AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc (AMC)

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Short AMC. No chance they are getting rid of Dark Pools that is the bread and butter of the Big Banks to kill and steal from retail traders.

Dark Pools owned by the biggest names on Wall Street – such as Goldman Sachs’ Sigma X2, JPMorgan Chase’s JPM-X, UBS’ UBSA, Morgan Stanley’s MSPL, and Credit Suisse’s Crossfinder — have been making tens of thousands of trades in the shares of GameStop on an ongoing weekly basis.  FINRA, Wall Street’s highly compromised self-regulator, reports the Dark Pool data on a stale basis, two to three weeks after the trading has occurred. It is then lumped together for the whole week, rendering it useless in terms of monitoring price manipulation. The chart above is taken from the latest available information from FINRA. (See our previous reporting on Dark Pools in Related Articles below.)
It’s a fair guess that you haven’t heard a peep about Dark Pools on the evening news. The fact that you haven’t is a perfect commentary on why mainstream media is failing the American people when it comes to exposing Wall Street’s serial looting of the little guy.
But when a bunch of quixotic posters on a Reddit message board can be parlayed into the exciting narrative of a Robinhood band taking on the evil hedge funds, it goes viral on the evening news – sucking in hundreds of thousands more unsophisticated retail investors.
It’s important to remember who has been pumping the GameStop/Reddit story on CNBC. That would be none other than Andrew Ross Sorkin, who created a completely false narrative about who and what caused the crash of 2008 – appearing to be intentionally protecting the reputations of the mega banks on Wall Street. Sorkin’s reporting on the 2008 crash looked even more suspect when we repeatedly asked the New York Times to correct his outrageously incorrect reporting and they failed to change one word.
What’s being ignored in all the current hoopla is that the largest federally-insured banks in this country, that now double as trading casinos and Dark Pools thanks to the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, have every incentive to suck in the small investor at the top of a market bubble in order to create an escape route for themselves. It’s called “distribution” and it occurs, by hook or crook, at the top of every market bubble.
Wall Street On Parade previously described how the retail investor was sucked into the dot.com bubble as follows:
“First, Wall Street brokerage firms issued knowingly false research reports to the public to trumpet the growth prospects for a specific company; second, the firms lined up big institutional clients who were instructed how and when to buy at escalating prices to make the stock price skyrocket. This had an official name inside the walls of the manipulators: ‘laddering.’ Next, managers of the fleets of stockbrokers at the various brokerage firms instructed their flock to stand pat as the stock prices soared. If the stockbroker tried to get his small client out with a profit, he was hit with a so-called ‘penalty bid,’ effectively taking away his commissions on the trade. This sent the clear warning to other stockbrokers to leave their clients in the dubious deals. Only the wealthy and elite were allowed to capture the bulk of profits on these deals.
“One other practice was called ‘spinning.’ This is how the SEC explained that technique in its charges against brokerage firm Salomon Smith Barney:
‘SSB, in a practice known as ‘spinning,’ provided preferential access to hot IPO shares to officers of existing or potential investment banking clients who were in a position to direct their companies’ investment banking business to SSB. The officers sold the shares provided to them for substantial profit. Subsequently, the companies for which the officers worked provided SSB with investment banking business. Executives of five telecom companies made approximately $40 million in profits from approximately 3.4 million IPO shares allocated from 1996-2001, and SSB earned over $404 million in investment banking fees from those companies during the same period.’
“Jack Grubman, a stock analyst at Salomon Smith Barney, was at the center of this era of collusion. He was charged by the SEC for ‘fraudulent research.’ He never went to trial or was criminally charged. He paid a $15 million fine, was barred from the industry, and walked away. His haul while at Salomon Smith Barney according to the SEC, ‘exceeded $67.5 million, including his multi-million dollar severance package.’ ”
It’s also important to remember who doesn’t like hedge funds that expose fraudulent stocks or over-valued stocks. That’s the same mega Wall Street banks that may have just issued buy ratings on these fraudulent or over-valued companies. (See WeWork’s Unraveling Is Another Indictment of Wall Street’s Universal Bank Model.)
Before you buy into the David versus Goliath saga of GameStop, it would be wise to step back and do some homework on what’s really going on.
This first appeared on Wall Street on Parade.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/01/29/gamestop-shares-dark-pools-owned-by-goldman-sachs-jpmorgan-ubs-et-al-have-made-tens-of-thousands-of-trades/

3-Count Felon, JPMorgan Chase, Caught Laundering More Dirty Money
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 21, 2020 ~

Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) has once again managed to do what federal bank regulators refuse to do in the United States – come clean with the American people about our dirty Wall Street banks.

