The government’s legal pursuit of JPMorgan Chase & Co. has struck some on Wall Street as unfair. CEO Jamie Dimon recently reached a tentative deal with the Justice Department to put an end to some of the embattled financial firm’s legal troubles, a settlement worth $13 billion in fines and consumer relief; it’s the biggest settlement ever announced involving a single company. In fact, this was a just outcome, and it should be a new model for holding financial institutions accountable in probes related to bad mortgages and the 2008 financial crisis. JPMorgan Chase is accused of selling mortgage securities that it knew were faulty, although it inherited many of the alleged abuses in its 2008 acquisitions of Washington Mutual and Bear Stearns. JPMorgan Chase’s supporters argue that it only purchased the two banks under duress, when pressed by government officials to do so in an effort to prop up the banking system in the early days of the credit crisis. That’s not entirely true, however. JPMorgan Chase had sought to purchase Washington Mutual several months before the crisis struck. Plus, even after paying the government settlement, JPMorgan Chase will come out way ahead on the deal. Washington Mutual had a $40 billion market capitalization when JPMorgan Chase purchased it for $1.9 billion, and its mortgage business’s performance has outpaced expectations ever since. No one will pity Dimon and his shareholders the $750 million Washington Mutual earned the bank last quarter. More in the Boston Globe [...]

A startling report in today’s Washington Post, the newspaper says more than a thousand of the nation’s non-profits have each acknowledged losses of a quarter million dollars or more, because of theft, investment fraud, embezzlement or other unauthorized use of funds. The report is based on tax filings by the non-profits during the past five years. Each non-profit disclosed the problem by checking a box on the tax form indicating what’s called a significant diversion of funds. For more about all this, we’re joined from Washington by Joe Stevens, he’s an investigative reporter for the Post and the co-author of today’s piece. So your article says just the ten largest losses you’ve identified add up to more than five hundred million dollars, give us some examples. More on PBS NewsHour [...]

Which of these statements is true: Jamie Dimon’s company has agreed to pay the largest regulatory settlement ever by a single firm. Jamie Dimon is the best bank chief executive in the world. Jamie Dimon can walk on water. If your answer was all three, then you can join the ranks of Wall Street analysts and financial pundits who claim that Dimon is the best possible chief executive of the best bank in the country even after it has paid tens of billions of dollars in fines and legal expenses on investigations into more than a dozen of its businesses. More in USA Today [...]