JP Morgan to settle for RM 41 Billion?

"JP Morgan Chase & Co has reached a tentative $13 billion (8.03 billion pounds) deal with the U.S. Justice Department and other government agencies to settle investigations into bad mortgage loans the bank sold to investors before the financial crisis, a source familiar with the talks said on Saturday.

The tentative deal, the largest ever between the U.S. government and a single company, does not release the bank from criminal liability for some of the mortgages it packaged into bonds and sold to investors.

That had been a major sticking point in the discussions, but the government refused to budge on that issue and JPMorgan felt it had no choice but to give in, according to a second source. Until recently, the most that JPMorgan was willing to pay was closer to $11 billion.

The ongoing criminal investigation underscores how even if this settlement takes some heat off JPMorgan Chief Executive Jamie Dimon, he still has myriad regulatory issues to deal with.

The biggest U.S. bank sidestepped the worst of the financial crisis but now faces more than a dozen probes globally into everything from alleged bribery in China to a possible role in manipulating benchmark interest rates known as Libor."


The above according to a news report from Reuters. For those readers who think this might be tough to swallow for JP Morgan:


"...the bank can easily afford this deal. It said earlier this month that it has set aside a total of $23 billion to cover legal settlements. In a typical quarter, it earns about $5 billion to $6 billion, and it has some $30 billion of cash on its books."


Simply amazing the amounts of money involved. The whole concept of TBTF (To Big To Fail) seems to be wrong. Good that the regulators stick to not releasing the bank from criminal liability.

However, to put things into perspective, readers should also take note of a previous blog posting:

"Difference between Bankers and Pirates".

Difference between Bankers and Pirates

Love the cartoon.

Please also look at this posting:

"After the savings and loans scandal of the 1980's, some 3,500 bankers ended up criminally prosecuted and behind bars. This time around, no one on Wall Street has done jail time.

Or this posting:

For the American economy – and for many other developed economies – the elephant in the room is the amount of money paid to bankers over the last five years. For banks that have filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, the sum stands at an astounding $2.2 trillion.

MF Global: A Despicable State of Affairs

"And perhaps this is why the American people are turning away from their corporate-branded presidential candidates and Congressional representatives, whose approval ratings have fallen to 9%, in righteous indignation and revulsion, in disgust at their craven betrayal of their sacred oaths and trust. They must have no sense of justice, or of proportion, or history, and apparently they have no shame."

It sounds like the US has not learned anything from the financial crisis?

http://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com/2012/01/mf-global-despicable-state-of-affairs.html

Much of the financial press picked up this story from the Wall Street Journal, Money From MF Global Feared Gone. Much of the mainstream media in the US and the UK these days is just a conduit for sound bites from the monied interests.

"Nearly three months after MF Global Holdings Ltd. collapsed, officials hunting for an estimated $1.2 billion in missing customer money increasingly believe that much of it might never be recovered, according to people familiar with the investigation.

As the sprawling probe that includes regulators, criminal and congressional investigators, and court-appointed trustees grinds on, the findings so far suggest that a "significant amount" of the money could have "vaporized" as a result of chaotic trading at MF Global during the week before the company's Oct. 31 bankruptcy filing, said a person close to the investigation."

And as we have heard, quite a bit of that money was also diverted in the last few days into the pockets of MF Global's bank, JP Morgan, which still reportedly holds much of it. Now whether they are legally entitled to keep that money is another matter. But this entire charade has been cloaked with a public relations campaign using terms like 'missing,' 'vaporized,' and 'mystery' to describe the customer assets as if no one really knows where the funds had gone, which the CFTC has explicity stated months ago is not the case. And that the handling of the bankruptcy and the method of ordering customers with creditors is in violation of the CFTC's rule 190, as is evident from the precedents and intentions which established it.

What the press apparently has not yet heard or is not reporting is that vulture funds are now contacting the MF Global customers, however they may have obtained their names, and are offering them 85 cents on the dollar for their claims.   Most of the claim holders are reported to expect or to have been payed 72 cents on the dollar as things now stand.   The Wall Street Journal certainly casts gloom on their prospects for a full recovery and hopes of justice, based on the report from an unnamed source.

This is creating a difficult position for these much abused customers because of the need to settle their income tax obligations for 2011. Until they can prove the funds are not 'recoverable' they bear the responsibility for their tax obligations on the full amount. But if they settle with the vulture funds they can take the loss and move on, capitulating to the despair and the anxiety of having been cheated and abused by the partnership between government and Wall Street.