ICIJ dropped a bombshell investigative report yesterday about money laundering for criminals at some of the biggest banks on Wall Street, but you won’t find a peep about it on the front page of today’s Wall Street Journal or New York Times’ print editions. In fact, the New York Times, as of 6:44 a.m. this morning, hasn’t reported the story at all. The Wall Street Journal carries an innocuous headline, “HSBC Stock Hits 25-Year Low,” putting the focus on the British bank, HSBC, when its focus should be on the largest bank in the U.S., JPMorgan Chase, a serial felon.

JPMorgan Chase has already pleaded guilty to three criminal felony counts brought by the U.S. Department of Justice since 2014. Two of those counts related to money laundering and failure to file suspicious activity reports on the business bank account it held for Bernie Madoff for decades. JPMorgan Chase actually told U.K. regulators that it suspected Madoff was running a Ponzi scheme but it failed to share those concerns with U.S. regulators, even though it was required under law to do so.

The third felony count brought by the U.S. Department of Justice came one year later, in 2015. It related to JPMorgan’s involvement in a bank cartel that was engaged in rigging foreign exchange trading. The bank is currently under a criminal investigation for allowing its precious metals desk to be turned into a racketeering enterprise according to the Justice Department. Multiple JPMorgan precious metals traders have already been charged under the RICO statute, typically reserved for members of organized crime.

The ICIJ investigation is based on secret documents leaked from FinCEN, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, a unit of the U.S. Treasury. The documents “show that five global banks — JPMorgan, HSBC, Standard Chartered Bank, Deutsche Bank and Bank of New York Mellon — kept profiting from powerful and dangerous players even after U.S. authorities fined these financial institutions for earlier failures to stem flows of dirty money.”

The report has much to say about JPMorgan Chase:

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 bombshell includes the charge that JPMorgan also “processed more than $50 million in payments over a decade, the records show, 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.”

More troubling activity at JPMorgan Chase includes the following, according to ICIJ investigators:

“JPMorgan also moved money for companies and people tied to corruption scandals in Venezuela that have helped create one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises. One in three Venezuelans is not getting enough to eat, the UN reported this year, and millions have fled the country.

“One of the Venezuelans who got help from JPMorgan was Alejandro ‘Piojo’ Isturiz, a former government official who has been charged by U.S. authorities as a player in an international money laundering scheme. Prosecutors allege that between 2011 and 2013 Isturiz and others solicited bribes to rig government energy contracts. The bank moved more than $63 million for companies linked to Isturiz and the money laundering scheme between 2012 and 2016, the FinCEN Files show…”

Wall Street likes to brag about its “KYC” rule (Know Your Customer). But the ICIJ investigators reveal that JPMorgan Chase paid little attention to that rule. The report found this:

“Take the case of a mysterious shell company called ABSI Enterprises. ABSI sent and received more than $1 billion in transactions through JPMorgan between January 2010 and July 2015, the FinCEN Files show.

“This amount included transactions through a direct bank account with JPMorgan, which ABSI closed in 2013, and through so-called correspondent banking arrangements, in which a bank with significant U.S. operations, such as JPMorgan, allows foreign banks to process U.S. dollar transactions through its own accounts.

“Compliance watchdogs based at the bank’s Columbus, Ohio, operations hub decided to try to figure out ABSI’s actual owner in 2015 after a Russian news site reported that a similarly-named shell company — which JPMorgan’s records indicated was the parent of ABSI — was linked to an underworld figure named Semion Mogilevich.

“Mogilevich has been described as the ‘Boss of Bosses’ of Russia mafia groups. When the FBI put him on its Top Ten Most Wanted list in 2009, it said his criminal network was involved in weapons and drug trafficking, extortion and contract murders. The chain-smoking, beefy Ukrainian’s signature method of neutralizing an enemy, The Guardian once reported, is the car bomb.

“The records show the compliance officers searched in vain through their files on the shell company, unable to determine who was behind the firm or what its true purpose was.

