“A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you are talking real money,” the US senator Everett Dirksen once remarked. How Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan Chase must yearn for that kinder, gentler era when bankers’ fines were set in mere single-digit billions.
US regulators are close to presenting the US banking group with a $13bn bill for alleged mis-selling of mortgage-backed securities. Not only would this be the largest fine ever levied on a US corporation, it comes without any waiver from prosecution. JPMorgan must both pay and run the risk of being damned by criminal indictment.
The details of the settlement have yet to emerge, so it is unclear precisely what JPMorgan is alleged to have done and what admissions the bank may have made. But already Wall Street is up in arms about the scale of the fine and its apparent arbitrariness.