by Pam Martens and Russ Martens at Wall Street on Parade
Yesterday’s headline making the rounds was that JPMorgan Chase’s Board had given its Chairman and CEO, Jamie Dimon, a pay raise to $34.5 million for 2021 that was 10 percent more than 2020.
That headline provides an instructive lesson in what passes for breaking news today at mainstream media outlets when it comes to Wall Street’s megabanks. The majority of Americans aren’t outraged and demanding that Congress reform Wall Street because mainstream media has overtly decided to keep the public in the dark.
The real breaking news is that despite JPMorgan Chase admitting to five criminal felony counts brought by the U.S. Department of Justice over the past 7 years for rigging markets and laundering money for Bernie Madoff, the financial criminal of the century, the Board of JPMorgan Chase has not sacked Dimon, the man who sat at the helm during this unprecedented crime spree. Instead of sacking Dimon, the Board of the largest federally-insured, taxpayer-backstopped bank in the United States has made Dimon a billionaire.
The Board of JPMorgan Chase seems to have adopted a compensation model based on “the more felony counts, the bigger the paycheck.” Consider the following: On September 29, 2020, the Justice Department charged JPMorgan Chase with two felony counts, to which it admitted, and fined the bank $920 million of shareholders’ money to settle its fourth and fifth felony counts since 2014. One felony count was for rigging the precious metals markets while the other was for rigging the U.S. Treasury market – the market that allows the federal government to pay its bills.
Rigging the U.S. Treasury market used to be a big deal with splashy headlines. But on September 29, 2020 the Justice Department didn’t even hold its usual press conference to announce the charges against JPMorgan Chase and not one newspaper thought to mention that these were the fourth and fifth felony counts during the tenure of Dimon. Nor did any newspaper mention that the bank had admitted to all five criminal counts while being repeatedly put on probation by the Justice Department but continuing its crime spree. (See JPMorgan Chase’s unprecedented rap sheet under Dimon here.)
Now here’s where you need to pay close attention. Just 10 months after the bank admitted to its fourth and fifth felony counts, the Board of JPMorgan Chase gave Dimon a bonus of 1.5 million stock options, which had a value of $50 million on paper, according to a specialist cited at Bloomberg News. In its filing with the SEC announcing the stock award, the Board wrote this:…
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