Jamie Dimon's 13 Billion Secret

Any vaguely capable underwriter knew what was going on.  Yet it was a gold rush.  All the safeguards had been compromised and the clients had not gotten wise.  So make as much now and hope you can stick the bill to the government when it does collapse.

Which is what happened.  The folks in the government have never taken full revenge.  I cannot believe that they do not know as the leaders all worked across the street.  again the loop is closed.

In my opinion, the too big to fail crowd need to be outright nationalized in order to progressively calve off much smaller competitive banking organizations. This also allows the massive investment made by government to be recognized and liquidated as well..
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JAMIE DIMON’S $13 BILLION SECRET—REVEALED

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/09/jamie-dimon-billion-dollar-secret-jp-morgan

Four years ago, JPMorgan Chase reached a then-record settlement with the Department of Justice after, among other things, the bank received a copy of a U.S. attorney’s draft complaint documenting its alleged role in underwriting fraudulent securities in the years leading up to the 2008 financial crisis. Following the bank’s $13 billion financial agreement, the draft complaint was never filed. Then the bank paid another settlement to prevent a separate legal case from potentially unearthing it. The contents of the draft complaint have long been a financial-crisis mystery, a Great White Whale of a document. At least until now.

BY 

WILLIAM D. COHAN 

SEPTEMBER 6, 2017 2:54 PM

In November 2013, JPMorgan Chase, the nation’s largest bank, agreed to pay a then-record $13 billion fine to federal and state authorities in order to settle claims that it had misled investors in the years leading up to the financial crisis. JPMorgan Chase’s settlement raised many eyebrows on Wall Street. The huge settlement appeared inconsistent with the oft-repeated narrative of the bank’s heroism during the crisis. JPMorgan Chase and its C.E.O., Jamie Dimon, after all, were appropriately lauded for swooping in to save both Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual, acts of financial patriotism that certainly helped prevent the U.S. economy from further doubling over upon itself.

But people wondered why one of Wall Street’s ostensible white knights would pay $13 billion—$9 billion of its shareholders’ cash, plus another $4 billion in mortgage relief—in a government case. During a conference call on the morning that the settlement was announced, Mike Mayo, a veteran Wall Street analyst, asked Dimon and bank C.F.O. Marianne Lake the question that appeared to be on the minds of everyone in the financial-services industry: “How is it that JPMorgan got front and center with this issue? That it’s the Department of Justice working out an agreement with JPMorgan when JPMorgan performed so well during the crisis, yet here’s the one bank that’s paying a $13 billion fine?” Without missing a beat, Dimon retorted, “Mike, you’ve got to ask them, O.K.?” In other words, Dimon seemed to be saying to Mayo, as he later put it in Davos, that the whole thing was “unfair.”

A number of clues about what had forced Dimon’s hand, however, began emerging soon after the conference call. As I reported in The Nation in 2014, JPMorgan Chase’s settlement came at the end of an intense series of negotiations with a wide range of government officials. Perhaps the most pivotal moment in the conversations occurred in September 2013 when D.O.J. lawyers shared with Dimon and his attorneys a draft of a 92-page civil complaint that Benjamin B. Wagner, the then U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of California, and his colleagues were prepared to file in federal court. The draft complaint—based upon hundreds of thousands of subpoenaed internal JPMorgan documents; and interviews with its bankers, employees in its mortgage-backed securities division, and third-party mortgage originator—alleged that the bank’s due-diligence process had been subverted, and ignored, during the years before the crisis. In Wagner’s narrative, the bank was not nearly the white knight of Wall Street.

No one knew precisely what Wagner’s investigation had uncovered about JPMorgan Chase, however, because his brief was never filed publicly. Within weeks of Wagner sharing a draft copy of the complaint with Dimon—and following a tense face-to-face meeting at the Department of Justice between Dimon and Eric Holder, then the U.S. attorney general—the two sides agreed to the $13 billion settlement, at the time the largest ever. (It has since been surpassed by Bank of America’s $16.65 billion fine, settling similar claims.) In return, the Department of Justice agreed with Dimon and JPMorgan Chase that, among other things, it would not file Wagner’s complaint. Instead, an anodyne 11-page “Statement of Facts” was released. But it didn’t offer a tremendous amount of insight. “Much of it was the same-old-same-old, a not-very-lively description of a corrupted Wall Street mortgage factory,” wrote Gretchen Morgenson in The New York Times, “based largely on some facts that have been in the public domain for years.”

Wall Street C.E.O.s have many reasons for using their shareholders’ money to settle nettlesome lawsuits—from “optics” and brand preservation, to boosting their stock price and keeping embarrassing facts out of the public’s hands. And in the wake of his bank’s $13 billion settlement, Dimon made clear that he was frustrated that the bank had to settle. At a Microsoft C.E.O. summit, Dimon confessed that he “had to control his rage” regarding the topic.

