JPMorgan Chase & Co.'s stunning after-hours announcement Thursday of a $2 billion loss on a complex bet sent shock waves through the nation's capital Friday, as lawmakers blamed financial regulators for continuing to allow the same risky activity that nearly sunk the global financial system four years ago.
JPMorgan had been considered the healthiest of U.S. banks, emerging from the 2008 crisis largely unscathed. CEO Jamie Dimon, boyishly handsome with a thick New York accent, is often referred to as "the king of Wall Street."
But on Friday, investors humbled the king, sending the bank's share price down by $3.78, or 9.28 percent, to $36.96. Other big-bank stocks sunk as well.
The huge blunder on the part of a bank perceived as the nation's healthiest also cast an unwanted spotlight on the same federal regulators found to be asleep at the switch in the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis.
In the aftermath of that crisis, the Federal Reserve was given greater supervisory responsibility for large investment banks, which had transformed themselves into bank-holding companies to enjoy greater taxpayer support amid the crisis. Fed staffers are now located in the biggest banks and were supposed to be policing their risk-taking to protect the financial system.
"We can't discuss supervisory information," said Barbara Hagenbaugh, a Fed spokeswoman.
'It ought to be a concern'
The Securities and Exchange Commission also was given greater powers to ensure that large banks properly disclosed risks from complex investments to their investors. Lawmakers said JPMorgan did not fully disclose the risks from its soured bet in its annual report for 2011 or its report filed for the first quarter of 2011.
"It ought to be a concern to the SEC. They are the ones who ought to have a concern about that," Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., said in a conference call with reporters. "The SEC should surely take a look at it."
Levin heads the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. His panel was instrumental, after the fact, in piecing together much of the malfeasance that led to the financial crisis. On Friday, though, Levin called it premature to determine whether he'll hold hearings on JPMorgan.
The SEC regulates broadly on investor protection, but it narrowly regulates JPMorgan's broker-dealer operations, and the losses appeared to be in an area of the bank regulated by the Fed. SEC spokesman John Nester declined to comment.
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency regulates JPMorgan's commercial banking activities and also was mum.
"We don't comment on specific bank supervisory matters," spokesman Bryan Hubbard said.
The course of events Thursday night and Friday were all the more shocking because Dimon has been the leading industry critic of the Dodd-Frank Act, passed in 2010 to revamp financial regulation. Dimon labeled the act Dodd-Frankenstein, alleging it would cost upward of $400 million to comply with the array of new rules designed to curb bad behavior on Wall Street.
Fast action demanded
The co-architect of the legislation, Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., noted in a statement that "JPMorgan Chase, entirely without any help from the government, has lost, in this one set of transactions, five times the amount they claim financial regulation is costing them."
Frank and other lawmakers also argued that regulators must move forward more quickly on the so-called Volcker Rule provisions of the act to ban commercial banks from engaging in risky trading with their own capital that could imperil the financial system.
"The argument that financial institutions do not need the new rules to help them avoid the irresponsible actions that led to the crisis of 2008 is at least $2 billion harder to make today," Frank said.
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