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By Richard (RJ) Eskow
Senior Fellow, Campaign for America’s Future

$16 billion.

That’s how much JPMorgan Chase has paid in fines, settlements and other litigation expenses in the last four years alone.

More than half of that amount, $8.5 billion, was paid out in fines and settlements as the result of illegal actions taken by bank executives.

$8.5 billion is almost 12 percent of the net income the mega-bank brought in during the same period.

High Overhead

These figures comes from “JPMorgan Chase: Out of Control,” an impressive analysis of the bank’s performance by Joshua Rosner, an investment analyst at GrahamFisher. And there’s more. Since Rosner published his report only last week, JPMorgan Chase has settled another dispute.

This latest agreement is with the trustee for customers of fraudulent investment firm MF Global.

The MF Global deal included a $100 million cash payout from Chase, and an agreement to waive the $417 million in claims it had made against MF Global’s clients.  If you add in the full amount of this agreement, the bank has given up more than $9 billion in settlements since 2009.

Now we’re over 12 percent just in payouts.  Throw in all the other litigation costs and the total comes to well over 20 percent of the bank’s net income in a four year period.

And illegalities aren’t the only thing that’s costing JPMorgan Chase’s shareholders a lot of money. There’s also the London Whale foul-up, an apparently illegal series of trades that’s already lost the bank $6.2 billion.

Add it all up. Then throw in the massive fines JPMorgan Chase paid before 2009, but after Dimon took the helm. Then add in the likely cost of the cases which loom before the bank today. You’ll find that the Price of Evil for Dimon & Co. is very high — at least by normal standards.

Bad Company

Is “evil” too harsh a word?  Merriam-Webster defines evil as “morally reprehensible,” “arising from actual or imputed bad character or conduct,” “causing discomfort or repulsion,” or “causing harm.” Which of those descriptions is not true for the leaders of an institutions that’s paid billions for misdeeds such as:

• Reportedly taking MF Global’s customers’ money as that firm was collapsing under the weight of its own fraud;
• Closing the bank account and freezing the credit card of a hedge fund manager because he criticized its handling of MF Global on television;
• Bribing officials in Jefferson County, Alabama, which subsequently went bankrupt;
• Fraudulently submitting court documents in support of its foreclosures, using a group of untrained college students and other young people (known in the firm as “Burger King Kids”) to prepare and submit the papers.

Follow the links at the bottom of the page if you want more information, but here’s a sneak preview: Angels, they ain’t. (more…)

By Robert Reich
Former U.S. Secretary of Labor, Professor at Berkeley

I wish President Obama would draw the obvious connection between Bain Capital and JPMorgan Chase.

That way his so-called “attack” on private equity is neither a personal attack on Mitt Romney nor a generalized attack on American business.

It’s an attack on a particular kind of capitalism that Romney and JPMorgan both practice: Using other peoples’ money to make big bets which, if they go wrong, can wreak havoc on the economy.

It’s the substitution of casino capitalism for real capitalism, the dominance of the betting parlor over the real business of America, financial innovation rather than product innovation.

It’s been terrible for the American economy and for our democracy.

It’s also why Obama has to come out swinging about JPMorgan. The JPMorgan Chase debacle would have been prevented if the Volcker Rule were sufficiently strict, prohibiting banks from using commercial deposits to make bets except very specific offsetting bets (hedges) on narrow classes of trades.

But Jamie Dimon and JPMorgan have been lobbying like mad to loosen the Volcker Rule and widen that exception to include the very kind of reckless bets JPMorgan made. And they’re still at it, as evidenced by Dimon’s current claim that the rule that eventually emerges would allow those bets.

As a practical matter, the Volcker Rule is hopeless. It was intended to be Glass-Steagall lite – a more nuanced version of the original Depression-era law that separated commercial from investment banking. But JPMorgan has proven that any nuance – any exception – will be stretched beyond recognition by the big banks.

So much money can be made when these bets turn out well that the big banks will stop at nothing to keep the spigot open.

