Open thread for night owls: JP Morgan settlement a sham and a scam (Click on this heading to read more)
Wednesday, November 20, 2013, 11:48 pm
The first thing you need to know about JPMorgan Chase’s long-awaited $13 billion deal with the Justice Department — to settle a number of civil lawsuits related to the fraudulent sale of mortgage-backed securities — is that it’s not a $13 billion deal. $4 billion of this figure, over 30 percent, was announced almost a month ago as the conclusion of a lawsuit between JPMorgan and the Federal Housing Finance Agency.
David Dayen
Attorney General Eric Holder, wanting to stand at a podium and give out a really big settlement number, simply folded the FHFA settlement into the Justice Department’s. Why news editors who have already reported on the FHFA settlement would let the Justice Department use it again in its headline figure is completely beyond me. They aren’t obligated to do the Justice Department’s P.R. for them. We don’t say the Miami Heat beat the San Antonio Spurs 200-98, but 100 of those points came from a previous game.
So, let’s talk about this $9 billion settlement. Even that headline number doesn’t really reflect the actual penalty to JPMorgan Chase’s bottom line. Nearly half of the figure comes in the form of “mortgage relief,” which an independent monitor (and what’s so independent about a monitor chosen by the bank?) has four years to distribute. Any time you extend the time horizon of a penalty, you’re reducing its real value. And in this case, there’s not much value here to begin with.
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