Courtesy of Pam Martens
Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO, JPMorgan Chase
According to Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s daily appointment calendar, he met privately with Jamie Dimon, the Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, from 3:00 to 3:30 p.m. on Thursday, September 30.
JPMorgan Chase is the largest bank in the United States. It is supervised – badly – by the Federal Reserve. Just how bad is that supervision? JPMorgan Chase is the only U.S. bank to have been charged by the Justice Department with five felony counts since 2014 – admitting to all of them.
But despite that unfathomable number of felony counts under the same Chairman and CEO, the Board of JPMorgan Chase didn’t sack Dimon. The Federal Reserve didn’t order JPMorgan Chase’s Board to sack Dimon either – not even after the bank was charged with rigging the U.S. Treasury market last year – the market that allows the U.S. government to pay its bills. Instead, what the Fed has done throughout this unprecedented era of felony charges against the nation’s largest bank is to give JPMorgan Chase a no-bid contract to be the custodian of all of the agency Mortgage-Backed Securities (MBS) that the Fed has been buying up since 2009. (See our previous report: Despite Its Five Felony Counts, the Federal Reserve Has Entrusted $2 Trillion in Bonds to JPMorgan Chase.)
Given this background, it looks spurious for Fed Chair Jerome Powell to be having private meetings with Jamie Dimon.
The meeting occurred on the same day that Powell gave testimony, in person, before the House Financial Services Committee in the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington, D.C. So, it is likely, although not a given, that Dimon traveled to Washington, D.C. from New York to meet with Powell. Exactly what was so important about this meeting that it had to be in person, instead of a phone call?
…
