Financial News Articles

Excerpts of key news articles on

Below are key excerpts of revealing news articles on financial corruption from reliable news media sources. If any link fails to function, a paywall blocks full access, or the article is no longer available, try these digital tools.

For further exploration, delve into our comprehensive Banking Corruption Information Center.

Note: Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news articles on dozens of engaging topics. And read excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.

Opening unauthorized bank accounts. Cheating customers on mortgages and car loans. If you can dream up a financial scam, there’s a good chance that Wells Fargo ran it on its customers in recent years. After years of pressure, the company finally parted ways with its second chief executive in three years. But this isn’t real accountability. When a criminal on the street steals money from your wallet, they go to jail. When small-business owners cheat their customers, they go to jail. But when corporate executives at big companies oversee huge frauds that hurt tens of thousands of people, they often get to walk away with multimillion-dollar payouts. Too often, prosecutors don’t even try to hold top executives criminally accountable. They claim it’s too hard to prove that the people at the top knew about the corporate misconduct. This culture of complicity warps the incentives for corporate leaders. The executives know that, at worst, the company will get hit with a fine — and the money will come out of their shareholders’ pockets, not their own. It doesn’t have to be this way. With sustained resources and a commitment to enforcing the law, we can bring more cases under existing rules. Beyond that, we should enact the Ending Too Big To Jail Act, which I introduced last year. That bill would make it easier to hold executives at big banks accountable for scams by requiring them to certify that they conducted a “due diligence” inquiry and found that no illegal conduct was occurring on their watch.

Note: The above was written by US Senator Elizabeth Warren. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing financial industry corruption news articles from reliable major media sources.

The economic debate of the day centers on whether the cure of an economic shutdown is worse than the disease of the virus. Similarly, we need to ask if the cure of the Federal Reserve getting so deeply into corporate bonds, asset-backed securities, commercial paper, and exchange-traded funds is worse than the disease seizing financial markets. It may be. In just these past few weeks, the Fed has cut rates by 150 basis points to near zero and run through its entire 2008 crisis handbook. That wasn’t enough to calm markets, though — so the central bank also announced $1 trillion a day in repurchase agreements and unlimited quantitative easing, which includes a hard-to-understand $625 billion of bond buying a week going forward. At this rate, the Fed will own two-thirds of the Treasury market in a year. But it’s the alphabet soup of new programs that deserve special consideration, as they could have profound long-term consequences. The federal government is nationalizing large swaths of the financial markets. The Fed is providing the money to do it. If these acronym programs were abused ... they might indeed force markets higher than valuation warrants. But it would come with a heavy price. Investors would be deprived of the necessary market signals that freely traded capital markets offer to aid in the efficient allocation of capital. Malinvestment would be rampant. It also could force private sector players to leave as the government’s heavy hand makes operating in “controlled” markets uneconomic.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on the coronavirus pandemic and financial industry corruption from reliable major media sources.

A national inquiry into Australia's scandal-plagued financial sector has proposed sweeping changes in an attempt to end rampant industry misconduct. The Royal Commission spent 12 months investigating wrongdoing by some of the nation's biggest institutions. Prominent scandals included the charging of fees for no service - sometimes to dead customers. The government said it would act on all 76 recommendations made by the inquiry. The Royal Commission - Australia's highest form of public inquiry - came after a decade of scandals that shook confidence in the country's largest industry. After the report was made public on Monday, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said the public had paid an "immense" price for the misconduct. "It's a scathing assessment of conduct driven by greed and behaviour that was in breach of existing law and fell well below community expectations," he said. The Royal Commission received more than 10,000 public submissions. It interviewed over 130 witnesses in public hearings. The report made 76 recommendations for reform, including: More than 20 unidentified cases to be referred on to regulators, resulting in possible criminal or civil prosecutions; There should be an overhaul of the sector's sales culture to reduce conflicts of interest; Regulators need to more regularly prosecute breaches, or lose some of their powers. The government has been criticised for initially resisting the probe, which it later described as "regrettable but necessary" action to restore public trust.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing banking corruption news articles from reliable major media sources.