There’s no alternative but to resurrect Glass-Steagall as a whole. Even then, the biggest banks are still too big to fail or to regulate. We also need to heed the recent advice of the Dallas branch of the Federal Reserve, and break them up. (more…)

Zach Carter

Zach Carter
Economics Editor, AlterNet; Fellow, Campaign for America’s Future

Despite escalating outrage over rampant foreclosure fraud, the Federal Reserve now appears ready to eviscerate a key mortgage regulation in an effort to spare banks the losses from their own wrongdoing. Even as bank executives preposterously claim to have wronged nobody in the foreclosure process, they’re pushing hard to unwind the only serious federal rule that protects borrowers from predatory loans and improper foreclosures. As if the last decade of abuse wasn’t bad enough, banks are once again mobilizing to screw borrowers in the pursuit of epic bonuses. And once again, it appears that the Federal Reserve has become an accomplice to this nationwide mortgage scam.

This week, top mortgage officers from the nation’s largest banks are telling the Senate Banking Committee that they aren’t kicking the wrong people out of their homes. This is simply false. Problems at mortgage servicers have been going on for years, long before banks got into trouble for illegally robo-signing foreclosure documents. People are kicked out of their homes without cause in the United States every day. If the top executives at America’s largest banks don’t know this fact, they lack the competence needed to run their organizations.

Law firms that work with troubled borrowers are jam-packed with horror stories about foreclosures caused entirely by banks, not borrowers. Families who never miss a payment come home to an eviction notice, or a thug breaking down their door.

But it’s even more common for borrowers to find themselves in trouble because their bank engaged in blatantly predatory lending. There is only one serious federal remedy for predatory lending, and the Fed is now knowingly trying to gut that remedy in order to help banks avoid losses from their own fraud. The remedy is called rescission, and it works like this:

If a bank failed to make key consumer protection disclosures about a mortgage, the borrower can demand that all of the interest and closing costs on the loan be refunded. Equally important, the bank must also stop all foreclosure proceedings and give up its right to foreclose. Once the bank gives up its right to foreclose, the full amount of the mortgage, minus interest and closing costs, becomes due. This isn’t a free lunch for the borrower, especially when the value of her home has declined dramatically, but it’s better than nothing, and it does impose real costs on banks. (more…)

Zach Carter

Zach Carter
Economics Editor, AlterNet; Fellow, Campaign for America’s Future

Foreclosure fraud is ruffling a lot of feathers on Wall Street, and while the full scope of losses remains unclear, even major banks are now acknowledging that this is a multibillion-dollar disaster, not just a set of minor paperwork headaches.

So how bad will it get for Wall Street? There are several disaster scenarios in which the housing market simply shuts down, where the potential losses for Wall Street are simply incalculable. But even situations that do not directly rip apart the basic functioning of the mortgage system could be enough to shut down one or more big banks, creating serious trouble for the financial system, and a major test of the recent Wall Street reform bill.

JPMorgan Chase loves using its research department to push its political agenda, and the bank is currently characterizing the foreclosure fraud outbreak as a set of “process-oriented problems that can be fixed.” That puts them in the rosy optimist camp for this crisis, and they’re projecting a total of $55 billion to $120 billion in losses for the entire industry, spread out over a few years.

But take a look at the analysts’ methodology. The actual scope of losses gets drastically larger if you just change a few arbitrary assumptions.

JPMorgan’s analysts look at about $6 trillion in mortgages issued between 2005 and 2007 — this is the height of the bubble, but it excludes plenty of lousy loans issued in 2003, 2004 and 2008. They then estimate defaults of $2 trillion and losses of $1.1 trillion on those defaults. (more…)

Zach Carter

By Zach Carter
Economics Editor, AlterNet; Fellow, Campaign for America’s Future

Anybody looking for a primer explaining why the current foreclosure fraud issue is a major systemic risk for the financial system should check out Mike Konczal’s new post for the Roosevelt Institute. I’m going to try and simplify it even further here, and present the only serious avenue available to solve the problem.

Three parties stand to lose big. The most obvious is homeowners—they’re being slapped with enormous, illegal fees invented by fraudulent documents, and frequently being illegally exiled from their homes.

