Matt Taibbi: Nobody Should Shed a Tear for JP Morgan Chase

[marmar]

(Rolling Stone) A lot of people all over the world are having opinions now about the ostensibly gigantic $13 billion settlement Jamie Dimon and JP Morgan Chase have entered into with the government.

The general consensus from most observers in the finance sector is that this superficially high-dollar settlement – worth about half a year's profits for Chase – is an unconscionable Marxist appropriation. It's been called a "robbery" and a "shakedown," in which red Obama and his evil henchman Eric Holder confiscated cash from a successful bank, as The Wall Street Journal wrote, "for no other reason than because they can and because they want to appease their left-wing populist allies."

Look, there's no denying that this is a lot of money. It's the biggest settlement in the history of government settlements, and it's just one company to boot. But this has been in the works for a long time, and it's been in the works for a reason. This whole thing, lest anyone forget, has its genesis in a couple of state Attorneys General (including New York's Eric Schneiderman and Delaware's Beau Biden) not wanting to sign off on any deal with the banks that didn't also address the root causes of the crisis, in particular the mass fraud surrounding the sale and production of subprime mortgage securities.

Those holdouts essentially forced the federal government's hand, leading Barack Obama to create a federal working group on residential mortgage-backed securities (widely seen as the AGs' price for okaying the $25 billion robosigning deal), headed up by Schneiderman, whose investigation of Chase and its affiliates led to the deal that's about to be struck. Minus all of that, minus those state holdouts in those foreclosure negotiations, this settlement probably would never even take place: The federal government seemed more than willing previously to settle with the banks without even addressing the root-cause issues that are at the heart of this new Chase deal. ...................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/nobody-should-shed-a-tear-for-jp-morgan-chase-20131025#ixzz2j4dK76ns

[Make7]

1. Not even Maria Bartiromo? ( n/t )

[rhett o rick]

2. I wonder what small percentage the $13 billion is of the profit they made via

the fraud. It's becoming a business plan, commit fraud make 100 billion, pay a "settlement" for 13 billion. Bonus's all around. Send a couple of billion to your politicians.

[Enthusiast]

3. Of course it's becoming a business model.

It's a great pathway to obscene profits. I guess the DOJ wants to encourage malfeasance.

[KG]

4. 13B just the price of doing business.

unless some mutherfuckers go to jail the whole thing is a joke.

[Nine]

5. This needs more recs. (nt)

[Guy Whitey Corngood]

6. Ok. nt

[el_bryanto]

7. This is pretty important - and Taibbis on the money as near as i can tell. nt