April 2024 - cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

Billionaire-Owned Media Has Gone Full Throttle to Save Fellow Billionaire, Jamie Dimon
by Gunnar Larson 23 Apr '24

23 Apr '24

https://wallstreetonparade.com/2024/04/billionaire-owned-media-has-gone-ful… By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 22, 2024 ~ The Washington Post Editorial Board appears to have sipped the same kool aid as Bloomberg News. As we’ve frequently reported in the past, Bloomberg News has spent the better part of the last decade attempting to brainwash the public into believing that the head of JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon, is a respected statesman of Wall Street. (See here, here, and here.) In reality, JPMorgan Chase has admitted to an unprecedented five criminal felony counts with Dimon at the helm and paid fines in the tens of billions of dollars for an additional crime wave that rivals an organized crime family. Billionaire Michael Bloomberg, the former Mayor of New York, is the majority owner of Bloomberg LP, the owner of Bloomberg News. In 2016, Michael Bloomberg even co-authored an opinion piece with Dimon. 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 approximately $21,000 each per lease, per year, or about $210 million being paid by JPMorgan Chase to Michael Bloomberg’s company annually. Bloomberg’s data terminals are the cash cow of the company. The latest spin at Bloomberg News is over the top. On April 17, Bloomberg News posted what is effectively an infomercial for Jamie Dimon but is styled as a news interview. Its title: “When JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon Speaks, the World Listens.” (You can watch the video without the Bloomberg paywall at this YouTube link.) The interviewer in this piece of puffery is Bloomberg’s Emily Chang. In the opening minutes, Chang says this: “Jamie Dimon is an institution. Since 2005 he’s been the head of the world’s biggest bank, JPMorgan Chase. He’s widely seen as a rock in the storms of 21st century finance and even at times a kind of guardian of the U.S. and global economy.” Later in the interview, there is this exchange: Chang: “You’ve got this reputation of sort of a white knight for the economy. Do you ever feel pressure to come in with the save?” Dimon: “I feel like a tremendous amount of pressure to do — I’m just, my family comes first. Okay. But to do a great job for my company and our clients. I also feel to do a good job for my country. So, when my country wants me to do something, and we talk all the time to, you know, the Senators and regulators, what can we do to make the system better, to lift up the country, lift up inner cities. We’re trying to figure out how to make this country better. And I do consider that part of our job.” Against that fanciful alternative reality are these hard facts found in releases from the U.S. Department of Justice and other regulators during Dimon’s tenure at the helm of the bank: charging the bank with laundering money for Bernie Madoff, the largest Ponzi kingpin in U.S. history; charging the bank with using depositors money at its federally-insured bank to gamble in derivatives and lose $6.2 billion; charging the bank with selling toxic mortgages to unknowing investors; charging the bank with “schemes to defraud” the precious metals and United States Treasury market – the market that the U.S. desperately needs to function properly in order to pay its bills. Last year, JPMorgan Chase settled charges with the Attorney General of the U.S. Virgin Islands, who had credibly charged in a federal lawsuit that the bank “actively participated” in Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking of underage girls by funneling hard cash to him illegally for more than a decade. Later in the Bloomberg interview, Chang says this: “Many attribute Dimon’s success to what’s known as the ‘Fortress Balance Sheet.’ Essentially, he takes the cautious approach; never getting so overleveraged that the bank can’t withstand a major unforeseen shock.” The mirage of a fortress balance sheet at JPMorgan Chase is a running joke among experts in the field. Below is a chart showing that in the last quarter of 2019, the trading unit of JPMorgan Chase became so illiquid that it needed to borrow $2.59 trillion from an emergency repo loan program set up by the Federal Reserve. Fed's Repo Loans to Largest Borrowers, Q4 2019, Adjusted for Term of Loan Today, JPMorgan Chase’s federal regulators have indicated that they believe the bank is undercapitalized by 25 percent and have proposed new rules to make it raise that needed capital. Dimon is fighting this tooth and nail, going so far as to threaten to file a lawsuit against his own bank regulators. So along comes the Washington