Next are the mortgage servicers. These are the mortgage industry’s debt collectors, and their mere existence often creates huge conflicts of interest that have made the foreclosure mess much harder to clean-up. The dominant servicers are owned by megabanks—Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citibank and GMAC control the vast majority of this work. A massive loss for a mortgage servicer means a massive loss for a massive bank.

Mortgage servicers are supposed to collect payments and negotiate with troubled borrowers in order to maximize the returns to investors. Who are these investors? Hedge funds and banks that bought mortgage-backed securities during the housing bubble.

The basic job of a mortgage servicer is to collect payments from borrowers, and pass them on to investors. If borrowers stop paying, servicers have to make those payments to investors out of their own pocket—until they actually foreclose. At foreclosure, the servicer gets to recoup its costs. So in many cases, servicers have a very strong incentive to cut whatever corners they can in order to recoup their costs and avoid forwarding more money to investors (This is only part of the story—since the servicers are megabanks, the other assets of the servicer bank can give the servicer wing an incentive to stall the foreclosure process like crazy—more on that in another post).

The point is, in many cases, servicers have a clear incentive to cut corners to speed up the foreclosure process, and stand to lose a lot of money if they don’t. (more…)

Zach Carter

Zach Carter
Economics Editor, AlterNet; Fellow, Campaign for America’s Future

Unbelievably, the U.S. Senate has approved legislation making it easier for banks to get away with foreclosure fraud. The bill would make it much harder for consumer advocates to show that banks are engaging in fraud, bailing out megabanks who cut corners in order to boost bonuses and slap borrowers with massive, illegal fees. The political fight between big banks and troubled homeowners is on, and President Barack Obama must take a side.

If President Obama signs this legislation into law, he’s sending a clear signal that his administration stands ready to bailout the banks again, whatever the consequences for American homeowners. The new legislation is a clear attempt to provide legal cover to GMAC’s robo-signing scandal, and should be firmly opposed by Obama.

Banks are running into big trouble in foreclosure courts right now because they have kept shoddy mortgage records for years in order to cut costs and boost bonuses. Those records are so bad that banks routinely cannot prove that they have the legal right to foreclose on the homes they attempt to foreclose on. That’s a major problem, because banks have repeatedly demonstrated that they cannot be trusted to figure out their own foreclosures for themselves. They’ve foreclosed on people who haven’t missed any mortgage payments, and even on borrowers who have fully paid off their loans.

So banks and their lawyers have been fabricating documents, forging signatures, and lying to judges in order to go through with foreclosures. All of this is fraud– especially when committed systematically, en masse by large corporations and their clients. It gets even worse when banks try to use fraudulent documents to slap borrowers with thousands of dollars in illegal fees. (more…)

Zach Carter

Zach Carter
Economics Editor, AlterNet

I’ll have plenty to say about the escalating foreclosure fraud scandal later this week. For now: This is a big, big deal. It isn’t a clerical error, it’s an aggressive attempt to slap borrowers with thousands of dollars in illegal fees for the luxury of being foreclosed on. And what’s more, this absurd, shady business was priced into the entire mortgage securitization scheme from the get-go. Banks have been fudging their documentation for years in order to cut costs and score higher profits from securitization—the business model has relied on this corner-cutting since day one of the housing boom.

The good news is that borrowers can use this epic fraud to defend themselves. If a bank can’t prove that it has the right to foreclose on a borrower by showing the proper documentation to a judge, then it doesn’t have the right to foreclose. This is a tremendous opportunity for neighborhood advocates. Make them pony up the docs, it might just save your home. The problem isn’t restricted to GMAC—foreclosure counselors and attorneys talk about the issue of forged or destroyed documentation all the time, and we already know that JPMorgan Chase and Countrywide (now Bank of America) have major documentation problems. Including GMAC, that’s three of the biggest players in every aspect of the mortgage market.

If courts actually follow the law here, we get the best of both worlds—big losses for Wall Street on their predatory loans, and borrowers who get to stay in their homes (mortgage-free, at that). The only question is whether these mortgage losses prove so severe that Wall Street banks come back begging to the government for another bailout. If so, it’s an opportunity to do what should have been done in 2008—break up these financial monsters into smaller creatures that don’t require bailouts when they fail. (more…)

Leo W. Gerard

By Leo W. Gerard
USW International President

Recent stories about Wall Street contain a recurring theme: deceit.

