Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Nobody Goes To Jail

Madness:
WASHINGTON (AP) — JPMorgan Chase & Co. has agreed to pay $153.6 million to settle civil fraud charges that it misled buyers of complex mortgage investments just as the housing market was collapsing.

J.P. Morgan Securities, a division of the powerful Wall Street bank, failed to tell investors that a hedge fund helped select the investment portfolio and then bet that the portfolio would fail, the Securities and Exchange Commission said.

Among the investors who lost money on the deal were autoworkers for General Motors, a Lutheran financial organization in Minneapolis and a retirement services company in Topeka, Kan.

The settlement announced Tuesday is one of the most significant legal actions targeting Wall Street's role in the 2008 financial crisis. It comes a year after Goldman Sachs & Co. paid $550 million to settle similar charges.

Still, the settlement amounts to less than 1 percent of the bank's 2010 net income of $17.4 billion — or less than what JPMorgan earns in one week.

JPMorgan neither admitted nor denied wrongdoing under the settlement. The bank released a statement saying it lost nearly $900 million on the investment. It also noted that it reviewed similar mortgage investments and voluntarily paid $56 million to compensate some investors in those deals.

The bank agreed to settle the charges two weeks after Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co., complained to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke that new financial regulations designed to prevent another financial crisis were too burdensome on banks.
And this is how every case against Wall Street ends. With no jail time, no one losing their job, no one even having to say they're sorry. Jamie Dimon get a platform to talk about how there's too much government regulation, still be buds with Obama and Geithner, all like it never happened.

How I wish I could go back in time and tell Elliott Spitzer to stop sleeping with hookers.

2 comments:

  1. your blog makes me sad. i can't bring myself to write about the Wal-Mart gender discrimination lawsuit yet. still licking my wounds. thoughts?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Ugh. I haven't either. I'm waiting on RB for some sort of legal rundown.

    ReplyDelete