The $20 billion in fines regulators levied against JPMorgan Chase in the past year may seem big, but the bank’s even larger profits have taken their sting away, reports the New York Times.
The most recent penalty came this week, when the firm was charged $1.7 billion by federal prosecutors for failing to report Bernie Madoff’s suspicious behaviour to the authorities.
Read: JPMorgan to pay $1.7B to settle Madoff fraud
But while most banks would buckle under those bills, JPMorgan’s shares are up 28%, says the Times. It’s business as usual at the company, where investment bankers earned an average of $217,000 in 2012.
JPMorgan’s balance sheet is now so large—it will make an estimated $23 billion in profit this year—that even fines that seem large don’t have the intended impact, the Times reports.
Commenting to Advisor.ca last fall about a $1-billion fine levied against JPMorgan by U.S. authorities, New York-based securities lawyer Bill Singer noted how small the penalty was in proportion to the firm’s operations.
“All that we have here is a settlement for a little less than $1 billion, which, to be blunt, is probably what they pay for toilet paper,” he said. Read more here.
Read more about JPMorgan here.
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