March 2023 - cypherpunks@lists.ogf.org

JPMorgan’s High Risk Footprint; Bloomberg News as PR Agent for Jamie Dimon; and the Untold Story of the Failed “Rescue” of First Republic by the Mega Banks
by Gunnar Larson 17 Mar '23

17 Mar '23

https://wallstreetonparade.com/2023/03/jpmorgans-high-risk-footprint-bloomb… By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 17, 2023 ~ Jamie Dimon Sits in Front of Trading Monitor in his Office (Source -- 60 Minutes Interview, November 10, 2019) Jamie Dimon Sits in Front of Trading Monitor in his Office (Source: 60 Minutes Interview, November 10, 2019) At 6:33 a.m. this morning, this big, bold headline appeared at the very top of Bloomberg News web page: “How Dimon and Yellen Helped Secure $30 Billion Lifeline for First Republic.” This headline is part of a very long, highly questionable promotion of Jamie Dimon by Bloomberg News as the wunderkind of Wall Street banking. In reality, under Dimon’s tenure as Chairman and CEO, JPMorgan Chase has been on an unprecedented crime spree, including being charged with five felony counts by the U.S. Department of Justice, and his bank is annually ranked by U.S. banking regulators as well as the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision as the riskiest bank on the planet. (See charts at this link at the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Financial Research. Give the page time to load the charts.) This morning’s headline at Bloomberg News was clearly meant to suggest that Dimon was the modern reincarnation of John Pierpont (J.P.) Morgan, who famously came to the rescue during the financial panic of 1907 with a private pool of money. The Bloomberg headline refers to the fact that JPMorgan Chase, along with Bank of America, Citigroup and Wells Fargo, each ponied up $5 billion to place as uninsured deposits into the teetering First Republic Bank, which has lost 72 percent of its market value year-to-date (as of yesterday’s close). The balance of the $30 billion came from seven additional banks. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) caps federal deposit insurance at $250,000 per depositor, per bank. The stock market looked at the teacup of $30 billion in rescue money, weighed it against the tsunami of facts in First Republic’s regulatory filings which showed, among other things, that the bank at year end had total deposits of $176.25 billion, of which $119.47 billion (or 68 percent) were uninsured by the FDIC, and said to itself, the last thing First Republic Bank needs is more uninsured deposits. The stock of First Republic Bank (ticker FRC) fell 14.7 percent in after-hours trading. Another troubling detail is that the securities units of JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America were among the book-running underwriters of a secondary stock offering of 2 million shares of First Republic on or around February 10 of this year. First Republic closed at $135.45 on February 10 versus $34.27 yesterday – meaning these underwriters may have legal exposure. In addition, the same underwriters led an August 1, 2022 sale of shares of First Republic Bank to the public, raising over $400 million for the bank. First Republic’s shares were even higher then, priced at $155.48. Units of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley were the other two underwriters in both the August and February secondary offerings. Both banks were part of yesterday’s $30 billion “rescue,” contributing $2.5 billion each in uninsured deposits to First Republic. Michael Bloomberg, the former Mayor of New York, is the majority owner of the publishing and data terminal empire that keeps publishing these slobbering headlines about Jamie Dimon. In 2016, Michael Bloomberg even co-authored an opinion piece with Dimon for the opinion section of Bloomberg News. The same year, the New York Post reported that JPMorgan Chase was the second largest customer of Bloomberg’s data terminal business with 10,000 leases of Bloomberg’s terminals. At the time, the terminals cost around $21,000 each per year or approximately $210 million being forked over by JPMorgan Chase to Michael Bloomberg’s company. Bloomberg’s data terminals are the cash cow of the company. During JPMorgan Chase’s London Whale scandal in 2012 and 2013, where the bank gambled with bank depositors’ money in exotic derivative trades in London and lost at least $6.2 billion, Michael Bloomberg was Mayor of New York City. Instead of condemning this outrageous risk-taking with federally-insured deposits, Bloomberg was quoted in the Wall Street Journal calling Dimon “a very smart, honest, great executive,” adding “The controls failed. He’ll look at that and fix it.” That statement appeared in May of 2012. The five felony counts followed from 2014 to 2020. On September 16, 2019, for the first time that anyone on Wall Street can remember, RICO charges were brought against traders at JPMorgan Chase by the U.S. Department of Justice. Its precious metals trading desk was characterized at the time as a racketeering enterprise by the Justice Department. The DOJ couldn’t bring itself to state the name of the bank where the traders were located, calling JPMorgan Chase simply “Bank A.” On September 29, 2020, the Justice Department brought the fourth and fifth felony counts against JPMorgan Chase. One count involved traders rigging the precious metals markets and the other count was for rigging the U.S. Treasury market. As the Justice Department had done in all the previous felony charges against the bank, it settled the charges with large fines, deferred prosecution agreements, and a probation period. (The bank has had three probation periods since 2014 for criminal activity.) But the Justice Department did one thing on September 29, 2020 that was unprecedented for a felony charge involving the rigging of the U.S. Treasury market. The Justice Department announced the charges without holding its usual press conference and taking questions from reporters. The Justice Department’s deal was so sweet for a criminal recidivist that it wrote in its deal with the bank that “an independent compliance monitor was unnecessary” despite also revealing that the bank “did not voluntarily and timely disclose to the Fraud Section and the Office the conduct described in the Statement of Facts.”

