Courtesy of Pam Martens
Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase
As Wall Street On Parade has previously reported, JPMorgan Chase has been fingered as the bank that contributed to the Federal Reserve having to intervene in the overnight loan market on September 17 of this year, and every business day since then. The Fed, through its money spigot, the New York Fed, has flooded Wall Street’s trading houses with hundreds of billions of dollars weekly in cheap loans over the past three months. That cheap, pre-announced source of liquidity has not only caused the stock market to set multiple new historic highs but has caused the stock of JPMorgan Chase to set multiple new historic highs as well.
Jamie Dimon is the Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase. Dimon admitted on his quarterly earnings call with analysts that his bank had backed away from lending on September 17. That backing away contributed to the overnight lending rate spiking from an average of about 2 percent to 10 percent on September 17. That rate spike was used by the Federal Reserve to justify its interventions – the first such interventions since the financial crisis.
But as it now turns out, few individuals have personally benefitted as much as Jamie Dimon as a result of the Fed’s actions.
Jamie Dimon is one of the largest individual shareholders in the stock of JPMorgan Chase. Those shares are the sole reason Dimon is a billionaire. On October 10, 2019, the shares of JPMorgan Chase closed at $114.21. On October 11, the New York Fed announced a dramatic escalation in its plans to flood money to Wall Street’s trading houses. It said it would be buying up $60 billion a month in Treasury bills; providing $35 billion twice a week in 14-day term loans; and making at least $75 billion in overnight loans available daily. (That $75 billion was later increased to $120 billion available daily.)
Here’s how the share price of JPMorgan Chase has reacted since the Fed’s announcement on October 11, 2019: On October 10, 2019, the day prior to the Fed’s announcement, the stock price of JPMorgan Chase closed its trading day at $114.21 per share. Yesterday, December 26, 2019, the share price of JPMorgan Chase closed at $139.04 – an increase in less than three months of 22 percent.
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