Post, owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, which has a joint marketing program with the Chase Bank unit of JPMorgan Chase. On Tuesday of last week, the Washington Post Editorial Board decided it would jump into the battle over the amount of capital large banks need to hold to prevent more banking crises and bank bailouts. The editorial suggested that bank regulators didn’t need to demand so much extra capital. (The editorial is behind a paywall.) Unfortunately, the WaPo Editorial Board grossly misrepresented what constitutes bank capital. WaPo provided a list of the full 12-members of the Editorial Board who had, ostensibly, penned this editorial or, at least, reviewed it. The names were: Opinion Editor David Shipley, Deputy Opinion Editor Charles Lane and Deputy Opinion Editor Stephen Stromberg, as well as writers Mary Duenwald, Shadi Hamid, David E. Hoffman, James Hohmann, Heather Long, Mili Mitra, Eduardo Porter, Keith B. Richburg and Molly Roberts. There are plenty of Harvard College graduates in that bunch as well as quite a number of folks who studied at Oxford. It’s difficult to believe that not one of them understands bank capital. The editorial writers go off the rails in the very first paragraph, writing: “…This familiar story is playing out once again as regulators around the world seek to impose higher capital requirements on systemically important banks — those deemed ‘too big to fail.’ This is a fancy way of saying they want banks to set aside larger rainy-day funds so they won’t need taxpayer bailouts in the next crisis.” “Rainy day fund.” Seriously? It was just last month that a financial writer at the New York Times, Andrew Ross Sorkin, had to admit that he had been mischaracterizing bank capital for more than 14 years by calling it a rainy day fund. As we pointed out at the time: “…bank capital is not a ‘fund.’ It’s not cash. It’s not liquid assets. It’s an accounting term and a balance sheet item whose components have changed over time. At present, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the federal bank regulator and agency that insures bank deposits up to a maximum of $250,000 per depositor, per bank, bank capital is the following: ‘Common equity tier 1 capital is the most loss-absorbing form of capital. It includes qualifying common stock and related surplus net of treasury stock; retained earnings; certain accumulated other comprehensive income (AOCI) elements if institution management does not make an AOCI opt-out election, plus or minus regulatory deductions or adjustments as appropriate; and qualifying common equity tier 1 minority interests. The federal banking agencies expect the majority of common equity tier 1 capital to be in the form of common voting shares and retained earnings. [Bold emphasis added.] ‘Additional tier 1 capital includes qualifying noncumulative perpetual preferred stock, bank-issued Small Business Lending Fund (SBLF) and Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) instruments that previously qualified for tier 1 capital, and qualifying tier 1 minority interests, less certain investments in other unconsolidated financial institutions’ instruments that would otherwise qualify as additional tier 1 capital. ‘Tier 2 Capital includes qualifying preferred stock, subordinated debt, and qualifying tier 2 minority interests…’ Why is having a lot of equity capital important for a megabank? Equity capital, and lots of it, is critically important for a bank like JPMorgan Chase because it forces shareholders to take the hit on their investment – and potentially be wiped out – before the losses spill over to the bank’s creditors – which include the mom and pop depositors at its federally-insured bank. Although the FDIC insures bank deposits (with the unconditional guarantee of the U.S. government standing behind that insurance up to $250,000 per depositor, per bank), in two of the bank collapses that occurred in the spring of last year, the FDIC elected to insure even uninsured depositors to prevent bank runs from spreading across the nation. This created billions of dollars in losses to the FDIC insurance fund. (Those banks were Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank.) The really embarrassing part of the WaPo editorial came in these two sentences: “Consider Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse a year ago. On paper, the bank had sufficient capital in the form of government bonds purchased before the Federal Reserve hiked interest rates.” The government bonds were securities purchased by the bank and held on its balance sheet as assets. They were not capital. If you’ve been getting your information about the safety and soundness of the megabanks on Wall Street from billionaire-owned media, you might want to rethink that strategy.

