Most Recent Posts

Authorities are set to slap banking giant JPMorgan Chase with a massive fine over the bank's huge trading losses in London last year, confirms NPR's Jim Zarroli.

Though details of the deal are still pending, several reports put the amount at more than $700 million. It comes on the heels of the bank's having recently paid $410 million to settle charges that it manipulated energy markets.

The current settlement revolves around an investigation from across the federal government and the globe over trading losses, first announced in May, that have ballooned to more than $6 billion. Regulators including the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency allege that JPMorgan had inadequate risk controls in place when traders made complex derivative bets that ultimately led to the losses.

Last month, two traders were charged with covering up the losses. The U.K. trader who placed the bad bets, Bruno Iksil, became known as the "London Whale" because of the large size of the trades he made for the company's London office. Iksil is now cooperating with authorities and is likely to avoid prosecution.

The settlement will include fines from the SEC and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, but the Financial Conduct Authority, the British financial regulator, will impose its own fine. And even then, JPMorgan most likely won't see closure on this issue. The New York Times has more:

"The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a regulator that oversees the market in which the losses occurred, has balked at joining the broader settlement announcement, the people briefed on the matter said. The agency has focused on whether JPMorgan, by amassing an outsize trading position so large that it distorted the market for financial contracts known as derivatives, 'manipulated' that market.

"By potentially striking out on its own, the C.F.T.C. has frustrated JPMorgan's efforts to move beyond the trading losses, the people briefed on the matter said. Those efforts to settle were born out of a recent federal crackdown on the bank."

New York City Democrats breathed a sigh of relief late Monday morning when Bill Thompson conceded the mayoral primary to Bill de Blasio, avoiding what could have been a nasty intraparty battle.

Thompson, 60, made his announcement on the steps of New York's City Hall in lower Manhattan, flanked by de Blasio and New York Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

"I am proud to stand here today and support Bill de Blasio to be the next mayor of the city of New York," said Thompson, a centrist former city comptroller who finished a distant second in last week's nine-candidate primary.

Said de Blasio, 52, the city's public advocate: "There is nothing more beautiful than Democratic unity, and thank you for it."

He will face Republican nominee Joseph Lhota, former deputy mayor in the Giuliani administration, in the November race. De Blasio is attempting to become the first Democrat in two decades to win the mayor's office — in a city where registered Democrats vastly outnumber Republicans, and where President Obama captured 81 percent of the vote in his 2012 re-election campaign.

Republican turned independent Michael Bloomberg is finishing up his third term, and has said he won't endorse a candidate to succeed him. Republican Rudy Giuliani served two terms prior to Bloomberg.

Thompson, who was the only African-American candidate in the primary, was making his second run for the mayoral nomination. He declined to immediately concede the race because de Blasio appeared to barely reach the 40 percent threshold needed to avoid a runoff. Thompson's decision triggered a Board of Elections review of voting machines over the weekend, and a recount that began Monday of about 78,000 paper ballots.

After Thompson's concession, de Blasio said that "if the people choose me, it will be my honor to turn to Bill regularly" for counsel.

But he quickly pivoted to Cuomo, standing directly behind him, as someone who "all of us Democrats have turned to for leadership, for guidance."

Cuomo, who had picked Lhota to run the Metropolitan Transportation Authority — which he left at the end of 2012 — said he would endorse de Blasio and praised Thompson as "a man of substance," who chose to take a step back instead of forward for the betterment of the Democratic Party.

Authorities are set to slap banking giant JPMorgan Chase with a massive fine over the bank's huge trading losses in London last year, confirms NPR's Jim Zarroli.

Though details of the deal are still pending, several reports put the amount at more than $700 million. It comes on the heels of the bank's having recently paid $410 million to settle charges that it manipulated energy markets.

The current settlement revolves around an investigation from across the federal government and the globe over trading losses, first announced in May, that have ballooned to more than $6 billion. Regulators including the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency allege that JPMorgan had inadequate risk controls in place when traders made complex derivative bets that ultimately led to the losses.

Last month, two traders were charged with covering up the losses. The U.K. trader who placed the bad bets, Bruno Iksil, became known as the "London Whale" because of the large size of the trades he made for the company's London office. Iksil is now cooperating with authorities and is likely to avoid prosecution.

The settlement will include fines from the SEC and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, but the Financial Conduct Authority, the British financial regulator, will impose its own fine. And even then, JPMorgan most likely won't see closure on this issue. The New York Times has more:

"The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a regulator that oversees the market in which the losses occurred, has balked at joining the broader settlement announcement, the people briefed on the matter said. The agency has focused on whether JPMorgan, by amassing an outsize trading position so large that it distorted the market for financial contracts known as derivatives, 'manipulated' that market.

"By potentially striking out on its own, the C.F.T.C. has frustrated JPMorgan's efforts to move beyond the trading losses, the people briefed on the matter said. Those efforts to settle were born out of a recent federal crackdown on the bank."

Sometimes presidents have to make things up as they go along.

President Obama's decisions have had an improvisational air these past three weeks. His course on Syria kept shifting, at times seemingly guided by offhand remarks.

But the results are what count.

"If it works out in the end, the president's allowed to be uncertain," says Tim Naftali, a former director of the Nixon presidential library. "Oftentimes, the judgment you get during the crisis is not the judgment you get at the end."

There's still plenty of opportunity for problems to emerge when it comes to implementing the deal to rid Syria of chemical weapons, announced Saturday by Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.

No one has tried to dispose of weapons of mass destruction on such an accelerated timetable — and certainly not in the middle of an ongoing civil war. Obama's critics note that this deal does nothing to drive Syrian President Bashar Assad from power.

Republican Sens. John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina called the deal "an act of provocative weakness on America's part." In a statement, they wrote, "It requires a willful suspension of disbelief to see this agreement as anything other than the start of a diplomatic blind alley."

“ If you get under the skin of most crises, they'd have this kind of ad hockery.