A $7 BILLION loss at JPMorgan? WHEN are our criminal bankers going face some real accountability?

the crap keeps flowing nonstop and these guys keep walking the streets with zero consequences for fraud, malfeasance, mismanagement, lying, and outright theft... meanwhile, you or i could be literally tossed in jail over a minor traffic violation... when is this shit going to cease...?

JPMorgan Fears Traders Obscured Losses in First Quarter

JPMorgan Chase which reported its second-quarter results on Friday, disclosed that the losses on a soured credit bet could mount to more than $7 billion, as the nation’s largest bank indicated that traders may have intentionally tried to conceal the extent of the red ink on the disastrous position.

Amid a swirl of questions about how the traders marked their bets, JPMorgan also said Friday that it would be forced to restate its first-quarter results.

If the trades, made out of the powerful chief investment office unit in London, had been properly valued, the bank said it would have lost $1.4 billion on the position in the first quarter.

Jamie Dimon, the bank’s chief executive who has consistently reassured investors that the losses would be contained, announced that the bank lost $4.4 billion on the botched trade in the second quarter. So far this year, the bank says it has lost $5.8 billion on the trades in credit derivatives.

In a statement, JPMorgan said that “the firm has recently discovered information that raises questions about the integrity of the trader marks and suggests that certain individuals may have been seeking to avoid showing the full amount of the losses in the portfolio during the first quarter.”

jamie dimon, crook-in-chief...

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The increasingly corrupt banking industry and the multiple ways the U.S. Government continues to prop it up [UPDATE]

glenn highly recommends the following moyers & company youtube clip and, after watching it, i strongly concur...

If you can find 25 minutes or so this weekend, I can’t recommend highly enough this segment from this week’s Bill Moyers program, with Yves Smith and Matt Taibbi, discussing the increasingly corrupt banking industry and the multiple ways the U.S. Government continues to prop it up.

[UPDATE]

here's a link and a few paragraphs from matt taibbi's rolling stone article from 21 June...

[T]his just-completed trial in downtown New York against three faceless financial executives really was historic. Over 10 years in the making, the case allowed federal prosecutors to make public for the first time the astonishing inner workings of the reigning American crime syndicate, which now operates not out of Little Italy and Las Vegas, but out of Wall Street.

The defendants in the case – Dominick Carollo, Steven Goldberg and Peter Grimm – worked for GE Capital, the finance arm of General Electric. Along with virtually every major bank and finance company on Wall Street – not just GE, but J.P. Morgan Chase, Bank of America, UBS, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Wachovia and more – these three Wall Street wiseguys spent the past decade taking part in a breathtakingly broad scheme to skim billions of dollars from the coffers of cities and small towns across America. The banks achieved this gigantic rip-off by secretly colluding to rig the public bids on municipal bonds, a business worth $3.7 trillion. By conspiring to lower the interest rates that towns earn on these investments, the banks systematically stole from schools, hospitals, libraries and nursing homes – from "virtually every state, district and territory in the United States," according to one settlement. And they did it so cleverly that the victims never even knew they were being ­cheated. No thumbs were broken, and nobody ended up in a landfill in New Jersey, but money disappeared, lots and lots of it, and its manner of disappearance had a familiar name: organized crime.

In fact, stripped of all the camouflaging financial verbiage, the crimes the defendants and their co-conspirators committed were virtually indistinguishable from the kind of thuggery practiced for decades by the Mafia, which has long made manipulation of public bids for things like garbage collection and construction contracts a cornerstone of its business. What's more, in the manner of old mob trials, Wall Street's secret machinations were revealed during the Carollo trial through crackling wiretap recordings and the lurid testimony of cooperating witnesses, who came into court with bowed heads, pointing fingers at their accomplices. The new-age gangsters even invented an elaborate code to hide their crimes. Like Elizabethan highway robbers who spoke in thieves' cant, or Italian mobsters who talked about "getting a button man to clip the capo," on tape after tape these Wall Street crooks coughed up phrases like "pull a nickel out" or "get to the right level" or "you're hanging out there" – all code words used to manipulate the interest rates on municipal bonds. The only thing that made this trial different from a typical mob trial was the scale of the crime.

the scale of corruption is breathtaking...