In the last decade, private equity firms have been quietly taking control of dental care from behind the scenes, largely through secondary business organizations that push dental practices to cut costs and, in some cases, encourage unnecessary and irreversible dental procedures. In 2024, the dental industry witnessed 161 private equity deals – the highest number of any health care industry, as tracked by the watchdog organization, Private Equity Stakeholder Project. The data reveals that these investment firms are increasingly acquiring dental practices or inserting themselves into clinic management roles, where they then cut corners on patient care. The dental industry is an especially alluring target for private equity firms because it's comprised of thousands of independent clinics, offering investors a fragmented industry to consolidate and streamline. Between 2011 and 2019, private equity firms bought up $4.4 billion worth of dental practices. Dentists at ClearChoice Dental Implant Centers – a dental chain owned by Aspen Dental, one of the largest dental service organizations – were allegedly extracting healthy teeth from patients and replacing them with expensive implants. Experts have warned in various lawsuits against the implant center that this irreversible procedure exposes patients to excessive costs and surgery complications, plus a greater risk of future dental problems like infections and bone loss.

Note: BlackRock and Vanguard manage over $11 trillion and $8 trillion respectively–an unprecedented concentration of financial power. We hear outrage about billionaires and oligarchs, but rarely about private equity firms, who are backed by both political parties and are drastically reshaping our economy, contributing to environmental destruction, and extracting wealth from communities in the US and all over the world. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on health and financial industry corruption.

Even when the economy appears to be booming, millions struggle to stay afloat. In a recent poll from Demand Progress, 81.6 percent of voters surveyed said they want leaders who break up monopolies, compared to just 47.3 percent who prioritize cutting government red tape. This poll suggests that the public supports a populist approach that confronts corporate power more than an abundance agenda that sidesteps it. It reflects a growing recognition: while bureaucratic inefficiencies certainly exist, corporations are blocking our abundance because scarcity is profitable. The scarcity that so many Americans feel in their daily lives is not by accident, it's by design. Companies block abundance by strategically reducing output and access to goods and services. Artificial scarcity is a business strategy. One that prioritizes profit maximization over widespread availability, ensuring that demand consistently outstrips supply. This deliberate restriction allows companies to command higher prices. Concentration makes it easier to manufacture scarcity. When a few large players dominate the market, they can manipulate the fundamental dynamics of supply and demand and charge high economic rents. This is made possible by an economic and political system that corporations have spent decades reshaping to suit their needs. As a result, we live in an economy that has quietly redefined freedom as the power of the wealthy to set the terms for the rest.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on corporate corruption and financial inequality.

I had to pay a student to go island hopping to find basic records in the U.S. Virgin Islands. The territory's opaque laws and corruption makes it a haven for misdeeds. Albert Bryan Jr., the current governor, used his position to curry favor for Jeffrey Epstein for years. He helped bestow tax exemptions on Epstein's shadowy businesses and pushed for waivers allowing the former financier to dodge USVI sex offender laws. Bryan, whose hand-selected Attorney General swiftly ended the J.P. Morgan lawsuit that revealed a gusher of damning documents about Epstein's network, is now tapping Epstein victim settlement funds ... to pay for various earmarks and unrelated government debts. Former Attorney General Denise George led a series of lawsuits against Epstein's estate and former associates. Bryan fired her. In 2024, Bryan named a new Attorney General–none other than Gordon Rhea, a private practice attorney who previously defended Richard Kahn during the Epstein estate lawsuit. Not long ago, Kahn and Indyke were described by the U.S. Virgin Islands as "indispensable captains" of Epstein's alleged criminal human trafficking enterprise. We still have many unanswered questions. Why did U.S. Virgin Islands police and customs agents never act to protect the young girls they saw taken to Epstein's islands? What is clear, however, is that an attorney who worked to protect Epstein's estate is now the chief law enforcement officer of the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Note: Read our comprehensive Substack investigation covering the connection between Epstein's child sex trafficking ring and intelligence agency sexual blackmail operations. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on government corruption and Jeffrey Epstein's child sex trafficking ring.

Da Ying "David" Sze walked out of a four-story concrete warehouse in Queens, New York, carrying several bags full of money. Federal agents had been surveilling him for months. They suspected him of leading a gang of money launderers whose clients included Chinese fentanyl dealers. Most of that business had been conducted at one institution: TD Bank. When investigators looked closer at the bank, they realized Sze wasn't the only criminal who'd made TD their depository of choice. There was the group from Manhattan's Diamond District using bogus gold sales to launder money. The Colombian drug traffickers using TD debit cards to bring their US profits back home. And the human trafficking ring that claimed to be an HVAC company when it opened an account. The more investigators looked at TD, the more money laundering they found. Last year, TD's American subsidiary became the first US bank ever to plead guilty to conspiracy to commit money laundering. The company agreed to pay $3.1 billion in fines to various parts of the federal government, a sum that included the biggest penalty ever levied by the Department of Justice under the Bank Secrecy Act, the main US anti-money-laundering law. More than two dozen people, including three bank employees, have already been charged. US authorities have also imposed an asset cap on TD's American retail operations, limiting their size indefinitely. This is among the most feared punishments in banking.