To keen observers, though, it also seemed that he and JPMorgan Chase appeared intent on keeping Wagner’s unfiled complaint out of the public record. The specter of the document becoming public was again raised in a separate court case, when, a few weeks after the Department of Justice announced the settlement with JPMorgan Chase, lawyers for the Federal Home Loan Bank of Pittsburgh, which had sued JPMorgan Chase’s investment bank, along with other defendants, alleging it had sold the bank more than $1.7 billion in squirrelly mortgage-backed securities, wanted a copy of Wagner’s complaint. In fact, a state judge in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, ordered the bank to turn over the draft complaint. But JPMorgan Chase settled the litigation after the judge’s ruling—a settlement that, among other things, included a provision that the draft complaint was to remain private. (Disclosure: after JPMorgan Chase fired me as a managing director in January 2004, I brought—and lost—an arbitration claim against the bank. I also remain in litigation with the bank as the result of a soured investment I made in 1999.)

Now, nearly four years later, as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit initiated by Daniel Novack, an enterprising First Amendment attorney in New York City, the D.O.J. sent Novack a partially redacted copy of Wagner’s curiosity-stoking draft complaint against JPMorgan Chase. Novack provided a copy of the partially redacted complaint to me. “By this action,” the draft complaint begins, “the United States seeks to recover civil penalties” against JPMorgan Chase and its investment banking arm “for a fraudulent and deceptive scheme to package and sell residential mortgage-backed securities” that the bank “knew contained a material amount of materially defective loans.” As the unfiled complaint continued, “JPMorgan knowingly securitized and sold billions of dollars of mortgage loans that were originated in material violation of underwriting guidelines and law.” (When reached for comments and responses to the various allegations in Wagner’s unfiled brief, a spokesperson for JPMorgan Chase told me, “These allegations have been addressed, resolved, or refuted years ago.”)

Wagner’s unfiled brief catalogs behavior rather at odds with the public narrative about the bank in the years preceding the crisis. It further asserts that JPMorgan Chase knew that “many of these loans were tainted with fraud” and “knowingly misrepresented” that the loans met its underwriting guidelines, even though they clearly did not, and that the loans had sufficient equity value to collateralize the mortgages even though they did not. Notably, Wagner’s complaint argues that “these fraudulent misrepresentations” cost investors “to suffer billions of dollars in losses.”

Wagner wrote in the unfiled complaint that, according to his investigation, Christine Coleand Bill King, managing directors at JPMorgan Securities, ran the Securitized Products Group inside the investment bank that manufactured and sold the tainted mortgaged-backed securities in hopes of generating fees that would lead to large end-of-year bonuses for them and other members of the group. The bonuses ranged into the millions of dollars, and could be many times the size of the bankers’ and traders’ salaries. Between 2005 and 2007, Wagner wrote, “the year-end bonuses of the traders and salespeople rose significantly, in correlation with the spike in volume of [residential mortgage-backed securities] issuances at JPMorgan.”

The unfiled complaint also alleges that the JPMorgan Chase bankers and traders acquired mortgages from third-party originators with the sole intention of packaging up the mortgages into securities and selling them off quickly to investors in exchange for large fees. Wagner wrote that the bankers, traders, and employees responsible for carefully scrutinizing the mortgages being packaged up and sold knew they were acquiring loans with material defects that would be securitized and sold to investors. The bank, the unfiled brief continues, “ignored its due diligence findings and securitized materially defective loans” and “knowingly purchased and securitized loans with material credit and compliance defects.” The document further alleges that the bank, and its employees, knowingly sold mortgage-related securities with “inflated appraisals” and that “ignored internal controls” and that it “intentionally misrepresented” to investors “the quality of the loans” in offering documents, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, for the securities.

Worse, the unfiled brief notes, the bank continued to sell mortgage-backed securities even though Dimon himself was worried that the residential mortgage-backed securities market was about to crash. According to Wagner, during the second week of October 2006, Dimon allegedly told King, the co-head of the Securitized Products Group, that he needed to “watch out for subprime”—a reference to low-quality mortgage-backed securities—because he feared that the market “could go up in smoke.” The document also notes that Dimon wanted King to reduce the bank’s exposure to that market. The “impetus” for Dimon’s concern, Wagner continues, was his review of reports from the mortgage-servicing arm of the bank that showed that delinquencies on such mortgages “were rising at an alarming rate.” At Dimon’s “insistence,” the unfiled complaint asserts, “JPMorgan formulated an exit strategy to divest itself” of the riskiest pieces of mortgage-backed securities that had been accumulating on its balance sheet. But, Wagner writes in the draft complaint, “despite knowledge at the highest levels that underwriting had deteriorated across the industry and early payment defaults were spiking, JPMorgan continued to purchase and securitize subprime loans without addressing the known breakdown of its due diligence practices and without disclosing its knowledge to investors.” This is pretty much the exact same thing that Goldman Sachs did leading up to the financial crisis, a practice for which the bank was roundly criticized.