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JPMorgan Chase and Jamie Dimon decide on a little derivatives sunshine

bwahahahaha...! long overdue...

from the ft...

JPMorgan Chase announced surprise “significant mark-to-market losses” on credit derivatives in its chief investment office, an opaque unit whose aggressive trades have recently drawn controversy.

The bank said in a regulatory filing that the portfolio at the CIO had “proven to be riskier, more volatile and less effective as an economic hedge than the firm previously believed”.

On a hastily convened conference call, Jamie Dimon blamed “errors, sloppiness and bad judgment”.

Separately, JPMorgan said it was on the hook for as much as $4.2bn in excess of reserves for various legal proceedings.

there's been a great deal of abortive effort to uncover the precise extent of the toxic derivatives held by our criminal, too-big-to-fail banks... suddenly, in this surprise announcement, lo and behold, a little sunshine... my hunch is that this is the thin edge of the wedge and that's there a lot more to come...

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Speaking of the greed of the 1%, let's hear it for Jamie Dimon and his fellow bailed out banksters

hard on the heels of the story about bank of america ceo brian moynihan's $8.1M pay...

Dimon’s $23m trumps pay of US bank rivals

Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, earned $23.1m in total compensation last year, an 11 per cent increase over 2011, a higher level than the heads of the other large US banks.

In its annual report, JPMorgan said Mr Dimon received $1.4m in salary, a bonus of $4.5m and $17m in stock and options. John Stumpf, chief executive of Wells Fargo, earned $19.8m, while Citigroup’s Vikram Pandit earned $14.9m.

untrammeled greed... ya gotta love it...

Big Bank Profile: JPMorgan Chase

Federal taxpayer bailout received:	$94.7 billion
Lobbying fees in 9 months after bailout:	$4.2 million
Campaign contributions in 2008 federal elections:	$6.0 million
Profits for 1998-2008:	$97.6 billion
Profits for the first half of 2009:	$4.86 billion
Bank fees for first half of 2009:	$3.45 billion
Change in bank account fees (2003-08):	+249.5%
Percent of first half 2009 profit from fees:	71%
Credit card income for first half of 2009:	$3.56 billion
Median JPMorgan Chase bank teller wage:	$10.58/hour or $22,006 annually
2008 CEO Jamie Dimon pay:	$19.7 million (893 times median teller wage)
2008 bonus pool:	$8.7 billion
First half 2009 bonus and compensation pool:	$14.5 billion
Cash bonuses (top 5 execs) last 10 years:	$254.9 million
Effective tax rate in 2008:	-33.4%
Offshore subsidiaries in tax havens:	53

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A Park Avenue M.D. Rheumatologist supports OWS

Alexander Reed Kelly
Bertha Bauer is a board certified rheumatologist
who has been practicing medicine for 30 years.

she has an office in a building very close to where jpmorgan chase ceo jamie dimon lives... here's what she had to say...

I am completely sympathetic to what’s going on here. My profession is being ruined and decimated by the greed of Wall Street, by Big Pharma, by insurance companies. I’m practically forced out of practice after 30 years because I’m honest, because people looking at ways of hurting me and patients while CEOs are making millions and billions of dollars in the industries that control us now. So I am—I came running out of my office to say ‘Yes! Yes! I agree with you.’

nothing like a quote from somebody in the 'hood...

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City of London, the home base (besides Wall Street) of the world's banksters, is upset

add this whine to that of jamie dimon's sad bleating about basel from monday (see my previous post and related link)...

Britain to sue ECB over threat to City

Britain is to sue the European Central Bank for setting rules that allegedly handicap the City of London and would force one of the world’s largest clearing houses to decamp operations to the euro area.

The unprecedented legal action underlines the depth of ministerial concern over the ECB policy, which comes as the UK engages in a turf war with France and Germany over Europe’s financial markets infrastructure.

