WASHINGTON — Soon after lawmakers finished work on the nation’s new
financial regulatory law, a team of JPMorgan Chase lobbyists descended
on Washington. Their goal was to obtain special breaks that would allow
banks to make big bets in their portfolios, including some of the types
of trading that led to the $2 billion loss now rocking the bank.
Even after the official draft of the Volcker Rule regulations was
released last October, JPMorgan and other banks continued their
full-court press to avoid limits.
That was not the intent of the law, said Phil Angelides, who headed the
Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. “I think the regulators need to go
back and sharpen their pencils,” Mr. Angelides said. “The intent of the
law was to stop insured depositories from doing propriety trading with
this kind of risk profile.” And whatever JPMorgan calls it, “it sure
looks like proprietary trading, which Dodd-Frank was designed to stop
insured depositories from engaging in.”
Read the whole story in the NYTimes
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