Institute for Supply Management teamed up with Thomson Reuters to also sell a kind of enhanced access to the results to a monthly survey of purchasing managers (which measures both manufacturing and non-manufacturing industries). The ISM releases the data to everyone at 10:00 a.m. once a month, but those who pay extra get the data in a form that's a few ticks easier for computer trading algorithms to read and digest.

[...]

Thomson Reuters threw the P.R.-office version of a hissy fit today after [New York State Attorney General Eric] Schneiderman closed shop on their neat little revenue stream. The firm refused to permanently end the practice and defiantly insisted upon their right to sell data to whomever they want, whenever they want.

  Matt Taibbi

Because they can.

But there is a tiny ray of sunshine out there trying to push back: Massachusetts freshman Senator Elizabeth Warren.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and a bipartisan group of senators introduced a bill Thursday that would break up the nation's biggest banks, forcing them to split their routine commercial banking operations from their risky trading activities.

The 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, which Congress passed in response to the 1929 financial crash, separated traditional commercial banks—which hold Americans' checking and savings accounts and are backed by taxpayer money—from investment banks, which make riskier bets. But in 1999, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act—which was backed by the Clinton administration—gutted this law. A bonanza of bank mergers ensued, and the size of these new behemoths, such as Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase, and Bank of America, made their downfalls more threatening to the overall US economy. [...] The senators behind this new bill—a group that includes John McCain (R-Ariz.), Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), and Angus King (I-Maine)—refer to their legislation as the 21st Century Glass-Steagall Act because it would reinstate a firewall between normal banking functions and casino-like finance.

  Mother Jones

It’s a start. If it gets any traction.

One Big, Rotten Bamboozle - Plenty Players

So you say you don’t believe in conspiracies.

[The primary function of financial ratings companies] is to help define what's safe to buy, and what isn't. A triple-A rating is to the financial world what the USDA seal of approval is to a meat-eater, or virginity is to a Catholic. It's supposed to be sacrosanct, inviolable: According to Moody's own reports, AAA investments "should survive the equivalent of the U.S. Great Depression."

[...]

Thanks to a mountain of evidence gathered for a pair of major lawsuits by the San Diego-based law firm Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd, documents that for the most part have never been seen by the general public, we now know that the nation's two top ratings companies, Moody's and S&P, have for many years been shameless tools for the banks, willing to give just about anything a high rating in exchange for cash.

In incriminating e-mail after incriminating e-mail, executives and analysts from these companies are caught admitting their entire business model is crooked.

"Lord help our fucking scam . . . this has to be the stupidest place I have worked at," writes one Standard & Poor's executive. "As you know, I had difficulties explaining 'HOW' we got to those numbers since there is no science behind it," confesses a high-ranking S&P analyst. "If we are just going to make it up in order to rate deals, then quants [quantitative analysts] are of precious little value," complains another senior S&P man. "Let's hope we are all wealthy and retired by the time this house of card[s] falters," ruminates one more.

[...]

The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission published a case study in 2011 of Moody's in particular and discovered that between 2000 and 2007, the agency gave nearly 45,000 mortgage-backed securities AAA ratings. One year Moody's doled out AAA ratings to 30 mortgage-backed securities every day, 83 percent of which were ultimately downgraded. "This crisis could not have happened without the rating agencies," the commission concluded.

[...]

[The emails] also lay out in detail the evolution of the industrywide fraud that led to implosion of the world economy – how banks, hedge funds, mortgage lenders and ratings agencies, working at an extraordinary level of cooperation, teamed up to disguise and then sell near-worthless loans as AAA securities.

  Matt Taibbi

Not for the Squeamish

Today, [Carl Levin] decided to serve up en brochette Jamie Dimon, that smug moocher of the public purse from JP Morgan. This comes on the heels of a 300-page report from Levin's subcommittee in which Dimon and the grifters who ran his bank make Bonnie And Clyde look like penny-ante stick-up kids working the strip malls. They also lied to each other, which is the kind of thing that will happen if you throw five weasels into a barrel and roll it down a hill.

[...]

The strategy forced JPMorgan Chase to reduce and restate first-quarter earnings last year. It ultimately led to a 50% cut in Dimon's 2012 pay, reducing his annual compensation to $11.5 million.

Try not to gag on that last sentence and then gaze in awe. ... This is the kind of thing that everybody said was terrible in 2008, and everybody said should never, ever, happen again, and if we only hand over a few trillion, well, everything will be all better and Daddy will get well and never loot your piggy bank again because Uncle Bookie gave him a sure thing in the fourth at Belmont. If anybody tried this crap at the track, they'd limp home with two kneecaps turned around the other way.

  Charlie Pierce

The whole story is available through that link and the links embedded therein if you care to read it.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

It Must Be Campaign Season

But, hey, whatever it takes....

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman on Monday filed a lawsuit against JPMorgan Chase for alleged fraud relating to mortgage-backed securities, a type of investment that consists of mortgage loans that have been pooled together. The case is the first brought by a White House task force called the Residential Mortgage-Backed Securities Working Group against a major bank. President Barack Obama formed the group in January to investigate fraud in the mortgage-backed securities market.

