Four events happened during the last two weeks that displayed levels of criminality that you rarely see outside of the mafia.

Two weeks ago the overnight loan market nearly froze up.

The Federal Reserve was forced to inject $100 billion a day. Who needed all of this money?

JP Morgan Chase.



The other notable thing to occur on September 16 was this: The largest bank in the United States, JPMorgan Chase, had its precious metals desk charged by the U.S. Department of Justice with being a criminal enterprise for approximately eight years as it rigged the prices of gold, silver and other precious metals. The head of that desk and two other precious metals traders were charged with racketeering under the RICO statute that is typically reserved for organized crime. The Justice Department said that the traders and their co-conspirators (others may be named at a later date) “conducted the affairs of the desk through a pattern of racketeering activity, specifically, wire fraud affecting a financial institution and bank fraud.” Wall Street veterans cannot remember any other time in history when the RICO statute (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) was used against a large bank in the United States. It was, however, used to indict members of the Gambino and Bonanno crime families in 2017.

A major bank being labeled a criminal enterprise under the RICO statute is out of the ordinary, but what makes this unprecedented is that JPM had admitted to three criminal felony counts within the past five years, and was still under probation in its plea agreement for the role it played in rigging the foreign currency exchange market.

As part of its plea agreement, JPMorgan Chase agreed to “not commit another crime in violation of the federal laws of the United States” during the term of probation.

So now JPMorgan Chase is getting $150 billion in emergency loans from the Fed, while getting accused of racketeering, after pleading guilty to three criminal felonies, and...

where are the congressional hearings?

Around the same time, Deutsche Bank’s headquarters office in Frankfurt, Germany was being raided by police for the second time in less than a year.

Deutsche Bank has been on a losing streak.



Its latest plan is to fire 18,000 workers and create a good bank/bad bank, isolating off unwanted assets that it plans to sell. Deutsche Bank has run through four different CEOs in the past four years and incurred losses in three of those years. Its share price has lost 90 percent of its value over the last dozen years

However the biggest problem with working at Deutsche Bank is the tendency of employees to turn up dead.

On Wednesday, Mr. Rehe was found dead, an apparent suicide, in his backyard in Tallinn, the Estonian police said.

Mr. Rehe’s death is another twist in the money-laundering scandal, which prompted a criminal investigation and forced Danske Bank, Denmark’s largest lender, to withdraw from Estonia and other Baltic countries.

...

The scope of the investigations widened Wednesday when prosecutors in Frankfurt confirmed that they were investigating Deutsche Bank’s role as an intermediary that helped Danske Bank process transactions in United States dollars for suspect customers. The New York Times has reported that Danske Bank was part of a federal investigation of whether Deutsche Bank complied with laws meant to stop money laundering and other crimes.

Deutsche Bank has a common stock market capitalization of $15.63 billion with a derivatives book of $49 trillion, showing strong similarities to Citigroup in 2008.