Note: Read our Substack on the dark truth about the war on drugs. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on financial industry corruption and the war on drugs.

A three-step process called "Buy, Borrow, Die" ... allows people to amass a huge fortune, spend as much of it as they want, and pass the rest–untaxed–on to their heirs. The technique is so cleverly designed that the standard wish list of progressive tax reforms would leave it completely intact. The ... wealth [of the superrich] consists almost entirely of stock in the companies they've built or invested in. Instead of selling their assets to make major purchases, the superrich can use them as collateral to secure loans, which, because they must eventually be repaid, are also not considered taxable income. You might think this couldn't possibly go on forever. Eventually, the rich will need to sell off some of their assets to pay back the loan. That brings us to step three: die. According to a provision of the tax code known as "stepped-up basis"–or, more evocatively, the "angel of death" loophole–when an individual dies, the value that their assets gained during their lifetime becomes immune to taxation. Those assets can then be sold by the billionaire's heirs to pay off any outstanding loans without them having to worry about taxes. All of this is completely, perfectly legal. The strategy has basically killed the entire concept of an income tax for the wealthiest individuals. The result is a two-tiered tax system: one for the many, who earn their income through wages and pay taxes, and another for the few, who accumulate wealth through paper assets and largely do not pay taxes.

Note: Average individuals also pay more in taxes than major corporations. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on financial inequality.

Five years ago, researchers for RAND found that roughly $47 trillion earned by the working class between 1975 and 2018 was instead given to the richest 1 percent, in 2018 dollars. This calculation was based on calculations of the growth of the bottom 90 percent in the decades after World War II, when income distribution held steady between groups. In a new analysis published last month by RAND extending the analysis to 2023, RAND found that that figure is now $79 trillion in 2023 dollars, with inflation accounting for roughly $10 trillion of the growth. In 2023 alone, $3.9 trillion was redistributed from the bottom 90 percent to the top 1 percent – enough to give every worker a raise of $32,000 per year. In 1975, RAND found in its most recent report, the bottom 90 percent of Americans received about a third of all taxable income in the U.S. That share dropped to 47 percent by 2019, with over half of income going instead to the top 10 percent. If rates of income growth had remained equitable from the rates prior to the 1970s, the median household income today would be double what it is now, the analysis found. According to a recent analysis by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, President Donald Trump's tax proposals ... would provide $36,320 yearly in tax savings to the richest 1 percent, or people with incomes of over $914,900 a year. Meanwhile, the bottom 95 percent of Americans would see a tax increase.

Note: Two-thirds of all new wealth created since the pandemic has been captured by the 1%. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on financial inequality.

DOGE has fixated on slashing essential government programs in the name of fiscal responsibility. Yet, in order for it to truly serve our nation, it is urgent that it address the ossified, structural reality of our present financial system, which has been designed to manufacture deficits to the benefit of private banks. How is money created? Who creates it? Why are we locked into perpetual debt? Government borrowing, spiraling national debt, and the accompanying tax burden on the American people are not the result of overspending on public services. Rather, they stem from the privatization of the money supply, a system enshrined by the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, which handed the power of money creation to private banks, ensuring their profits through the simultaneous creation of the federal income tax. The U.S. Constitution, Article 1, Section 8, Clause 5, granted Congress the power to create money, yet that power was appropriated. With the passage of the Federal Reserve Act, the constitutional power to coin money was appropriated by private banks. The creation of the federal income tax, through the 16th Amendment to the Constitution ... guaranteed the money borrowed from them by the government would be repaid through the imposition of the federal income tax. This reduced to people of the United States to being collateral for the debt which the country owed to the banks. The Federal Reserve expands the money supply by creating more debt. It has created trillions of dollars of money out of thin air, for the benefit of banks. Inflation ensues. Inflation is a hidden tax which erodes consumers purchasing power, causing people to take on more debt.

Note: This was written by Dennis Kucinich, former Democratic congressman and nationally recognized leader in peace and social justice. For more along these lines, read more about the history of the Federal Reserve, along with concise summaries of news articles on financial system corruption.

