“This begs the question: did the U.S. have a Wall Street banking crisis similar to 2008 long before there was a pandemic crisis?”
by Pam Martens and Russ Martens
Wall Street on Parade
From 3 to 4 p.m. on Wednesday, February 19 of this year, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome (Jay) Powell met in the anteroom to his office in Washington, D.C. with Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase. Adding to the unusual nature of this meeting, the Chief Financial Officer of JPMorgan Chase, Jennifer Piepszak, had traveled with Dimon from New York to Washington, D.C. to attend this meeting. During the entire month of February, Powell met with no other CEO or CFO of any other Wall Street mega bank. We obtained this information from a review of the Fed Chairman’s daily calendar.
The meeting came one day after Reuters reported a “sweeping reshuffle” at JPMorgan’s investment bank and two weeks after Bloomberg News reported that the bank was, once again, under a criminal probe by the U.S. Department of Justice. This would be the fourth, publicly known, criminal probe at JPMorgan Chase during Dimon’s tenure as Chairman and CEO. A prior investigation into how JPMorgan Chase had handled the business bank account for Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff ended in two criminal felony counts against the bank in 2014, to which the bank pleaded guilty. Another investigation into the bank’s role in rigging foreign exchange trading ended in one criminal felony count in 2015, to which the bank also pleaded guilty.