Obviously customers can ask for extensions on filing their taxes and hope for a settlement at some point. But the issue is the odd manipulation of the bankruptcy in the courts, and the uncertainty and fear fostered in the customers caused by the management of this situation through rumour and innuendo and the canard of the 'missing money' from almost day one.

Remember that the customers were not speculators who lost money on their bets, as the bailed out banks had been, but in many cases were depositors who had cash and valid title to precious metals and treasuries held on account in a firm that was one of the Fed's primary dealers and a major player at the CME.  And the money was taken twice.  First by MF Global, and then by the financial institutions that seized the money and then manipulated the courts and the press to hide it and to keep it.

The theft of customer funds was bad enough, but the manner in which the exchange, the regulators, the court, the Congress and the Obama Administration have dealt with the aftermath of this is truly despicable. Throughout the financial crisis the character of the public's dealings with the financial sector has been dominated by of opacity, obfuscation, misuse of influence, abuse of power, and fear.
If I have ever seen the opportunity for those in the government to take a heroic stand in defense of the people against the predations of powerful financial interests this was it. And they have failed miserably. So whatever these politicians now say seems at best a shallow mockery, with the ring of untruth, and the hollowness of hypocrisy.

And perhaps this is why the American people are turning away from their corporate-branded presidential candidates and Congressional representatives, whose approval ratings have fallen to 9%, in righteous indignation and revulsion, in disgust at their craven betrayal of their sacred oaths and trust.

They must have no sense of justice, or of proportion, or history, and apparently they have no shame.

Did Paulson give inside information to Hedge Fund Managers?

Shocking story from Bloomberg, it is a few days old but has not yet been refuted.

How Paulson Gave Hedge Funds Advance Word of Fannie Mae Rescue

By Richard Teitelbaum - Nov 30, 2011 1:46 AM GMT+0800

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson stepped off the elevator into the Third Avenue offices of hedge fund Eton Park Capital Management LP in Manhattan. It was July 21, 2008, and market fears were mounting. Four months earlier, Bear Stearns Cos. had sold itself for just $10 a share toJPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM)

Now, amid tumbling home prices and near-record foreclosures, attention was focused on a new source of contagion: Fannie Mae (FNMA) and Freddie Mac, which together had more than $5 trillion in mortgage-backed securities and other debt outstanding, Bloomberg Markets reports in its January issue.

Paulson had been pushing a plan in Congress to open lines of credit to the two struggling firms and to grant authority for the Treasury Department to buy equity in them. Yet he had told reporters on July 13 that the firms must remain shareholder owned and had testified at a Senate hearing two days later that giving the government new power to intervene made actual intervention improbable.

“If you have a bazooka, and people know you have it, you’re not likely to take it out,” he said.
On the morning of July 21, before the Eton Park meeting, Paulson had spoken to New York Times reporters and editors, according to his Treasury Department schedule. A Times article the next day said the Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency were inspecting Fannie and Freddie’s books and cited Paulson as saying he expected their examination would give a signal of confidence to the markets.

A Different Message

At the Eton Park meeting, he sent a different message, according to a fund manager who attended. Over sandwiches and pasta salad, he delivered that information to a group of men capable of profiting from any disclosure.

Around the conference room table were a dozen or so hedge-fund managers and other Wall Street executives -- at least five of them alumni of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS), of which Paulson was chief executive officer and chairman from 1999 to 2006. In addition to Eton Park founder Eric Mindich, they included such boldface names as Lone Pine Capital LLC founder Stephen Mandel,Dinakar Singh of TPG-Axon Capital Management LP and Daniel Och of Och-Ziff Capital Management Group LLC.

After a perfunctory discussion of the market turmoil, the fund manager says, the discussion turned to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Paulson said he had erred by not punishing Bear Stearns shareholders more severely. The secretary, then 62, went on to describe a possible scenario for placing Fannie and Freddie into “conservatorship” -- a government seizure designed to allow the firms to continue operations despite heavy losses in the mortgage markets.

For more information:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-11-29/how-henry-paulson-gave-hedge-funds-advance-word-of-2008-fannie-mae-rescue.html

"US financial industry is a machine to enrich itself"

Good warning for all other countries in the world: keep tabs on the financial industry: it should be nothing more than an intermediary.