A global network of powerful entities, fueled in part by Wall Street, is buying up land and water around the world. This global land rush has led to wrecked wells and lost farms from Arizona to Zambia – and it risks sowing the seeds for future global conflict, according to "The Grab," a new documentary out today from Gabriela Cowperthwaite. The film follows a seven-year investigation by producer and journalist Nathan Halverson of The Center for Investigative Reporting. In part, "The Grab" argues that power is being exercised over individual landowners by a convoluted and opaque network of sovereign wealth funds, national governments and Wall Street. One critical focus of this push is Africa. Halverson interviewed Brig Siachitema, an activist in the Zambian town of Serenje, where he says foreign investors have been buying up the ancestral land of villagers and kicking them off it. Late in the movie, he presents La Paz County Supervisor Holly Irwin with evidence that the Arizona State Retirement System – her own pension fund – is invested in the project that is draining the aquifer beneath the county. Rather than fighting to protect U.S. land and food from other multinational corporations, "the governments are working for the corporations." There are enough calories worldwide to feed a growing global population, even with climate change, and even in 2050. The race to lock down resources, and governments' panic over the unrest caused by spiking food prices, risks scaling up to a war between great powers.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corruption in the financial system and in the corporate world from reliable major media sources.

The pressure to repay debts is forcing poor nations to continue investing in fossil fuel projects to make their repayments on what are usually loans from richer nations and financial institutions, according to new analysis from the anti-debt campaigners Debt Justice and partners in affected countries. The group is calling for creditors to cancel all debts for countries facing crisis – and especially those linked to fossil fuel projects. "High debt levels are a major barrier to phasing out fossil fuels for many global south countries," said Tess Woolfenden, a senior policy officer at Debt Justice. "Many countries are trapped exploiting fossil fuels to generate revenue to repay debt while, at the same time, fossil fuel projects often do not generate the revenues expected and can leave countries further indebted than when they started. This toxic trap must end." According to the report, the debt owed by global south countries has increased by 150% since 2011 and 54 countries are in a debt crisis, having to spend five times more on repayments than on addressing the climate crisis. Sharda Ganga, the director of the Surinamese civil society group Projekta, said ... "The reality is that this is the new form of colonialism – we have exchanged one ruler for the rule of our creditors who basically already own what is ours. The difference is this time we signed the deal ourselves."

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and income inequality from reliable major media sources.

The government of the U.S. Virgin Islands alleges in a lawsuit filed this week that JPMorgan Chase "turned a blind eye" to evidence that disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein used the bank to facilitate sex-trafficking activities on Little St. James, the private island he owned in the territory until his 2019 suicide. In a more than 100-page complaint filed by U.S.V.I. Attorney General Denise George in the Southern District of New York in Manhattan on Tuesday, the territory alleges that JPMorgan failed to report Epstein's suspicious activities and provided the financier with services reserved for high-wealth clients after his 2008 conviction for soliciting a minor for prostitution in Palm Beach, Fla. The complaint says the territory's Department of Justice investigation "revealed that JP Morgan knowingly, negligently, and unlawfully provided and pulled the levers through which recruiters and victims were paid and was indispensable to the operation and concealment of the Epstein trafficking enterprise." It accused the bank of ignoring evidence for "more than a decade because of Epstein's own financial footprint, and because of the deals and clients that Epstein brought and promised to bring to the bank." "These decisions were advocated and approved at the senior levels of JP Morgan," it said. The bank allegedly "facilitated and concealed wire and cash transactions that raised suspicion of – and were in fact part of – a criminal enterprise whose currency was the sexual servitude of dozens of women and girls," according to the complaint.

Note: Just days after filing the lawsuit against JP Morgan Chase, the district attorney of US Virgin Islands was fired. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on Jeffrey Epstein's sex trafficking ring from reliable major media sources.

Federal regulators fined Wells Fargo a record $1.7 billion on Tuesday for "widespread mismanagement" over multiple years that harmed over 16 million consumer accounts. Wells Fargo's "illegal activity" included repeatedly misapplying loan payments, wrongfully foreclosing on homes, illegally repossessing vehicles, incorrectly assessing fees and interest and charging surprise overdraft fees. The CFPB ordered Wells Fargo to pay the $1.7 billion civil penalty in addition to more than $2 billion to compensate consumers for a range of "illegal activity." CFPB officials say this is the largest penalty imposed by the agency. The misconduct described by the CFPB echoes previously reported revelations that have emerged about Wells Fargo since 2016 when the bank's fake-accounts scandal created a national firestorm. "Wells Fargo's rinse-repeat cycle of violating the law has harmed millions of American families," Rohit Chopra, the CFPB's director, said in a statement. Chopra noted that the settlement does not provide immunity for individuals at Wells Fargo, and the agency recognizes the $3.7 billion in fines and restitution will not fix the bank's problems. Although Chopra credited Wells Fargo with making some progress, he said it's not clear "they are making rapid enough progress" and said the agency is concerned that the bank's product launches, growth initiatives and profit-boosting efforts have "delayed needed reform."