Wagner’s unfiled complaint provided details on 10 allegedly fraudulent mortgage-backed securities that JPMorgan Chase underwrote and sold to investors. (Four of the 10 examples were redacted in the copy the D.O.J. provided to Novack and that Novack provided to me, because “the D.O.J. contends that these paragraphs contain information pertaining to an ongoing investigation,” according to a recent ruling in Novack’s case.)

The draft complaint further stated that the 10 examples “do not encompass the full extent of JPMorgan’s fraudulent scheme.” In one un-redacted example, the U.S. attorney’s office in the Eastern District of California described what happened to a $1 billion security that JPMorgan underwrote in August 2006 that contained more than 5,500 mortgages issued by Countrywide Financial, then an independent public company (and now part of Bank of America). Prior to purchasing the Countrywide pool, one-quarter of the loans were tested by an independent third-party consultant hired by JPMorgan. The third-party evaluator’s report, received by JPMorgan in May 2006, showed that up to 17 percent of the mortgages contained “material” defects, including “excessive” loan-to-value ratios, “incomplete or defective” appraisals, and missing verifications of income, employment, or assets at closing, among other problems.

According to Wagner’s draft complaint, after JPMorgan received the third-party report showing the defects in the mortgages, the company’s bankers “manipulated” the results by re-categorizing the defective mortgages because of “missing documents,” which lowered their risk assessment and made them appear to comply with the bank’s underwriting standards. But, according to Wagner’s unfiled complaint, “these missing documents were not delivered” and despite “knowledge of the material defects in the Countrywide pool,” JPMorgan Chase nevertheless bought 99 percent of the mortgages, and securitized all but seven of them into what became known as JPMAC 2006-CW2. Furthermore, the bank “did not inform investors of material amount of materially defective loans” that created the security. Wagner’s complaint, drafted seven years after the security was issued, noted that JPMAC 2006-CW2 “has suffered hundreds of millions of dollars in cumulative lost principal balance, and more losses are projected.” The complaint noted that although the top tranches of the security were once rated AAA, they had since been downgraded to “junk bond” status or below. And some had defaulted.

In another un-redacted example from Wagner’s complaint, a mortgage-backed security that JPMorgan Chase underwrote in February 2007—relatively late in the cycle—for some $980 million contained around 35 percent of mortgages originated by GreenPoint Mortgage Funding, Inc. The mortgages, which were drawn from two pools with unpaid principal balances of $459 million and $300 million, respectively, had many of the same underwriting flaws as found in the Countrywide mortgages. Once again, JPMorgan hired a third-party consultant to look at a sample of them and to report back to it about their quality. Approximately 25 percent of the sample evaluated came back as containing unacceptable risks because of the low quality of the initial underwriting. According to Wagner’s draft complaint, “JPMorgan had knowledge that a substantial portion of the loans did not comply with the originator’s underwriting guidelines and had a substantial risk of default.” The bank packaged up the GreenPoint mortgages and sold them anyway. In the end, investors suffered “hundreds of millions of dollars” of losses on that one security. In all, the unfiled document concludes, JPMorgan Chase and its investment bank “reaped substantial profits from their fraudulent scheme, having sold over $25 billion in nonprime RMBS”—residential mortgage-backed securities—“certificates backed by toxic loans.”

Mythmaking is a blood sport on Wall Street, and few are better at the game than Dimon. While Dimon has not been shy about criticizing Donald Trump and his many offensive policy proposals, it is worth recalling that he was considered a leading candidate to be Trump’s Treasury secretary and served on the president’s Strategy and Policy Forum (until he resigned last month in protest of the president’s response to Charlottesville). One of Dimon’s main jobs as C.E.O. is to find his successor, but so far one top executive after another has left the firm, with many of them becoming C.E.O.s at other financial institutions. (Matt Zames, the bank’s 46-year-old chief operating officer, became the latest Dimon heir apparent to leave JPMorgan Chase when he departed unexpectedly in June. “We have huge success and great people for succession of the bank,” Dimon told CNBC in August.)

Dimon had harsh words, of course, for the Obama administration over his belief that his bank was treated unfairly by the Department of Justice in the $13 billion settlement. Instead of penalizing the bank for its bad behavior, Dimon argued, it should be celebrated for helping to save the financial system from its further free fall. That may be true to some degree, but Wagner’s 92-page draft complaint puts the wood to Dimon’s spin machine and shows that he and his colleagues at the bank were no different than the rest of the Wall Street banksters who received big bonuses for packaging up mortgages they knew would not be repaid into securities that they could sell to investors for big fees. Dimon’s pay package for 2013, the year of the big government settlement, was $20 million—a raise of 74 percent from the year before.