“While those details still remain unclear, JPMorgan had plenty of reasons to examine ABSI years earlier: it operated as a shell company in Cyprus, considered a major money laundering center at the time, and it was directing hundreds of millions of dollars through JPMorgan…

“Through a spokesperson, Mogilevich said he had no knowledge of ABSI.”

Given the roster of former CIA, Secret Service and FBI personnel that have gone to work at JPMorgan Chase over the years, we find it difficult to believe that the bank couldn’t identify the true owner(s) of ABSI.

In February of this year, the Financial Secrecy Index named the United States as the second worst country, behind only the Cayman Islands, in helping individuals hide their finances from the rule of law. The report noted that the U.S. “has yet to sign up to the Common Reporting Standard, which currently has 105 signatories.”

That makes the ICIJ’s money laundering report seem like a feature, not a bug, of the Wall Street banks.

We asked veteran trial lawyer Helen Davis Chaitman her thoughts on the latest ICIJ report. Chaitman and a fellow trial lawyer, Lance Gotthoffer, wrote a book in 2016 titled JPMadoff: The Unholy Alliance Between America’s Biggest Bank and America’s Biggest Crook. The book compares JPMorgan Chase to the Gambino crime family. Chaitman responded with this:

“Those of us who follow the activities of the world’s major financial institutions are not the least bit surprised by the documents in FinCEN’s files. On the contrary, it has been obvious for years that JPMorgan Chase, to take one example, operates just like an organized crime family…The criminalization of the major banks runs so deep that there is no solution other than to liquidate these banks and put their key management in prison.”

The Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase is Jamie Dimon. The Board of Directors of the bank has kept Dimon in these posts through the bank’s pleading guilty to the three criminal felony counts detailed above; through the “London Whale” scandal where the bank lost $6.2 billion of depositors’ money gambling in exotic derivatives in London; through the revelation that an internal whistleblower, lawyer Alayne Fleischmann, had witnessed and reported to management, to no avail, that there was “massive criminal securities fraud” in the mortgage operations of the bank; and through the current ongoing criminal investigation by the Justice Department of JPMorgan’s precious metals operations.

Dimon would be long gone had either the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal used its editorial page to demand his removal. Instead, the Wall Street Journal has used its editorial page to insanely paint the bank as a victim.

An October 20, 2013 editorial in the Wall Street Journal was headlined: “The Morgan Shakedown.” The unsigned editorial began with this:

“The tentative $13 billion settlement that the Justice Department appears to be extracting from J.P. Morgan Chase needs to be understood as a watershed moment in American capitalism. Federal law enforcers are confiscating roughly half of a company’s annual earnings for no other reason than because they can and because they want to appease their left-wing populist allies.”

Never mind that the $13 billion mortgage settlement came as a result of the Justice Department having thousands of documents illustrating what Alayne Fleischmann had alleged: “massive criminal securities fraud.”

In 2017 the Wall Street Journal editorial board was again attempting to portray the banks as victims, writing this time:

“Politicians and journalists have made careers of lamenting that too few bankers have been convicted of crimes. They overlook that, at least in America, to prove a crime you have to have enough evidence and that a mistake is not necessarily criminal.”

In late 2007, in the midst of what would become the greatest Wall Street crash at the hands of corrupt banks since the Great Depression, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. bought Dow Jones & Company, parent of the Wall Street Journal, after a century of ownership by the Bancroft family. The purchase curiously came at the same time that the Federal Reserve was secretly propping up the Wall Street banks with what would turn out to be three years of cumulative loans totaling $29 trillion to hide both the banks’ corruption and the Fed’s own negligence as a big bank supervisor.

In 2011, the Pew Research Center released a study on how front page business coverage had changed since the News Corp. purchase of the Wall Street Journal. Pew found that “coverage has clearly moved away from what had been the paper’s core mission under previous ownership—covering business and corporate America. In the past three and a half years, front-page coverage of business is down about one-third from what it had been in 2007, the last year of the old ownership regime.”

Every American should be horrified by this latest report from the ICIJ; every American should be outraged that the U.S. is now second only to the Cayman Islands for hiding dirty money for criminals; every American should demand that the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal give this story the front page coverage it deserves; and every American should look at this upcoming presidential election as the defining moment in whether the United States can be saved or will join a sad, tragic list of failed democracies.

https://wallstreetonparade.com/2020/09/3-count-felon-jpmorgan-chase-caught-laundering-more-dirty-money/