JPMorgan Chase & Co CEO Jamie Dimon met with US Attorney General Eric Holder on Thursday, seeking to make sure a possible US$11 billion settlement will end the bank’s pain from mortgage-securities probes, a source said.
The bank is close to settling many of the probes into how it sold mortgage bonds before the financial crisis, but Dimon fears that as soon as this deal is worked out other investigations will emerge, a familiar with the matter said.
It is unusual for a CEO of a company to meet with the head of the US Justice Department.
However, the bank is seeking to tamp down its legal problems as it fends off a spate of probes covering everything from possibly illegal nepotism in China to whether it hid losses from its disastrous “London whale” trades.
On the mortgage front, the Department of Justice in California, New Jersey and Philadelphia has been looking into mortgages that the bank packaged into bonds before the financial crisis.
Meanwhile, government-owned home finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have been pressuring JPMorgan to buy back mortgage bonds that they said the bank should not have sold them.
Those claims and the investigation in California would be the two biggest pieces of any deal, another source said.
After the meeting at the US Justice Department, which lasted about an hour, Holder told reporters that he had met with representatives of JPMorgan, but did not mention Dimon by name. He declined to give details of the talks.
Speaking at a news conference on an unrelated topic, the attorney general also said that the Justice Department plans to make announcements about financial cases in the coming weeks and months.
A source familiar with the matter said a JPMorgan mortgage deal could come within days.
JPMorgan has already paid billions of dollars this year to resolve probes into areas including power market manipulation and failing to supervise employees that lost US$6 billion from the London whale trades.
Many investors see the heat on the bank as evidence of Dimon’s dysfunctional relationship with regulators.
A member of JPMorgan’s board of directors said on Thursday at a conference in Chicago that the company is determined to make amends and improve its reputation.
“We’ve got these things that we actually are guilty of and we’ve got to fix them,” said Labon Jackson, the head of the audit committee on JPMorgan’s board of directors.
“It’s embarrassing for the board,” he said.
The bank avoided the worst losses in the financial crisis, but has been under intense scrutiny since May last year, when it said it was losing money on derivatives bets that became known as the London whale trades.
Stephen Garrett, a 27-year-old graduate student, always thought he would study in China, but first the country’s restrictive COVID-19 policies made it nearly impossible and now he has other concerns. The cost is one deterrent, but Garrett is more worried about restrictions on academic freedom and the personal risk of being stranded in China. He is not alone. Only about 700 American students are studying at Chinese universities, down from a peak of nearly 25,000 a decade ago, while there are nearly 300,000 Chinese students at US schools. Some young Americans are discouraged from investing their time in China by what they see
MAJOR DROP: CEO Tim Cook, who is visiting Hanoi, pledged the firm was committed to Vietnam after its smartphone shipments declined 9.6% annually in the first quarter Apple Inc yesterday said it would increase spending on suppliers in Vietnam, a key production hub, as CEO Tim Cook arrived in the country for a two-day visit. The iPhone maker announced the news in a statement on its Web site, but gave no details of how much it would spend or where the money would go. Cook is expected to meet programmers, content creators and students during his visit, online newspaper VnExpress reported. The visit comes as US President Joe Biden’s administration seeks to ramp up Vietnam’s role in the global tech supply chain to reduce the US’ dependence on China. Images on
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last