by Pam Martens and Russ Martens, Wall St On Parade:
There’s only one thing more dangerous than the largest bank in the United States, JPMorgan Chase, being charged with (and admitting to) five criminal felony counts by the U.S. Department of Justice since 2014 and a host of other fraud charges by federal regulators. What is more dangerous is having government officials look the other way at this recidivist history of crime at the nation’s largest bank.
In May, federal banking regulators allowed JPMorgan Chase to get even bigger, despite its unprecedented crime wave, by handing it the failed First Republic Bank in a sweetheart deal.
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Yesterday, we learned from online documents that the Comptroller of New York State has turned over a vast amount of the financial affairs of the fourth largest state in the country to this banking house of crime. (See related articles below.)
According to a New York State Comptroller website, JPMorgan Chase has 59 contracts with the state with a total current contract amount of $5.2 billion. The contracts include everything from banking services to the purchasing cards for state employees.
The New York State Comptroller is Thomas DiNapoli, who has held this no-term-limit position since February 7, 2007 – a span of 17 years. DiNapoli’s job description reads as follows: “The comptroller is the chief financial officer of the state government and the head of the Department of Audit and Control. The comptroller’s responsibilities include managing the state’s pension fund, auditing the spending practices of all state agencies and local governments, reporting on state finances, and serving as the custodian of unclaimed funds.”
As it turns out, JPMorgan Chase has a 7-year contract with the Comptroller’s office to serve as the custodian for the securities held in the New York State Common Retirement Fund for state workers. As of September 30, 2023, the Common Retirement Fund had a value of almost a quarter of a trillion dollars, or $246.3 billion to be exact.
But the Comptroller does not want the public to know all of the granular details in its contract between JPMorgan Chase and itself. Numerous paragraphs are blacked out in the document.
According to the Common Retirement Fund’s Annual Report, JPMorgan Chase – not the Comptroller or the Fund’s auditor – calculates the rate of return for the fund. That return was indicated as “negative 4.14 percent, gross of certain investment fees” for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2023.
How large is this custodial business at JPMorgan Chase, which holds so many securities for other parties?
On November 24, 2020, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the federal regulator of national banks, fined JPMorgan Chase $250 million for “failure to maintain adequate internal controls and internal audit over its fiduciary business.” That business includes its custodial business. The OCC Consent Order related to that fine revealed the following:
“The Bank maintains one of the world’s largest and most complex fiduciary businesses with total fiduciary and related assets of $29.1 trillion, including $1.3 trillion in fiduciary assets and $27.8 trillion of non-fiduciary custody assets.”
To put that $29.1 trillion into the proper perspective, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) reports that as of September 30, 2023 there were 4,049 commercial banks in the U.S. The total assets of those 4,049 banks was $22.2 trillion. But, somehow, just one of those banks has attracted $27.8 trillion of assets for which it serves as custodian.
Is there some secret sauce that JPMorgan Chase has going for it to attract all of that money?
In September 2020, when the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) released a bombshell investigative report about money laundering for criminals at some of the largest Wall Street banks, it had quite a bit to say about JPMorgan Chase. (The ICIJ investigation was based on secret documents leaked from FinCEN, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, a unit of the U.S. Treasury.)
According to the ICIJ report, JPMorgan Chase was involved in moving illicit funds for the fugitive, Jho Low, involving the notorious looting of public funds in Malaysia. Jho Low has been accused by multiple jurisdictions of playing a key role in the embezzlement of more than $4.5 billion from a Malaysian economic development fund, 1MDB. JPMorgan Chase moved $1.2 billion in money for Jho Low from 2013 to 2016, according to the report.
The ICIJ report also found that JPMorgan “processed more than $50 million in payments over a decade…for Paul Manafort, the former campaign manager for President Donald Trump. The bank shuttled at least $6.9 million in Manafort transactions in the 14 months after he resigned from the campaign amid a swirl of money laundering and corruption allegations spawning from his work with a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine.”
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