BIGGUS DICKUS - BEWARE THE IDES

Eric and Jamie are "friends"
We know how this love affair ends
Jamie's a whale
Who's Too Big Too Jail
So Eric subserviently bends

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Carefully orchestrated indignation is scheduled for yet another display in the Senate this morning at 9:30 a.m, in a sub-committee on Homeland Security, which is fitting given Jamie Dimon's role as a domestic global terrorist.

Let the Senate charades begin...

JPMorgan Whale Trades: A Case History of Derivatives Risks and Abuses - (Senate link)

Again, we are not calling JPM a terrorist bank, the government is.

Witnesses

PANEL 1

INA DREW
Former Chief Investment Officer

JPMorgan Chase Bank NA

New York, NY
ASHLEY BACON
Acting Chief Risk Officer

JPMorgan Chase Bank NA

New York, NY
PETER WEILAND
Former Head of Market Risk - Chief Investment Office

JPMorgan Chase Bank NA

New York, NY

PANEL 2

MICHAEL J. CAVANAGH
Co-Chief Executive Officer - Corporate & Investment Bank

JPMorgan Chase Bank NA

New York, NY
DOUGLAS L. BRAUNSTEIN
Current Vice Chairman

JPMorgan Chase Bank NA

New York, NY

PANEL 3

THE HONORABLE THOMAS J. CURRY
Comptroller of the Currency

U. S. Department of the Treasury

Washington, DC
SCOTT WATERHOUSE
Examiner-in-Charge - OCC National Bank Examiners - JPMorgan Chase

Office of Comptroller of the Currency

Washington, DC
MICHAEL SULLIVAN
Deputy Comptroller for Risk Analysis - Risk Analysis Department

Office of the Comptroller of the Currency

Washington, DC

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Commentary from Cheyenne:

Taken together, all previous displays of outrage by bought-and-paid-for government representatives have produced nothing of any substance whatsoever. In fact, the impotence of these carnivals has become so predictable, indeed so yawn-inducing, that it appears dis-information merchants in congress are working overtime trying to distract people from the barren wasteland of justice with wild promises of a brighter future.

Sadly, this wholly unbelievable puffery manages to turn up credulous writers and bloggers round after round after round after round after round--where was I? doing Jaeger bombs!!!--as reliably as Charlie Brown's appearance before Lucy's teed up football. In the current episode of "The Dupe" we see none other Dave Dayen in the starring role:

"People I’ve talked to expect the hearing to be explosive. As an excellent preview for the Friday fireworks..." Yeah, yeah, yeah.....zzzzzzzzzz THUDDdddd.

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DB here again. Take a minute to read Dayen's piece as he does discuss a new, and especially repugnant report detailing the various and extensive frauds of JPMorgan.

What the hell, here's the list of JPM frauds...

Bank Secrecy Act violations;
Money laundering for drug cartels;
Violations of sanction orders against Cuba, Iran, Sudan, and former Liberian strongman Charles Taylor;
Violations related to the Vatican Bank scandal (get on this, Pope Francis!);
Violations of the Commodities Exchange Act;
Failure to segregate customer funds (including one CFTC case where the bank failed to segregate $725 million of its own money from a $9.6 billion account) in the US and UK;
Knowingly executing fictitious trades where the customer, with full knowledge of the bank, was on both sides of the deal;
Various SEC enforcement actions for misrepresentations of CDOs and mortgage-backed securities;
The AG settlement on foreclosure fraud;
The OCC settlement on foreclosure fraud;
Violations of the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act;
Illegal flood insurance commissions;
Fraudulent sale of unregistered securities;
Auto-finance ripoffs;
Illegal increases of overdraft penalties;
Violations of federal ERISA laws as well as those of the state of New York;
Municipal bond market manipulations and acts of bid-rigging, including violations of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act;
Filing of unverified affidavits for credit card debt collections (“as a result of internal control failures that sound eerily similar to the industry’s mortgage servicing failures and foreclosure abuses”);
Energy market manipulation that triggered FERC lawsuits;
“Artificial market making” at Japanese affiliates;
Shifting trading losses on a currency trade to a customer account;
Fraudulent sales of derivatives to the city of Milan, Italy;
Obstruction of justice (including refusing the release of documents in the Bernie Madoff case as well as the case of Peregrine Financial).

And, exhale.

The sheer litany of illegal activities just overwhelms you. And these are only the ones where the company has entered into settlements or been sanctioned; it doesn’t even include ongoing investigations into things like Libor, illegally concealing inclusions of mortgage-backed securities in employer funds (another ERISA violation), the Fail Whale trades, and especially putback suits for mortgages, where a recent ruling by Judge Jed Rakoff has seriously increased exposure. While the risks are still very much alive and will continue to weigh on the firm, ultimately shareholders will pay, certainly not executives as long as the no-prosecutions standard holds.

Again, read the report, but two case studies stand out. First, JPM is trying to stick the public with losses related to its purchase of Washington Mutual and its related liabilities. Rosner documents painstakingly how JPM originally accepted the risks and responsibilities with the WaMu deal, and continued to do so for several years. But now that they see the actual possibility of mass mortgage-related putback claims, JPM wants to shift losses on over $190 billion in MBS onto the FDIC. They hope to get out from under as much as $5 billion in losses in this fashion. It’s impossible to logically follow JPM’s claim that they purchased WaMu but not any of its risk-related activities. The case “demonstrates the unwillingness to accept responsibility for their own management failures,” Rosner writes.

Check out the Banzai Dimon photo in full size...