"The financial industry has strayed far from being an intermediary between companies that want to raise capital so they can sell people things they want. Instead, it is a machine to enrich itself, fleecing customers and widening income inequality. When it goes off the rails, it impoverishes the rest of us. When the crises come, as they inevitably do, banks hold the economy hostage, warning that they will shoot us in the head if we don’t bail them out."

"On Wall Street, Some Insiders Express Quiet Outrage"

By Jesse Eisinger, Propublica

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/11/30/on-wall-street-some-insiders-express-quiet-outrage/?nl=business&emc=dlbkpma1

Albert Edwards: incompetency of central banks

http://www.businessinsider.com/albert-edwards-conspiracy-theory-central-banks-created-the-housing-bubble-and-heres-why-2011-11

Societe Generale's Albert Edwards has a killer conspiracy theory for you.

For his latest Global Strategy Weekly note, Edwards decided to republish an article he first wrote in January 2010.  The title: Theft! Were the US & UK central banks complicit in robbing the middle classes?

As usual, Edwards' note is entertaining. And this particular one has a timeless quality, so we are sharing some of it with you.

Edwards was so shocked by what he considered to be incompetancy by U.S. and U.K. central banks that he was willing to consider their actions as parts of a grand conspiracy.

Mr Bernanke’s in-house Fed economists have found that the Fed wasn’t responsible for the boom which subsequently turned into the biggest bust since the 1930s. Are those the same Fed staffers whose research led Mr Bernanke to assert in Oct. 2005 that “there was no housing bubble to go bust”? The reasons for the US and the UK central banks inflating the bubble range from incompetence and negligence to just plain spinelessness. Let me propose an alternative thesis. Did the US and UK central banks collude with the politicians to ‘steal’ their nations’ income growth from the middle classes and hand it to the very rich?

If true, how did they get away with it with no one noticing?

...Indeed, it has been amazing how little political backlash there has been against the stagnation of ordinary people’s earnings in the US and UK. Did central banks, in creating housing bubbles, help distract middle class attention from this re-distributive policy by allowing them to keep consuming via equity extraction? The emergence of extreme inequality might never otherwise have been tolerated by the electorate.
........
I recalled seeing another article from John Plender on this topic back in April 2008. His explanation for why there had been so little backlash from the stagnation of ordinary people’s income at a time when the rich did so well was simple: “Rising asset prices, especially in the housing market, created a sense of increasing wealth regardless of income. Remortgaging homes over a long period of declining interest rates provided a convenient source of funds via equity withdrawal to finance increased consumption”

.

So, what happens when the housing bubble bursts and people start to realize the income disparity?

Going forward, in the absence of a sustained housing boom, labour will fight back to take its proper (normal) share of the national cake, squeezing profits on a secular basis. For as Bill Gross pointed out back in PIMCO’s investment outlook ‘Enough is Enough’ of August 1997, “When the fruits of society’s labor become maldistributed, when the rich get richer and the middle and lower classes struggle to keep their heads above water as is clearly the case today, then the system ultimately breaks down.”. In Japan, low levels of inequality and inherent social cohesion prevented a social breakdown in this post-bubble debacle. With social inequality currently so very high in the US and the UK, it doesn’t take much to conclude that extreme inequality could strain the fabric of society far closer to breaking point.

Finally, a Judge Stands up to Wall Street

The amazing thing about the wave of corruption that has overtaken the financial services industry is that most of it couldn’t happen without virtually every player at every level signing off on these deals. From the ratings agencies to the law firms to the accounting firms to the regulators to the bank executives themselves, everybody had to be on board in order for a lot of these fraud schemes to work.

Judges are a part of that picture, and too often, members of the bench sign off on dirty deals made between banks and regulators when the law says that such settlements must be “fair, reasonable, adequate and in the public interest.”

It’s great that Rakoff is behaving as any decent human being would and rejecting these disgusting settlements. But equally disturbing is the fact that more judges haven’t done the same thing.

Are people with backbones really that rare?



http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/finally-a-judge-stands-up-to-wall-street-20111110#ixzz1dNpu8bbF

Federal judge Jed Rakoff, a former prosecutor with the U.S. Attorney’s office here in New York, is fast becoming a sort of legal hero of our time. He showed that again yesterday when he shat all over the SEC’s latest dirty settlement with serial fraud offender Citigroup, refusing to let the captured regulatory agency sweep yet another case of high-level criminal malfeasance under the rug.

The SEC had brought an action against Citigroup for misleading investors about the way a certain package of mortgage-backed assets had been chosen. The case is very similar to the notorious Abacus case involving Goldman Sachs, in which Goldman allowed short-selling billionaire John Paulson (who was betting against the package) to pick the assets, then told a pair of European banks that the “designed to fail” package they were buying had been put together independently.  

