JPMorgan-DOJ Settlement Challenged In Court

Better Markets, a Washington DC-based non-profit, has sued the Department of Justice and Attorney General Eric Holder, alleging their $13 billion settlement with JPMorgan Chase was illegal. The lawsuit was announced by Dennis Kelleher, president and CEO of Better Markets and a former partner at Skadden Arps, who despite the eye-popping settlement figure calls this “another sweetheart deal.” However, the writer of this article surmises that this lawsuit is not so much a claim the settlement was inadequate as it is about the fact that information needed to make that judgment has been withheld. He says that a personal phone call from Jamie Dimon to the government, laying the groundwork for the deal, is probably what lead to the secrecy, and that the documents that have been released fail to reveal “how much money the bank made through the sale of those securities, how much damage they inflicted on the economy as a whole, and who was responsible.”