What JPMorgan and Citigroup Have in Common When It Comes to Crime

by Pam Martens and Russ Martens, Wall Street On Parade:

On September 8, 2016, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) fined Wells Fargo $185 million following an investigation that found that its employees had engaged in a widespread practice of “secretly opening unauthorized deposit and credit card accounts” in order to meet sales quotas or qualify for bonuses. An estimated 2 million accounts were involved. One month later, the Chairman and CEO of Wells Fargo, John Stumpf, was gone.

Consider that swift action to acknowledge and punish egregious abuse of clients with how the Boards of Directors of JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup have responded to criminal felony charges and seemingly endless regulatory fines for abusing clients’ trust. The Boards have kept their CEOs in place, paid the monster fines and moved on to the next settlement.

Jamie Dimon became the CEO of JPMorgan Chase on January 1, 2006. At that point, the bank was more than a century old and had never been charged with a criminal felony. In 2014, the Justice Department charged JPMorgan Chase with two felony counts in connection with their role in facilitating the Madoff Ponzi scheme. The bank was given a two-year deferred prosecution agreement.

The very next year, in May 2015, JPMorgan Chase was hit with a new felony count for its role in rigging foreign currency markets as part of a banking cartel. That’s three felony counts in two years and yet Jamie Dimon kept his job. Before the felony counts there was a $13 billion settlement with the Justice Department and Federal and State regulators in 2013 for JPMorgan Chase’s role in selling toxic mortgage investments to investors as worthwhile products when the bank had good reason to believe they would blow up.

In 2012, Dimon himself was hauled before Congress to explain why his bank was making speculative bets with depositors’ money in high risk derivatives in London. The bank eventually owned up to losing $6.2 billion in the wild trades. The scandal  became infamously known as the London Whale. In 2013, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released a damning 307-page report on the London Whale matter. The same year, the regulator of national banks, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), released the following statement regarding the London Whale trades:

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