For example, this week the CEO of the late Lehman Brothers, Richard S. Fuld Jr., with a completely straight face swore to Congress that he’d been utterly out to lunch on the issue of “Repo 105,” a sleight-of-hand accounting procedure auditors found Lehman used to conceal its debts.

Last week, the Securities and Exchange Commission filed a civil lawsuit charging  Goldman Sachs with securities fraud and describing a scheme in which Goldman defrauded clients by selling them a mortgage investment to bet on after secretly permitting selection of its component securities by a hedge fund manager who Goldman knew planned to bet against it.

Also last week, the Senate conducted hearings on failed Washington Mutual following a report by a Senate subcommittee that found the bank’s lending operations rife with fraud, including fabricated loan documents.

This deceit illustrates that America’s largest financial institutions can’t be trusted to refrain from crashing the world economy again. In fact, when the big banks announced their first quarter earnings recently — Citigroup $4.4 billion; Bank of America, $4.2 billion; Goldman Sachs $3.46 billion, and JPMorgan $3.3 billion; Morgan Stanley $1.8 billion – it turned out that much of that money was made by their trading divisions – the very ones that dragged them – and the U.S. economy – down during the crisis in 2008. These are the same risky trading practices that cost taxpayers a $700 billion bank bailout, their savings, their jobs, their businesses.

Clearly, these bankers can’t control themselves. And the “free market” has failed to moderate their behavior. Strict regulation is essential, including re-instituting the Glass-Steagall Act and other rules that will prevent financial firms from growing too big to fail; forcing the banks themselves to pay for liquidation of big financial institutions; placing on open markets trades of those secretive derivatives that brought down AIG and that the SEC says Goldman used fraudulently; and creating an independent consumer financial protection agency to stop practices like predatory lending, usurious interest rates and hidden fees.

Congress lifted bank regulations over the past three decades, including the Glass-Steagall Act passed after the 1929 stock market crash to reduce speculation and conflicts of interest and to prevent “too-big-to-fail” financial institutions by forbidding the combination of investment and commercial banks. Like gullible investors in subprime mortgage bonds, the politicians who reversed those rules bought the argument that the free market would regulate itself. This is the same argument 1,500 Wall Street lobbyists are using, along with millions of dollars, right now in attempts to persuade lawmakers to stop worrying their little heads about seriously regulating Wall Street.

Main Street, where foreclosures continue at a record pace and unemployment remains painfully near 10 percent, desperately needs its own 1,500 lobbyists and millions in influence dollars. It will have the power of thousands of voices at a “Make Wall Street Pay” rally April 29 in the heart of New York City’s financial district, one of several protests across the country organized by the AFL-CIO.

On Main Street the need to forcefully re-regulate to prevent another Great Recession is clear; it’s not in Washington, D.C. In fact, weakening the already-too-soft financial regulation bill proposed by Sen. Chris Dodd is a crusade for Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell, whose campaign coffers have received more money from security and investment firms than from any other category — $1.3 million. Like a Wall Street banker, McConnell is using deception. For example, he harped all last week that an “orderly liquidation fund” in the Dodd bill was a “bailout fund.”

It’s not. It would be created with fees on banks – not taxpayers. And it’s not for bailouts that preserve banks. It is for bank liquidation. It would pay for the orderly closing of too-big-to-fail banks. Ezra Klein of the Washington Post ridiculed McConnell’s claims, and Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of the Nation, described McConnell’s attacks on the bill as fraudulent.

All of the sudden on Monday, McConnell changed his mind about Dodd’s bill. Coincidentally, that was three days after the SEC filed the fraud suit against Goldman Sachs, making railing against financial reform appear not quite so politically wise to Republicans anymore. It’s all about the politics in Washington, D.C.

McConnell said he had new optimism that Wall Street reform would pass because Democrats had resumed bipartisan talks and, he said:

“I’m convinced now there is a new element of seriousness attached to this, rather than just trying to score political points.”