This case was similar, but worse. Here, Citi similarly told investors a package of mortgages had been chosen independently, when in fact Citi itself had chosen the stuff and was betting against the whole pile.
This whole transaction actually combined a number of Goldman-style misdeeds, since the bank both lied to investors and also bet against its own product and its own customers. In the deal, Citi made a $160 million profit, while its customers lost $700 million.

Goldman, in the Abacus case, got fined $550 million. In this worse case, the SEC was trying to settle with Citi for just $285 million. Judge Rakoff balked at the settlement and particularly balked at the SEC’s decision to allow Citi off without any admission of wrongdoing. He also mocked the SEC’s decision to describe the crime as “negligence” instead of intentional fraud, taking the entirely rational position that there’s no way a bank making $160 million ripping off its customers can conceivably be described as an accident.

“Why should the court impose a judgment in a case in which the SEC alleges a serious securities fraud but the defendant neither admits nor denies wrongdoing?” And this: “How can a securities fraud of this nature and magnitude be the result simply of negligence?”

Rakoff of course is right – the settlement is nuts. If you take Citi’s $160 million profit on the deal into consideration, what we’re talking about then is a $125 million fine for causing $700 million in damages. That, and no admission of wrongdoing.

Just imagine a mugger who steals $70 from some lady’s wallet being sentenced to walk free after paying back twelve bucks. Magritte himself could not devise a more surreal take on criminal justice.
It gets worse. Over the last decade, Citi has repeatedly been caught committing a variety of offenses, and time after time the bank has been dragged into court and slapped with injunctions demanding that they refrain from ever engaging the same practices ever again. Over and over again, they’ve completely blown off the injunctions, with no consequences from the state – which does nothing except issue new (soon-to-be-ignored-again) injunctions.

In this current case, this particular unit at Citi had already been slapped with two different SEC cease-and-desist orders barring it from violating certain securities laws. Here’s a summary from Bloomberg:

"The commission already had two cease-and-desist orders in place against the same Citigroup unit, barring future violations of the same section of the securities laws that the company now stands accused of breaking again. One of those orders came in a 2005 settlement, the other in a 2006 case. The SEC’s complaint last month didn’t mention either order, as if the entire agency suffered from amnesia.

The SEC’s latest allegations also could have triggered a violation of a court injunction that Citigroup agreed to in 2003, as part of a $400 million settlement over allegedly fraudulent analyst-research reports. Injunctions are more serious than SEC orders, because violations can lead to contempt-of-court charges."

But the SEC avoided the issue of the 2003 injunction by charging Citi with a different type of fraud. But, as Bloomberg points out, it probably wouldn’t have mattered much if they had accused Citi of violating the 2003 injunction, since the bank had already done that once and not been punished for it:

In December 2008, the SEC for the second time accused Citigroup of breaking the same section of the law covered by the 2003 injunction, over its sales of so-called auction-rate securities. Instead of trying to enforce the existing court order, the SEC got yet another one barring the same kinds of fraud violations in the future.

So to recap: a unit of Citigroup, having repeatedly violated the same laws and having repeatedly violated the SEC’s own cease-and-desist orders and injunctions, is dragged into court one more time for committing a massive fraud.

And what does the SEC do? It doesn’t even bring up Citi’s history of ignoring the SEC’s own order, slaps the bank with a fractional fine, refuses to target any individuals, allows the bank to walk away without an admission of wrongdoing, and puts a cherry on the top by describing the $160 million heist not as a crime, but as unintentional negligence.

Imagine a car thief who, when caught driving a stolen Lexus, tells the police he simply stepped into the wrong car and drove off by mistake. Now imagine he tells the same story when, two years later, he’s caught screaming over the GW bridge in a stolen Mercedes.

Then, two years after that, he’s caught on the Cross-Bronx Expressway blasting the stereo in a boosted 7-series BMW. Cops ask him for an explanation. “I must have gotten in the wrong car by mistake,” he says, shrugging. And the cops buy the story and send him home without a charge.

That’s roughly what we’re dealing with with this SEC action. To extend the metaphor just a little further – let’s say that BMW wasn’t even the only car he accidentally drove away that day, but the cops didn’t bother with the others. In the latest Citi case, the $700 million fraud was just one of many dicey CDOs marketed by that unit of Citi. But the SEC chose to address just that one case in its settlement.