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WikiLeaks a CIA-backed fraud
by professor rat 17 Mar '23

17 Mar '23

Julian Assange recognised that the language of what amounted to the WikiLeaks Manifesto might appear a little “overblown”. He recognised that it had about it too much the flavour of “anarchy”. But in general when it was written he was pleased. John Young was not. In early January 2007 he decided that WikiLeaks was a CIA-backed fraud. “Fuck your cute hustle and disinformation campaign. Same old shit, working for the enemy … Fuck 'em all.” “We are going to fuck them all. Chinese mostly but not entirely a feint,” Assange cryptically replied…" Around 2010 Infowars, Alex Jones confirmed John Young's diagnosis of the Wikileaks-CIA-industrial-complex. 2014 WikiLeaks hasn’t spread a word of support for the Hong Kong protesters or for ANY of the lands and countries oppressed by nowadays Chinese government, including Chinese citizens. They just highlight "ooh the US govt is supporting the protests!" http://www.wikileaks-forum.com/-wikileaks-related-news/23/no-comment-wikile…

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[ot][spam][crazy] Fwd: Tweeted: Fields vesuvius
by fuzzyTew 17 Mar '23

17 Mar '23

i thought the prize money idea could help me spend time doing algorithms again but i did it wrong and instead it heavily heavily inhibited things similar to cryptocurrency arbitrage. the inhibtion seemed to spread through me associated with reading the vesuvius site which includes turorials for existing analysis work to detect ink inside 3d tomographic scans. deadline is end of 2023. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- ---------- /MachineLearning - @slashML A $250k contest to read ancient Roman papyrus scrolls with ML #ml #contest https://t.co/vI2MY1tYFq Read more at Twitter <https://twitter.com/slashML/status/1636219239081164804>

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Hawkish journalist says " Give war a chance "
by professor rat 17 Mar '23

17 Mar '23

Julian Warmonger Assmange in 2013 - we defend military secrecy and praise the spearhead troops of the illegal Iraq invasion ( the Supreme Crime in international law ) Julian " Support the COW troops " Assmange in 2017 - "The proper war is just beginning " Fast forward to last year - Mange supports fighting in Ukraine. The decade long pattern is clear - this govt registered, no-coiner, journalist badger is a Hawk. Probably a chickenhawk since he's reportedly in ' fear ' of this and ' fear ' of that for the same time period and longer. Search on ' Julian fears ' or " Assange fears ' for this awful truth. Thank fuck such a statist piece-of-shit will never pass for a c-punk again!

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Cryptocurrency: US FED Powell Is Lying About Not Starting CBDC's, War On Crypto, Chokepoint 2.0, Fight Back NOW!
by grarpamp 17 Mar '23

17 Mar '23

US FED San Francisco has just posted many job openings for crypto engineers. It has also been well known for months that the US FED has been operating a CBDC GovCoin pilot testbed in the US west. Also, the Fed has announced it will launch the service FedNow in July, which will allow banks to instantly transfer payments across the financial system... Reuters. Notice how the GovFedBanksters just killed Silvergate SEN and Signature SIGNET, then rolled out their own FedNow that does the same thing. The coordination and lies of these attacks in the war on crypto are unmistakeably classic and well rehearsed actions by these actors. The only way to win for freedom is to start buying and USING crypto, p2p around the world, right now today.