Listening to McConnell is like hearing Lehman’s Fuld, who got a $22 million bonus six months before his financial firm filed for bankruptcy, swear to Congress he knew nothing about the “Repo” accounting procedure Lehman used to conceal $50 billion in debts. Following his testimony, Anton R. Valukas, the examiner in the Lehman bankruptcy, told Congress that his investigators found a person who had discussed Repo with then-CEO Fuld and e-mails to Fuld describing it.

The problem with McConnell and his new-found eagerness to pass “bipartisan” legislation is that the Dodd bill needs to be strengthened, not weakened with compromises thrown to Senate Republicans, all 41 of whom signed a letter last week saying they’d vote against it.

Before compromises remove from this bill the power to effectively regulate, Congress needs to review what Goldman is accused of doing. Ezra Klein of the Post described it best:

“Goldman Sachs let hedge-fund manager John Paulson select the subprime-mortgage bonds that he thought likeliest to explode and put them into a package called Abacus 2007-AC1. Paulson, who guessed early that the market was heading for a crash, wanted to bet against these bonds. But he needed someone on the other side of the bet. So Goldman went out and found him some suckers, or, as Goldman called them, “counterparties.” .  .  .But here’s the rub: Goldman didn’t tell the counterparties that Paulson had picked the bonds. ‘Goldman wrongly permitted a client that was betting against the mortgage market to heavily influence which mortgage securities to include in an investment portfolio, while telling other investors that the securities were selected by an independent, objective third party,’  said Robert Khuzami, the director of the  SEC’s division of enforcement.”

Khuzami’s description makes Goldman’s behavior sound a lot like lying.

The real economy in this country – the one that manufactures, builds and produces tangible products – can’t afford a Wild West financial economy. The real economy depends on banks to finance business expansion and everyday transactions. All of that froze in the Fall of 2008 because of Wall Street’s reckless, inadequately-regulated gambling.

In a speech in New York City on Thursday, President Obama reinforced that some bankers “forgot that behind every dollar traded or leveraged, there is family looking to buy a house, and pay for an education, open a business, save for retirement.”

Obama also referenced the issue of dishonesty when he said this in New York:

“A free market was never meant to be a free license to take whatever you can get, however you can get it.”

If McConnell-style deceit about the financial reform bill continues in the Senate, serious regulatory reform won’t happen. Half measures won’t work. Only robust financial reform will end Wall Street’s freedom to deceive.

Sam Pizzigati

By Sam Pizzigati
Editor, on line weekly Too Much

Amid double-digit joblessness, two top U.S. corporations cut still another mega merger deal that enriches execs and tosses workers, by the thousands, out onto the street.

You don’t have to be a high-flyer in high finance to get a kick — and a fortune — out of wheeling and dealing. Greed and grasping, we need to remind ourselves every so often, are still thriving right down on the ground, in America’s oh-so pedestrian manufacturing sector.

The latest case in point: the just-announced $4.5 billion merger deal that will fold the 99-year-old Black & Decker tool-making powerhouse — the folks who brought us the world’s first pistol-grip power drill — into its chief tool-making rival, Connecticut’s Stanley Works.

“It’s a match made in heaven,” Stanley flack Tim Perra told reporters last week.

Heaven for who? Not consumers. The new “Stanley Black & Decker” may soon have enough marketplace dominance, says Morningstar business analyst Anthony Dayrit, “to raise prices” on do-it-yourself gizmos that range from from power tools to window locks.

And workers won’t find much heaven in the merger either. Black & Decker and Stanley together currently employ a workforce just over 40,000. The merger the two companies announced last week will eventually cost an estimated 10 percent of those workers their jobs, starting with staff at the Black & Decker headquarters just outside Baltimore.

No surprise there. In any big-time merger, at least some employees will always become “redundant.” A newly merged company, after all, doesn’t need two sets of headquarters staff.

But redundancies, after a big-time merger, never seem to show up in executive suites. Top execs at firms getting swallowed up either get cushy positions in the new firm or golden parachutes that ensure them a gentle landing when they leap out into the cold hard world.

Black & Decker CEO Nolan Archibald had to choose between the two. By contract, Archibald could have walked away from the new Stanley Black & Decker with a severance package worth $20.5 million.

