Chase, Once Considered “The Good Bank,” Is About to Pay Another Massive Settlement

During the financial crisis, while Dr. Evil-ish Wall Street villains like Goldman and Lehman Brothers were getting all the bad press, pundits continually referred to J.P. Morgan Chase as the “good bank.” The myth of Chase as the finance sector’s one upstanding rock of rectitude reached its zenith in July of 2009 with an embarrassingly hagiographic piece in the New York Times entitled, “In Washington, One Bank Chief Still Holds Sway.” In that one, the paper breathlessly praised Jamie Dimon for emerging from “the disgrace of his industry” to become Barack Obama’s “favorite banker.” Chase and Jamie Dimon kept that rep for a good long time. As late as 2011, Dimon’s name was being floated around Washington very seriously as a potential replacement for Tim Geithner’s Treasury Secretary post. Even when Dimon showed up on the Hill last year to testify (read: obfuscate) about the infamous “London Whale” episode, Senators on the banking committee – who, as writer George Zornick noted, had collected a cumulative $522,088 in donations from Chase – slobbered all over Dimon and shelved the important London Whale matter to ask the great genius’s advice on how to fix the economy. More in Rolling Stone here.