Rakoff quite correctly took issue with all of this. From Jonathan Weil’s Bloomberg piece:

“What does the SEC do to maintain compliance?” Additionally, [Rakoff] asked: “How many contempt proceedings against large financial entities has the SEC brought in the past decade as a result of violations of prior consent judgments?” We’ll see if the SEC finds any.

Rakoff gained some notoriety a few years ago when he rejected as inadequate an SEC settlement with Bank of America, which was accused of misleading shareholders about the size of the bonuses paid out by Merrill Lynch, the investment bank BofA was in the process of acquiring. Rakoff dismissed the original $33 million fine as “half-baked justice,” although he eventually approved a $150 million fine.

The amazing thing about the wave of corruption that has overtaken the financial services industry is that most of it couldn’t happen without virtually every player at every level signing off on these deals. From the ratings agencies to the law firms to the accounting firms to the regulators to the bank executives themselves, everybody had to be on board in order for a lot of these fraud schemes to work.

Judges are a part of that picture, and too often, members of the bench sign off on dirty deals made between banks and regulators when the law says that such settlements must be “fair, reasonable, adequate and in the public interest.”

It’s great that Rakoff is behaving as any decent human being would and rejecting these disgusting settlements. But equally disturbing is the fact that more judges haven’t done the same thing. Are people with backbones really that rare?

Is the SEC colluding with banks on CDO prosecutions?

Blog from Felix Salmon, if the allegations are true, then things are looking pretty bad in the US.

 

 

http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2011/10/20/is-the-sec-colluding-with-banks-on-cdo-prosecutions/

 

Felix Salmon, Oct 20, 2011

 

Is the SEC colluding with Wall Street’s biggest banks to let them off lightly with respect to their dodgy CDOs? Jesse Eisinger and Jake Bernstein get an astonishing on-the-record admission today, from a Citigroup flack, that might indeed be the case:

The bank says it has settled all of its potential liability to a key regulator – the Securities and Exchange Commission — with a $285 million payment that covers a single transaction, Class V Funding III…
[The SEC] made no mention of the dozens of similar collateralized debt obligations, or CDOs, Citi sold to investors before the crash.
A bank spokesman said the SEC would not be examining any of those deals. “This means that the SEC has completed its CDO investigation(s) of Citi,’’ the spokesman asserted in an e mail.

The SEC, of course, denies this — but it carries the ring of truth. Just look at the SEC’s own list of CDO prosecutions to date: there’s exactly one enforcement action per bank.
And the idea is held more broadly, too — look for instance at Peter Henning’s article on the subject today.

The settlement — in which the financial firm agreed to pay $285 million without admitting or denying guilt — appears to be of little concern to Citigroup investors. They’re likely to be happy that the bank has put the issue to rest.

What makes Henning think that Citigroup has put this issue to rest? As Eisinger and Bernstein demonstrate, Citi had lots of synthetic CDOs — not just Class V Funding III — where someone other than the ostensible CDO manager was intimately involved in choosing the contents, and had a vested interest in picking securities which were extremely likely to fail.

There’s every indication, here, that the banks are doing nod-and-a-wink deals with the SEC. The SEC brings its single strongest case, and the banks agree to a nine-figure fine, on the implicit understanding that the fine covers all their other CDO deals as well. That saves the SEC from having to laboriously put together a separate case for each CDO deal, and it allows the banks to put much of their contingent liability behind them.

But if that is going on, it’s a scandal. For one thing, it’s incredibly unfair to everybody who bought one of the dodgy CDOs which is not prosecuted. Investors in Class V Funding III, for instance, are getting all their money back as a result of this latest settlement. But what about investors in Citi’s other synthetic CDOs, like Adams Square Funding II, or Ridgeway Court Funding II, or even Class V Funding IV? Not to mention the $6.5 billion of Magnetar deals, where — according to all ProPublica’s reporting — Magnetar was intimately involved in choosing what went in and what didn’t. The big sin, remember, in both the Goldman and Citi deals, was one of disclosure: the banks didn’t disclose to investors that the short side of the trade was hand-picking the contents of the deal. And you just know that there were dozens of deals — not just one per bank — where that key disclosure was missing.

Is the SEC trying to protect the banks it’s meant to be prosecuting? Is it quietly agreeing on a one-prosecution-per-bank model? If so, we should be told. And if not, it had better bring prosecution #2 against someone pretty soon. Because right now the pattern is decidedly fishy.