US government lets JPMorgan off the hook for mortgage fraud
Andre Damon & Barry Grey: US government lets JPMorgan off the hook for mortgage fraud: There has as yet been no criminal indictment of Dimon or any other leading JPMorgan official. ■ This is in keeping with the administration’s policy of shielding the Wall Street elite from prosecution for its criminal actions both before, during and after the financial crash of September 2008. Not a single top banker has been criminally charged, let alone convicted and jailed, despite detailed exposures of illegal actions made public two years ago by a special investigatory commission into the financial crisis and, in a separate report, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. The settlement, hailed by the Obama administration and the media as a “breakthrough” in government policing of the banks, is nothing of the kind. The headline figure of $13 billion is deliberately deceptive. Only $9 billion of the total is in cash, the rest taking the form of relief to troubled homeowners, partly through reductions in mortgage principals and partly through the lowering of interest payments. It is likely that JPMorgan was already planning to offer much of this $4 billion in relief for business reasons.
BBC: JP Morgan in record $13bn settlement with US authorities