By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 28, 2014
It
doesn’t get any more Orwellian than this: Wall Street mega banks crash
the U.S. financial system in 2008. Hundreds of thousands of financial
industry workers lose their jobs. Then, beginning late last year, a rash
of suspicious deaths start to occur among current and former bank
employees. Next we learn that four of the Wall Street mega banks likely
hold over $680 billion face amount of life insurance on their workers,
payable to the banks, not the families. We ask their Federal regulator
for the details of this life insurance under a Freedom of Information
Act request and we’re told the information constitutes “trade secrets.”
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the
life expectancy of a 25 year old male
with a Bachelor’s degree or higher as of 2006 was 81 years of age. But
in the past five months, five highly educated JPMorgan male employees in
their 30s and one former employee aged 28, have died under suspicious
circumstances, including three of whom allegedly leaped off buildings – a
statistical rarity even during the height of the financial crisis in
2008.
There is one other major obstacle to brushing away these
deaths as random occurrences – they are not happening at JPMorgan’s
closest peer bank – Citigroup. Both JPMorgan and Citigroup are global
financial institutions with both commercial banking and investment
banking operations. Their employee counts are similar – 260,000
employees for JPMorgan versus 251,000 for Citigroup.
Both JPMorgan
and Citigroup also own massive amounts of bank-owned life insurance
(BOLI), a controversial practice that pays the corporation when a
current or former employee dies. (In the case of former employees, the
banks conduct regular “death sweeps” of public records using former
employees’ Social Security numbers to learn if a former employee has
died and then submits a request for payment of the death benefit to the
insurance company.)
Wall Street On Parade carefully researched
public death announcements over the past 12 months which named the
decedent as a current or former employee of Citigroup or its commercial
banking unit, Citibank. We found no data suggesting Citigroup was
experiencing the same rash of deaths of young men in their 30s as
JPMorgan Chase. Nor did we discover any press reports of leaps from
buildings among Citigroup’s workers.
Given the above set of facts,
on March 21 of this year, we wrote to the regulator of national banks,
the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), seeking the
following information under the Freedom of Information Act (See
OCC Response to Wall Street On Parade’s Request for Banker Death Information):
The
number of deaths from 2008 through March 21, 2014 on which JPMorgan
Chase collected death benefits; the total face amount of BOLI life
insurance in force at JPMorgan; the total number of former and current
employees of JPMorgan Chase who are insured under these policies; any
peer studies showing the same data comparing JPMorgan Chase with Bank of
America, Wells Fargo and Citigroup.
The OCC responded politely by
letter dated April 18, after first calling a few days earlier to inform
us that we would be getting nothing under the sunshine law request. (On
Wall Street, sunshine routinely means dark curtain.) The OCC letter
advised that documents relevant to our request were being withheld on
the basis that they are “privileged or contains trade secrets, or
commercial or financial information, furnished in confidence, that
relates to the business, personal, or financial affairs of any person,”
or relate to “a record contained in or related to an examination.”
The
ironic reality is that the documents do not pertain to the personal
financial affairs of individuals who have a privacy right. Individuals
are not going to receive the proceeds of this life insurance for the
most part. In many cases, they do not even know that multi-million
dollar policies that pay upon their death have been taken out by their
employer or former employer. Equally important, JPMorgan is a publicly
traded company whose shareholders have a right under securities laws to
understand the quality of its earnings – are those earnings coming from
traditional banking and investment banking operations or is this
ghoulish practice of profiting from the death of workers now a major
contributor to profits on Wall Street?
As it turns out, one aspect
of the information cavalierly denied to us by the OCC is publicly
available to those willing to hunt for it. On March 24 of this year, we
reported that JPMorgan Chase held $10.4 billion in BOLI assets at its
insured depository bank as of December 31, 2013.
We reached out to
BOLI expert, Michael D. Myers, to understand what JPMorgan’s $10.4
billion in BOLI assets at its commercial bank might represent in terms
of face amount of life insurance on its workers. Myers said: “Without
knowing the length of the investment or its rate of return, it is
difficult to estimate the face amount of the insurance coverage.
However, a cash value of $10.4 billion could easily translate into more
than $100 billion in actual insurance coverage and possibly two or three
times that amount” said Myers, a partner in the Houston, Texas law firm
McClanahan Myers Espey, L.L.P.
Read More Here
.....
Insurance policies pertaining to bankers’ suicides classified as containing ‘trade secrets’
Published time: April 29, 2014 19:09
AFP Photo / John Moore
After
a recent rash of mysterious apparent suicides shook the financial
world, researchers are scrambling to find answers about what really is
the reason behind these multiple deaths. Some observers have now come to
a rather shocking conclusion.
Wall Street on Parade bloggers Pam and Russ Martens
wrote
this week that something seems awry regarding the bank-owned life
insurance (BOLI) policies held by JPMorgan Chase. Traditional life
insurance policies ensure that the loved ones of the deceased are
compensated fairly in the event of a death, but banks are investing
billions in policies that let them receive untaxed payment with the
passing of each employee. While it’s not unusual for major banks to take
out policies that compensate companies in the event of an employee
death, the Martens wrote, attempts to find out more about that practice
have been peculiarly hard and have raised a red flag among bloggers like
those at Wall Street on Parade.
Four of the biggest banks on Wall
Street combined hold over $680 billion in BOLI policies, the bloggers
reported, but JPMorgan held around $17.9 billion in BOLI assets at the
end of last year to Citigroup’s comparably meager $8.8 billion.
Both
banks are global financial institutions with commercial and investment
banking operations, the Martens wrote, and each employs close to a
quarter-of-a-million employees. Nevertheless, they say that JPMorgan has
experienced a far greater rate of suicide among employees in recent
months, particularly in the midst of a series of news reports
documenting unusual leaps off buildings and other bizarre deaths that
have taken the lives of JPMorgan staffers.
Read More Here
.....
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Economic Policy Inst 
By Michael Snyder, on May 21st, 2014
