“U.S. prosecutors took an unusually aggressive turn in their investigation of price fixing at JPMorgan Chase & Co., describing its precious metals trading desk as a criminal enterprise operating inside the bank for nearly a decade.
The prosecutors charged the head of JPMorgan’s global precious metals trading operation and two others on Monday, accusing them of “conspiracy to conduct the affairs of an enterprise involved in interstate or foreign commerce through a pattern of racketeering activity.”
Tom Schoenberg and David Voreacos, JPMorgan’s Metals Desk Was a Criminal Enterprise
“From the very beginning of the year to the last two days of 2013, JPMorgan has dominated and controlled the price of silver and gold.
JPMorgan’s short market corners at the start of 2013 amounted to a 21% net share of the entire COMEX gold futures market (minus spreads) and an astounding (but typical) 35% of the entire COMEX silver market. No single entity had ever held such outsized and anti-competitive shares of any important regulated futures market. It is unreasonable not to associate such extreme market corners with what followed in price.”
Ted Butler, 3 January 2014
“Holder doubtless seriously believed at first that in a time of financial crisis, he was doing the right thing in constructing new forms of justice for banks, where nobody but the shareholders actually had to pay for crime. You’ve heard of victimless crimes; Holder created the victimless punishment.
But in the end, it was pretty convenient, wasn’t it, that ‘the right thing’ also happened to be the strategy that preserved Democratic Party relationships with big-dollar donors, kept the client base at Holder’s old firm nice and fat, made the influential rich immeasurably richer and allowed Eric Holder himself to crash-land into a giant pile of money upon resignation. What a coincidence!”
Matt Taibbi, Eric Holder, Wall Street Double Agent