An ECB policy paper, released in the summer, requires clearing houses to be based in the eurozone if they handle more than 5 per cent of the market in a euro-denominated financial product.

Britain will ask the courts to strike down the rule on the grounds that it restricts the free movement of capital and infringes on the right to establish cross-border businesses across a multicurrency European Union.

The policy, if enforced by the ECB, would undermine London’s financial market infrastructure since it would require that clearing houses shift many of their operations to the eurozone – most likely Frankfurt or Paris.

British diplomats have long feared that Paris was leading attempts to rig market regulations in a bid to shift the centre of gravity for financial services from the City to the continent.

The UK fought off French attempts in recent months to insert into an EU directive a requirement for clearing houses to have access to central bank liquidity – a measure effectively confining most euro-denominated clearing to the eurozone.

of COURSE france and germany want not just a BIGGER piece of the pie, they want the BIGGEST piece... ain't it fun to watch the global banksters and their gang of crooks go to war with each other...?

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JPMorgan Chief Jamie Dimon should be in jail, not whining about Basel

yeah, why should u.s. banks, the very ones at the forefront of the rape and pillage of the global economy for years, have to face any rules or regulations...? i mean, after all, banksters are a special breed, right...?

JPMorgan chief says bank rules ‘anti-US’

New international bank capital rules are “anti-American” and the US should consider pulling out of the Basel group of global regulators, Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, has said.

In an interview with the Financial Times, Mr Dimon said he was supportive of forcing banks to have more capital but argued that moves to impose an additional charge on the largest global banks went too far, particularly for American banks.

The Basel III capital rules are designed to make the financial system safer by making banks build up risk-absorbent “core tier one” capital to at least 7 per cent of risk-weighted assets. The biggest, including JPMorgan, have to reach 9.5 per cent.

“I’m very close to thinking the United States shouldn’t be in Basel any more. I would not have agreed to rules that are blatantly anti-American,” he said. “Our regulators should go there and say: ‘If it’s not in the interests of the United States, we’re not doing it’.”

Mr Dimon also criticised global liquidity rules, arguing that regulations that viewed covered bonds – a European market feature – as highly liquid but discounted government-backed mortgage-backed securities in the US were unfair and that other details hit investment banking activity core to US banks hardest.

god forbid that "government-backed mortgage-backed securities" ("government-backed" = bailout; "mortgage-backed" = fraudulent) should EVER have to be backed up by real cash... oh, no-o-o-oooooo...

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Greek police are beating Greek citizens on behalf of internation banksters - "paper terrorists"

max keiser...



a big picture you can be sure we won't get from any traditional media source in the u.s...

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Revolt now or be a debt slave

max keiser talks about our beloved banksters, our super-rich, elite, financial terrorists, going about their daily business in the financial rape and pillage of the globe...

from russia today...

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Sarkozy lashes out at the banksters at WEF in Davos

i love it... i love it a LOT... 's about time one of the leaders of the industrialized nations put the cards on the table... i'm no sarkozy fan but he's got this one right...

The world has paid with tens of millions of unemployed, who were in no way to blame and who paid for everything. It caused a lot of anger. Too much is too much. The world was stupefied to see one of five biggest U.S. banks collapse like a house of cards. We saw that for the last 10 years, major institutions in which we thought we could trust had done things which had nothing to do with simple common sense. That's what happened... There is an ocean between flexibility and the scandal we saw. So if people present me as obsessed with regulation, it's because there is a need for regulation. I don't contest the principle of securitisation, but when one offshore country guaranteed 700 times its GDP, are we in the market economy or in a madhouse? Bonuses don't bother me, provided there are also ... draw-downs when there are losses. When things don't work, you can never find anyone responsible. Those who got bumper bonuses for seven years should have made losses in 2008 when things collapsed.

you tell 'em, nick... i've been waiting a long time to hear this kind of righteous rant from a major world leader...

(thanks to bobswern at daily kos...)

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