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A thermite blanket wrapped around the suspension cable of the Golden Gate would probably drop the span
by professor rat 16 Mar '23

16 Mar '23

TIM May - Cable Guy https://marc.info/?l=cypherpunks&m=100472302128063&w=2 When reposts are called terrorism we will have done our job

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The Next Bomb to Go Off in the Banking Crisis Will Be Derivatives
by Gunnar Larson 16 Mar '23

16 Mar '23

https://wallstreetonparade.com/2023/03/the-next-bomb-to-go-off-in-the-banki… By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 16, 2023 ~ Janet Yellen U. S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen finds herself in a very dubious position. Under the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation of 2010, the U.S. Treasury Secretary was given increased powers to oversee financial stability in the U.S. banking system. This increase in power came in response to the 2008 financial crisis – the worst financial collapse since the Great Depression. The legislation made the Treasury Secretary the Chair of the newly created Financial Stability Oversight Council (F-SOC), whose meetings include the heads of all of the federal agencies that supervise banks and trading on Wall Street. The legislation also required the Treasury Secretary’s authorization before the Federal Reserve could create any more of those $29 trillion emergency bailout programs for the mega banks – which had tethered themselves to casino trading on Wall Street since the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999. Yesterday, after the Swiss banking behemoth Credit Suisse had traded at an all-time low of less than two bucks; blown out its credit default swaps to unprecedented levels; and tanked the Dow Jones Industrial Average by more than 700 points intraday, Bloomberg News ran this headline at 12:54 p.m. – “US Treasury Reviewing US Banks’ Exposure to Credit Suisse.” By “exposure,” the Treasury really means how many billions of dollars of underwater derivatives are U.S. banks on the hook for as a counterparty to Credit Suisse. The Treasury also has to worry about U.S. banks’ exposure to Credit Suisse’s other major counterparties that U.S. banks do business with, even if the banks are not direct counterparties to Credit Suisse itself. If the U.S. Treasury Secretary and her staff at F-SOC were just yesterday getting around to finding out which U.S. banks had counterparty exposure to Credit Suisse’s derivatives, we are all in very big trouble. The serious problems at Credit Suisse have been making headlines for two years, including here at Wall Street On Parade. In July of 2021, the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison released a 165-page report on the internal investigation it had conducted for the Board of Credit Suisse into how the bank came to lose $5.5 billion conducting highly-leveraged and dodgy derivative trades for the family office hedge fund, Archegos Capital Management, which went belly-up in March of 2021. The Paul, Weiss lawyers wrote: “The Archegos-related losses sustained by CS are the result of a fundamental failure of management and controls in CS’s Investment Bank and, specifically, in its Prime Services business. The business was focused on maximizing short-term profits and failed to rein in and, indeed, enabled Archegos’s voracious risk-taking. There were numerous warning signals — including large, persistent limit breaches — indicating that Archegos’s concentrated, volatile, and severely under-margined swap positions posed potentially catastrophic risk to CS. Yet the business, from the in-business risk managers to the Global Head of Equities, as well as the risk function, failed to heed these signs, despite evidence that some individuals did raise concerns appropriately.” Six months ago, Dennis Kelleher, President and CEO of the nonprofit watchdog, Better Markets, released a statement about the deteriorating condition of Credit Suisse, highlighting the following: “As the financial condition of Credit Suisse continues to deteriorate, raising questions of whether it will collapse, the world and U.S. taxpayers should be deeply worried as multiple, simultaneous shocks shake the foundations of economies worldwide. Credit Suisse is a global, systemically significant, too-big-to-fail bank that operates in the U.S. and is deeply interconnected throughout the global financial system. Its failure would have widespread and largely unknown repercussions from the inconvenient to the possibly catastrophic. “That is due, in part, to the failure of the Federal Reserve to properly regulate the activities of foreign banks that have U.S.-based operations. The U.S. has a largely ineffective regulatory framework with gaping loopholes that fail to include some of even the most basic safety and soundness requirements, which incentivizes regulatory arbitrage. As a result, the U.S. financial system and economy are needlessly threatened. “An effective and appropriate regulatory framework for large foreign banks that covers all of their U.S.-based affiliates should have been established when the Fed set up so-called U.S.-based intermediate holding companies (‘IHCs’) that they regulate. Instead, U.S.-based branches of foreign banks (which are not consolidated within the IHC) face significantly weaker standards than the IHC, remarkably including no specific capital requirements in the U.S. Furthermore, the branches have significantly weaker liquidity requirements. This has resulted in many foreign banks – including in particular Credit Suisse – engaging in regulatory arbitrage by shifting large amounts of assets from their IHCs to their branches, entities that are entirely reliant on the resources of their foreign-based parent companies. The 2008 financial collapse proved that these resources are not available in periods of stress, which is why the U.S. bailed out so many foreign banks operating in the U.S. The Fed should have stopped that long ago. “As is well-known, risks in the global financial system that materialize elsewhere easily end up becoming risks here in the U.S. and threaten our financial system and economy. Those risks are amplified by the unprecedented fiscal and monetary policies attempting to address the many unexpected shocks from the pandemic and war. The Fed must see Credit Suisse as a warning sign and improve the regulatory framework for large foreign banks and all banks to ensure that the American financial system and economy are properly protected.” Credit Suisse’s reputation has taken more hits from its involvement in the Greensill Capital scandal and the infamous spy-gate scandal in 2019 where the bank spied on and followed various employees. Nervousness about Credit Suisse reached a pivotal moment in the fall of last year. On November 30, its 5-year Credit Default Swaps (CDS) blew out to 446 basis points. That was up from 55 basis points in January of 2022 and more than five times where CDS on its peer Swiss bank, UBS, were trading. The price of a Credit Default Swap reflects the cost to traders, or investors with exposure, to insuring themselves against a debt default by the bank. If all of this didn’t awaken Secretary Yellen from her slumber about the contagion risks posed by a deteriorating Credit Suisse, she should have been jolted upright on December 5 of last year when researchers for the Bank for International Settlement (Claudio Borio, Robert McCauley and Patrick McGuire) released an astonishing report that found that foreign banks had secret derivative debt that is “10 times their capital.” The report focused on the amount of derivative debt that was not being captured through regular statistical reporting because it is held off the banks’ balance sheets. The researchers refer to this exposure as “staggering” and note the potential for upsets to dollar swap lines to settle it as it comes due. The report raises further alarm bells with this: “For banks headquartered outside the United States, dollar debt from these instruments is estimated at $39 trillion, more than double their on-balance sheet dollar debt and more than 10 times their capital.” Their on-balance sheet dollar debt is $15 trillion. The most recent quarterly derivatives report from the U.S. regulator of national banks, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), found that as of September 30, 2022 four U.S. mega banks held 88.6 percent of all notional amounts of derivatives in the U.S. banking system. The total notional amount for all banks was $195 trillion. JPMorgan Chase held $54.3 trillion of that; Goldman Sachs held $50.97 trillion; Citigroup’s Citibank held $46 trillion; and Bank of America held $21.6 trillion. Even though the Dodd-Frank legislation required that most of these derivative trades move to central clearing, as of September 30, 2022 the OCC report found that 58.3 percent of these derivatives were not being centrally-cleared, meaning they were over-the-counter (OTC) private contracts between counterparties, thus adding another layer of opacity to an unaccountable system. For the role that Citigroup played in keeping these dangerous derivatives inside federally-insured banks, see our December 2014 report: Meet Your Newest Legislator: Citigroup.