Archibald has chosen instead to stay on as the new company’s “executive chairman” for the next three years. The 66-year-old won’t have to do much heavy lifting in this new slot, except to cart his ample paychecks to the bank.

How ample? For attending board meetings and “advising” — and playing no role whatsoever in the new company’s day-to-day management — Archibald will collect a $1.5 million annual salary. He’ll also pocket a $35.5 million pension and another $15.7 million from his Black & Decker supplemental retirement plan.

On top of all that, the Associated Press reported last week, Archibald may grab as much as $45 million in bonus “if cost savings goals are met in three years.”

Meeting those goals shouldn’t be too difficult. Archibald and Stanley CEO John Lundgren have plenty of experience cutting costs. They know the secret. They just slice away at jobs and wages.

Last year, for instance, Black & Decker sales dropped 7 percent. Black & Decker paid CEO Archibald $12.1 million anyway, then announced plans to cut worker salaries by up to 5 percent.

Stanley CEO Lundgren, for his part, took home only $4.6 million in 2008. Last December, Stanley took steps to pump up that disappointing take-home — by closing three manufacturing facilities and axing 2,000 jobs.  

Wall Street cheered that move. And Wall Street is also cheering Stanley’s takeover of Black & Decker. For good reason. The deal will mean a quick 22 percent profit for Black & Decker shareholders. The investment banks that shepherded the merger deal along — Goldman Sachs for Stanley, JPMorgan for Black & Decker — stand to do even better.

Investment bankers typically cream off fees that equal at least 0.1 percent of a merger deal’s total value. On multi-billion-dollar deals, these fractional percents can add up fast.

So far in 2009, not counting last week’s blockbuster Stanley-Black & Decker action, JPMorgan has pulled in $1.26 billion advising clients on 156 merger-and-acquisition deals. Goldman Sachs has grabbed $1.22 billion, over the same time span, on 142 deals.

Where do all these billions in fee revenue go? Roughly half the revenue investment banks make from merger deals traditionally goes straight into banker bonus pools.

Into the communities these mergers devastate, a top U.S. labor leader charged late last month, goes nothing.

“Too often,” says United Steelworkers president Leo Gerard, “we’ve seen Wall Street hollow out companies by draining their cash and assets and hollow out communities by shedding jobs and shuttering plants.”

Gerard’s union has just announced a merger “deal” of its own — to help put an end to that hemorrhaging of jobs and futures. The Steelworkers will be joining with the Spanish-based Mondragón International, the world’s largest network of industrial worker cooperatives, in a bid to “transform manufacturing practices in North America.”  

“We need a new business model,” Gerard explains, “that invests in workers and invests in communities.”

Mondragón may just fit that bill. The Mondragón network, launched 53 years ago by a visionary Basque priest, has become Spain’s seventh-largest business group and currently operates 260 enterprises in over 40 countries — making everything from high-tech tools to refrigerators.

Workers in Mondragón cooperatives own their enterprises. They each have an equal share and an equal vote in key enterprise policy decisions. Workers in Mondragón businesses, notes long-time progressive analyst Carl Davidson, “themselves decide on the income spread between the lowest-paid worker and the highest-paid manager.”

That spread, across the Mondragón universe, averages 4.5 times. In the United States last year, CEOs averaged 319 times the pay of average U.S. workers.

The United Steelworkers, the biggest union of manufacturing workers in the United States, will now be looking to apply Mondragón principles to “viable small businesses in appropriate sectors where the current owners are interested in cashing out.”

“We see Mondragón’s cooperative model with ‘one worker, one vote’ ownership,” says Steelworkers president Gerard, “as a means to re-empower workers and make business accountable to Main Street instead of Wall Street.”

For thousands of workers at Black & Decker, and millions of consumers, that accountability may come a little too late.

***

Sam Pizzigati edits Too Much, the online weekly on excess and inequality. He is an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C. Last year, he played an active role on the team that generated The Nation magazine special issue on extreme inequality. That issue recently won the 2009 Hillman Prize for magazine journalism. Pizzigati’s latest book, Greed and Good: Understanding and Overcoming the Inequality that Limits Our Lives (Apex Press, 2004), won an “outstanding title” of the year ranking from the American Library Association’s Choice book review journal.