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The Fed Tallies Up a Big Threat to Financial Stability in the U.S.: “Runnables” at $21.3 Trillion
by Gunnar Larson 23 Apr '24

23 Apr '24

https://wallstreetonparade.com/2024/04/the-fed-tallies-up-a-big-threat-to-f… By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 23, 2024 ~ Federal Reserve Building in Washington, D.C. Federal Reserve Building in Washington, D.C. Last Friday, the Federal Reserve released its semi-annual Financial Stability Report. In the prior five years, the spring edition of the Fed’s Financial Stability Report was released in May. This year, for reasons we can only guess at (nervously), the Fed released the spring edition early, in April. Given that last spring the second, third and fourth largest bank failures in U.S. history occurred, handing over $30 billion in losses to the federal Deposit Insurance Fund, and one of those banks (Silicon Valley Bank) experienced the fastest run on its deposits in U.S. history, one particular item in the new report that caught our attention was this: “Overall, estimated runnable money-like financial liabilities grew 8.8 percent to $21.3 trillion (75 percent of nominal GDP) over the past year, as a decline in uninsured deposits was more than offset by an increase in assets under management at MMFs [Money Market Mutual Funds]. As a share of GDP, runnable liabilities remained above their historical median.” To our way of thinking, “runnable” is not a good word to be associated with banking. Americans look to banks for safety and soundness and big, secure vaults. The idea that things can be “running” out of banks like farm animals stampeding through a hole in the fence is not a comforting image. Add $21.3 trillion to that image in a country that is turning bank bailouts into an art form and you realize quickly that the Fed’s Financial Stability Report is little more than an exercise in CYA. It is, after all, the Fed that keeps bailing out these megabanks on Wall Street while ignoring the screaming need to reform them. The graph the Fed posted below its statement on “runnables” is even more hair-raising. (See below.) It breaks down the components of the $21.3 trillion in runnables. In simple terms, “runnables” are liabilities that the financial institution must pay on demand by the customer. Let’s zoom in on the runnable component that the Fed has listed as $6.692 trillion of uninsured deposits. It was uninsured deposits at Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank and to a lesser extent, First Republic Bank, that caused depositors to panic and run for the exits last spring. The FDIC insures deposits up to $250,000 per depositor, per bank. If there is negative news about a bank’s financial condition, depositors holding large amounts above the FDIC insurance limit will be the first to stampede toward the exits. In March of 2023, it took only a few negative social media posts to start an avalanche of digital deposit withdrawals at Silicon Valley Bank. In the span of just 24 hours, $42 billion in deposits had exited the bank with another $100 billion queued up to leave the next day – meaning it was possible for a federally-insured bank to lose 85 percent of its deposits in the span of 48 hours in the digital/social media age. But what the Fed is not telling you in its new Financial Stability Report about these uninsured deposits is that the vast majority of these uninsured deposits are held by a handful of megabanks on Wall Street – the same ones that the Fed bailed out with trillions of dollars in secret loans during and after the Wall Street collapse of 2008. (See The Deposit Insurance Fund Has a Balance of $117 Billion to Protect Deposits at 4,622 Banks. But One of Those Banks Has $1.4 Trillion in Uninsured Deposits.) In a report by the FDIC in May of last year on options for insurance reform, it reported the following: “Uninsured deposits are disproportionally concentrated in the largest banks. At year-end 2022, banks in the top 1 percent of the asset size distribution held about 72 percent of deposits in domestic offices but about 77 percent of uninsured deposits in domestic offices….” Another runnable listed by the Fed on its graph above is $5.8 trillion in Money Market Mutual Funds. These Funds had to be bailed out during the 2008 financial crisis and again during the COVID-19 pandemic. As we reported previously, “…just six Wall Street firms received 72 percent of the $162.9 billion in cumulative loans” made under the Fed’s money market bailout program during the pandemic. Four of those were Wall Street megabanks.

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CFTC Says Gemini Can't Pin Misstatements On 'Intermediary'
by Gunnar Larson 23 Apr '24

23 Apr '24

CFTC Says Gemini Can't Pin Misstatements On 'Intermediary' <https://www.law360.com/fintech/articles/1828018?nl_pk=d2b3e7ef-ab62-4a62-80…> By Aislinn Keely The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission has told a New York federal court that cryptocurrency exchange Gemini Trust Co. LLC is seeking to "shirk responsibility" for misleading the agency's staff about the risks of a proposed bitcoin futures contract. 1 document attached | Read full article » <https://www.law360.com/fintech/articles/1828018?nl_pk=d2b3e7ef-ab62-4a62-80…> | Save to favorites » <https://www.law360.com/fintech/articles/1828018?nl_pk=d2b3e7ef-ab62-4a62-80…>

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Lurch to the thermostat
by pro2rat＠yahoo.com.au 23 Apr '24

23 Apr '24

Dennett’s first book, Content and Consciousness was published in 1969. Sixteen other books and numerous papers adapted and extended its thesis – that intentionality can be ascribed, along a spectrum with no clear dividing line, impartially to minds, human brains, bees, computers, thermostats: it is a functional relation between object and environment. As to exactly when, in evolutionary or personal history, conscious intentionality arose, “don’t ask,” he said. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/apr/21/daniel-dennett-obituary

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Robinhood 'Meme Stock' Investors Lose New Class Cert. Bid
by Gunnar Larson 23 Apr '24