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LIES-by-omission in Assmange Wikipedia
by professor rat 16 Mar '23

16 Mar '23

2013 seems to have gone down the memory hole - not very journalistically professional https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Assange The world yesterday JULIAN " Being guilty of aggravated rape has nothing to do with our party" A. Broinowski. Wikileaks Party NSW candidate for au Senate. 2013. "... Mr Assange agreed that some level of privacy was necessary for the successful operation of the military ..." http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/drive/assange-i-can-rule-from-… JULIAN " ‘[The military] protects the sovereignty of Australia. It protects the independence of Australia.' ASSANGE July, 2013

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Deadpool on the POTUS is wide open
by professor rat 16 Mar '23

16 Mar '23

This could become a litmus test for cypherpunks - sort the revolutionary anarchists from the gasbag eunuchs https://stiffs.com/celebrity/joebiden ♪ . . . ante up or quit / double stakes or split / I know you've got to see me / read em and weep / dead mans hand again . . . ♪

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Mange’s unhygienic EU appeal caught by prophylactic measures
by professor rat 16 Mar '23

16 Mar '23

Another black day for the corpse-media army https://kolektiva.social/@NatSecGeek/110027410990735891 Alexander Ruthol @Je5usaurus_rex@universeodon.com @NatSecGeek That’s upsetting. His right to avoid having to stand trial for rape is being trampled.

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