  Raw Story

Financial Reform? Bah. Humbug.

Among the more laughable features of commentaries on Jamie Dimon’s recently revealed $2 billion (at least) gambling losses are earnest pronouncements that the debacle will stymie the efforts by Dimon and Wall Street in general to further deregulate the financial industry.

[...]

The last time naked credit default swaps (naked meaning they are traded as speculative bets rather than hedges) got in the headlines was the fall of 2008, when, via the massive exposure of AIG to these same instruments, the global financial system trembled on the brink.

[...]

Major players on Wall Street were swift to take action. Led by Dimon’s JPMorgan Chase, nine leading financial institutions set up the CDS Dealers Consortium and hired the master derivatives lobbyist Ed Rosen, of Cleary, Gottlieb, to keep things in order. Rosen crafted a memo suggesting that the market remain under the benign supervision of the Federal Reserve (which at that point was underwriting the banks to the tune of $7 trillion and more.) Meanwhile Timothy Geithner at Treasury was working on his master plan for policing the CDS market. Eventually, in May, 2009, Geithner unveiled his proposal, identical in all essential respects to Rosen’s memo.

A lot of money has flowed under the bridge and into legislators’pockets since then. The Dodd Frank financial reform legislation finally hit Obama’s desk, laced with loopholes and riddled with exceptions.

[...]

Now comes the fiasco of [JPMorgan's] $2 billion (make that $4 billion, at least) loss on a hugely stupid bet dutifully reported in the media as a “hedge.”

[...]

Back in 1986, Dimon was the bright young protégé of “Sandy” Weill, when he was forced out of American Express in a coup de requin. Master and servant made their way to Baltimore, Maryland, where Weill acquired a storefront moneylending firm called Commercial Credit. Potted media biographies flung together since the news of JP Morgan’s massive gambling losses broke last week put a decorous sheen on this phase of Dimon’s career. ABC News for example described the Baltimore company as “a sleepy finance firm that catered to middle-class clients.” Weill’s former assistant, Alison Falls, got it right at the time. “Hey guys,” she is said to have remarked “this is the loansharking business.”

  Counter Punch

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Banksters Still Rule

CEO Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase (shown left) went public with a whale of tale today about how one of its investors, Bruno Michel Iksil, known as the “London Whale” lost $2 billion in bad bets on volatile synthetic credit securities. What is most striking about the story is that Dimon was the executive who led efforts to limit reforms by the Federal Reserve after the last financial scandal. Now he says “There were many errors, sloppiness and bad judgment . . . grievous mistakes, they were self-inflicted.” Sound familiar?

Iksil is also known as “Voldemort” because of the massive power he wielded. Dimon has worked hard to prevent reforms limiting or monitoring such risk-taking enterprises. This includes opposition to the Volcker rule and related reforms.

Now Dimon is expected to blame the whale rather than his own anti-reform position.

  Jonathan Turley

JP Morgan chief executive Jamie Dimon had been crucial in persuading the US government to water down new regulations, in particular the so-called Volcker rule that aims to limit risk-taking by banks considered "too big to fail".

[...]

[A] City trader at the centre of a $2bn trading loss at JP Morgan Chase [...] returned to his home in Paris on Friday as the repercussions of the loss spread across the markets.

Some $13bn was wiped off the value of America's largest bank after it admitted the scale of the trading activities of Bruno Iksil – nicknamed the London Whale for his bullish trading – and his colleagues in the bank's little known "chief investment office".

[...]

Iksil is thought to be one of the highest-paid bankers in London and his New York-based boss, Ina Drew, whose pay has to be published, received $14m last year.

The Financial Services Authority has been informed and will liaise closely with the bank, which had earned an unrivaled reputation for navigating successfully through the 2008 banking crisis.

  UK Guardian

And by navigating successfully we mean grabbing all the life rafts from the peasant taxpayers.

Senator Jeff Merkely [...] said: "This really is a textbook illustration of why we need a strong Volcker rule. In the words of JP Morgan's chief executive, he had a strategy that was, quote, 'flawed, complex, poorly reviewed and poorly monitored'. And if that sounds eerily familiar, it's because it is an exact description of the type of risk-taking that got us into this financial crisis and recession."

[...]

US representative Barney Frank, [...] who gave his name to the 2010 Dodd-Frank law on regulation, said: "This regrettable news from JP Morgan Chase obviously goes counter to the bank's narrative blaming excessive regulation for the woes of financial institutions. The argument that financial institutions do not need the new rules to help them avoid the irresponsible actions that led to the crisis of 2008 is at least $2bn harder to make today."

But who's complaining?

This has occasioned some muted calls for increased regulation of the industry on the grounds that many of these people are avaricious gombeen bastards who should not have another chance at wrecking the world.

[...]

Honest to god, these people.

  Charlie Pierce