Note: In 2016, Wells Fargo was caught opening millions of fake accounts in its customers' names. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on financial system corruption from reliable major media sources.

Amid a humanitarian crisis compounded by mass layoffs and collapsing economic activity, the last course our legislators should be following is the one they appear to be on right now: bailing out shareholders and executives who, while enriching themselves, spent the past decade pushing business corporations to the edge of insolvency. The $500bn dollars of public money that Congress’s relief bill provides will be used for a corporate bailout, with the only oversight in the hands of an independent council similar to the one used in the 2008 financial crisis. While that body was able to report misuses of taxpayer money, it could do nothing to stop them. As currently structured, there is nothing to keep this bailout from, like its predecessor, putting cash directly into the hands of those at the top rather than into the hands of workers. Without strong regulation and accountability, asking corporations to preserve jobs with these funds will be nothing more than a simple suggestion, leaving millions of everyday Americans in financial peril. If not properly managed, this economic disaster has the potential to be the worst in American history. Our country cannot allow a small number of executives and shareholders to profit from taxpayer funds that we have injected into these corporations for reasons of pure emergency. We need to stop this rot at the core of our economic system and realign the priorities of government with those of workers and consumers.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and the coronavirus pandemic from reliable major media sources.

In “Homewreckers,” his new book about the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, [Aaron] Glantz skillfully tells a bigger story about American housing that’s tortuous, confounding and ultimately enraging. Along with “Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership,” by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, “Homewreckers” shows what happens when private speculators get buoyed by government largess while non-tycoons are largely left to fend for themselves. After the housing bubble burst, the government was desperate to get lending banks off its books, and so it offered a sweet deal to prospective buyers of the banks: Those private investors could keep the gains on any loans held by the bank, but if the loans lost money, the government would bear most of the cost. It was like a mutant version of the subprime bubble that led to the financial crisis: Rather than renegotiate the loans, the new owners of these lending banks found there was more money to be made in foreclosing on the properties and becoming “a class of landlord that had never been seen before,” charging rent and fees to tenants — not infrequently the previous owners who were foreclosed on — while hoarding the equity for themselves. Corporate landlords ... are also more likely to buy properties in neighborhoods with large concentrations of African-American and Latino residents, who end up paying “higher and higher rents that ultimately transfer wealth from their communities to investors far away.”

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on financial industry corruption from reliable major media sources.

A US senator on Wednesday released a report that detailed how private equity firms have ruined hospitals in his home state and across the country. The report from Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) documented what happened when three Connecticut hospitals–Waterbury Hospital, Rockville General, and Manchester Memorial–were bought by Prospect Medical Holdings, a private equity-backed healthcare firm. Ramona, an operating room assistant at Waterbury Hospital cited in the report, explained how Prospect went to extreme lengths to avoid spending money. She explained to Murphy that Prospect at one point stopped paying vendors, which resulted in supplies eventually growing "so scarce patients were sometimes left on the operating table while staff scrambled" to find the necessary equipment. Staff members eventually started buying supplies themselves, with some even going so far as to buy food for their patients to ensure that they did not go hungry. Prospect didn't just skimp on buying supplies for the hospitals but also on maintaining the buildings themselves. A unit secretary at Waterbury Hospital named Carmen told Murphy's staff of two instances where the ceiling at the building literally fell down due to years of neglect. Murphy's report also emphasized that the story of private equity stripping hospitals for parts is not unique to his state. "The story of these three Connecticut hospitals is playing out in healthcare systems all over the country," it said.

Note: According to this Guardian article, "More and more people, especially the relatively poor, may live almost their entire lives in systems owned by one or another private equity firm: financiers are their landlords, their electricity providers, their ride to work, their employers, their doctors, their debt collectors." For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on health and financial system corruption.

