JP Morgan Chase & Co (JPM)

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According to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the bank holding companies of those same five banks as of December 31, 2019 were sitting on astronomical levels of highly combustible derivatives: in notional (face amount) of derivatives, JPMorgan Chase held $46.4 trillion; Citigroup held $40.8 trillion; Goldman Sachs Group had $39.6 trillion; Morgan Stanley sat on $32.5 trillion while Bank of America held $30.4 trillion. These five banks represented 83 percent of all derivatives held by the more than 5,000 Federally-insured banks in the U.S.

In what dystopian banking system from hell would that make any sense – especially given the fact that it was derivatives that blew up the Wall Street banks in 2008 and required a $29 trillion secret feeding tube from the Federal Reserve that lasted from December 2007 to July 2010. Instead of reforming the structure of the U.S. banking sector, the Federal Reserve has simply gone on a decade-long road show telling the world that our banks are “highly capitalized.” Congress has been equally missing in action.