23 Apr '24

Shaun: How are you? Hope you are well. Sent you a few messages on Robinhood. Here is a headline from today: Robinhood 'Meme Stock' Investors Lose New Class Cert. Bid <https://www.law360.com/competition/articles/1827927?nl_pk=6416fd97-1dc4-4e0…> By Katryna Perera A Florida federal judge has denied a bid from Robinhood investors to file a new motion for class certification in a suit over the trading platform's suspension of so-called meme stock purchases, saying the deadline for class certification has passed and the investors have not shown a good reason to extend it. Order attached | Read full article » <https://www.law360.com/competition/articles/1827927?nl_pk=6416fd97-1dc4-4e0…> | Save to favorites » <https://www.law360.com/competition/articles/1827927?nl_pk=6416fd97-1dc4-4e0…> Have a great day! Thank you, Gunnar

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Congress Can Enact Corp. Transparency, Orgs Tell 11th Circ.
by Gunnar Larson 23 Apr '24

23 Apr '24

Congress Can Enact Corp. Transparency, Orgs Tell 11th Circ. <https://www.law360.com/banking/articles/1827709?nl_pk=feb6bbba-7878-4d39-be…> By Kevin Pinner Congress is empowered to require American companies to report their beneficial owners to the federal government because there is ample evidence they've previously been used to fund hostile foreign actors, evade sanctions and traffic drugs, two think tanks told the Eleventh Circuit in an amici brief. 2 documents attached | Read full article » <https://www.law360.com/banking/articles/1827709?nl_pk=feb6bbba-7878-4d39-be…> | Save to favorites » <https://www.law360.com/banking/articles/1827709?nl_pk=feb6bbba-7878-4d39-be…>

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PacWest Wants Suit Over Alleged Rate Hike Exposure Axed
by Gunnar Larson 23 Apr '24

23 Apr '24

PacWest Wants Suit Over Alleged Rate Hike Exposure Axed <https://www.law360.com/banking/articles/1828054?nl_pk=feb6bbba-7878-4d39-be…> By Katryna Perera PacWest Bancorp has urged a California federal judge to toss a proposed class action from an investor who alleges the California regional bank ignored warning signs posed by last year's collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, saying the fact that it did not anticipate the "unprecedented turmoil in the banking industry" is not a violation of federal securities laws. Memorandum attached | Read full article » <https://www.law360.com/banking/articles/1828054?nl_pk=feb6bbba-7878-4d39-be…> | Save to favorites » <https://www.law360.com/banking/articles/1828054?nl_pk=feb6bbba-7878-4d39-be…>

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Ex-Gov. Huckabee Says Bloomberg Can't Duck Copyright Suit
by Gunnar Larson 23 Apr '24

23 Apr '24

Ex-Gov. Huckabee Says Bloomberg Can't Duck Copyright Suit <https://www.law360.com/newyork/articles/1828013?nl_pk=ac5a3855-e47c-4403-be…> By Ivan Moreno Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee has urged a New York federal court not to dismiss Bloomberg from his proposed class action alleging copyright infringement of e-books to train the media company's large language model, arguing the business cannot lean on a fair use defense to toss the complaint at this stage. Response attached | Read full article » <https://www.law360.com/newyork/articles/1828013?nl_pk=ac5a3855-e47c-4403-be…> | Save to favorites » <https://www.law360.com/newyork/articles/1828013?nl_pk=ac5a3855-e47c-4403-be…>

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Exec In Insider Trading Case Says Feds Denied Him Counsel
by Gunnar Larson 23 Apr '24

23 Apr '24

Exec In Insider Trading Case Says Feds Denied Him Counsel <https://www.law360.com/capitalmarkets/articles/1828089?nl_pk=abe82add-2a33-…> By Jessica Corso The former CEO at the center of a novel insider trading case is asking that the California jury deciding his fate not be allowed to hear evidence obtained during a pre-indictment interrogation, arguing he was denied access to an attorney despite insisting on speaking to counsel at least a dozen times. Motion attached | Read full article » <https://www.law360.com/capitalmarkets/articles/1828089?nl_pk=abe82add-2a33-…> | Save to favorites » <https://www.law360.com/capitalmarkets/articles/1828089?nl_pk=abe82add-2a33-…>

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Justices To Mull Atty Fees For Preliminary Injunctions
by Gunnar Larson 23 Apr '24

23 Apr '24

Justices To Mull Atty Fees For Preliminary Injunctions <https://www.law360.com/legalethics/articles/1827955?nl_pk=153d4a8a-6fb9-4a5…> By Ryan Boysen The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday agreed to hear a case that could determine whether litigants can receive attorney fees for "prevailing" in a case by winning a preliminary injunction, despite never securing a final judgment. 3 documents attached | Read full article » <https://www.law360.com/legalethics/articles/1827955?nl_pk=153d4a8a-6fb9-4a5…> | Save to favorites » <https://www.law360.com/legalethics/articles/1827955?nl_pk=153d4a8a-6fb9-4a5…>

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