In 1998, Jeffrey Epstein purchased Little Saint James in the US Virgin Islands and began trafficking girls as young as 14 into "sexual servitude" at the secluded island. The same year, he opened his first account with JPMorgan Chase, the start of a lucrative partnership for the Wall Street giant that would continue for years after the late financier had been "red flagged" by the bank as a child sex offender. To keep his illicit sex-trafficking scheme running, Epstein needed access to large amounts of cash to pay off recruiters and attempt to silence victims. JPMorgan is alleged to have "pulled the levers" through which Epstein paid his network of enablers, according to a lawsuit filed by the US Virgin Islands (USVI) Attorney General in a US court. The lawsuit claims that JPMorgan concealed wire and cash transactions that were part of a "criminal enterprise" whose currency was vulnerable and desperate women and girls, groomed and recruited over decades by Epstein and his chief lieutenant Ghislaine Maxwell. In separate lawsuits, several survivors of Epstein's abuse sued JPMorgan and Deutsche Bank accusing them of actively enabling his abuse. The sprawling US Virgin Islands legal action is still pending. It has already drawn in some of the world's wealthiest individuals including billionaire JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, Tesla CEO and Twitter owner Elon Musk, Google's co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates. All have denied any involvement in Epstein's offending.

Note: One Nation Under Blackmail is a new book by Whitney Webb, an investigative journalist who explores the deep ties between Jeffrey Epstein and US and Israeli Intelligence criminal networks. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of news articles on Jeffrey Epstein's child sex ring from reliable major media sources.

JPMorgan Chase & Co. had ties to Jeffrey Epstein that ran deeper than the bank has acknowledged and extended years beyond when it decided to close the convicted sex offender's accounts. Mary Erdoes, a top lieutenant to Chief Executive Jamie Dimon, made two trips to Epstein's townhouse on Manhattan's Upper East Side, in 2011 and 2013, when Epstein still was a client of the bank, said the people familiar with the matter. She exchanged dozens of emails with him and discussed sharing with him fees related to a charitable fund the bank was considering launching. John Duffy, who ran JPMorgan's U.S. private bank for the ultrarich, went to Epstein's townhouse for a meeting in April 2013, the people said. One month later, the private bank renewed an authorization allowing Epstein to borrow money against his accounts despite repeated warnings from compliance staffers about his unusual banking practices. Justin Nelson, one of Epstein's bankers at JPMorgan, had about a half-dozen meetings at Epstein's townhouse between 2014 and 2017. He also traveled to Epstein's ranch in New Mexico in 2016. Epstein was convicted of soliciting a minor for prostitution in 2008 and forced to register as a sex offender. The new details show that JPMorgan was treating Epstein like a star client after his first conviction and despite repeated warnings from its own employees. And after JPMorgan closed Epstein's accounts, bankers kept meeting with him for years.

Note: One Nation Under Blackmail is a new book by Whitney Webb, an investigative journalist who explores the deep ties between Jeffrey Epstein and US and Israeli Intelligence criminal networks. Epstein had many concerning associations, including with Noam Chomsky as reported in Webb's most recent article. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on banking corruption and Jeffrey Epstein's crime ring from reliable major media sources.

Among the many surprising assets uncovered in the bankruptcy of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX is a relatively tiny one that could raise big concerns: a stake in one of the country's smallest banks. The bank, Farmington State Bank in Washington State, has a single branch and, until this year, just three employees. It did not offer online banking or even a credit card. The tiny bank's connection to the collapse of FTX is raising new questions about the exchange and its operations. The ties between FTX and Farmington State Bank began in March when Alameda Research, a small trading firm and sister to FTX, invested $11.5 million in the bank's parent company, FBH. At the time, Farmington was the nation's 26th-smallest bank out of 4,800. Its net worth was $5.7 million. FTX is a now bankrupt company that was one of the world's largest cryptocurrency exchanges. A judge allowed the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell to continue advising FTX on bankruptcy. It's unclear how FTX was allowed to buy a stake in a U.S.-licensed bank, which would need to be approved by federal regulators. Banking veterans say it's hard to believe that regulators would have knowingly allowed FTX to gain control of a U.S. bank. "The fact that an offshore hedge fund that was basically a crypto firm was buying a stake in a tiny bank for multiples of its stated book value should have raised massive red flags for the F.D.I.C., state regulators and the Federal Reserve," said Camden Fine, a bank industry consultant.

Note: An in-depth investigation by Whitney Webb and Ed Berger further unearths the mysterious connections between FTX and Farmington State Bank. Extending far beyond Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX, they make a case for a deeper criminal network at play, with troubling connections to this bank. Incidentally, the firm Sullivan & Cromwell has old connections with the CIA. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on financial industry corruption from reliable major media sources.

Important Note: Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news articles on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.