Levine on Wall Street: JPMorgan Isn't Done Yet

Jamie Dimon takes a meeting

Dimon met with Eric Holder yesterday to negotiate about all the things JPMorgan Chase is being sued for. The headline on this DealBook piece is "JPMorgan Urged to Pay More in Mortgage Deal," which I guess is how deals work. But actually "the size of the fine is not the central negotiating point for the bank: JPMorgan is instead focused on using the wide-ranging pact to resolve many of the mortgage-related investigations it faces." DealBook has a good rundown of all those investigations, as does Matt Yglesias, who puts it this way: "The problem Morgan is running into is that right now instead of settlements cauterizing investigations and letting the company move on with its life, each investigation seems to spawn new investigations." JPMorgan is a perpetually renewable resource for regulators and plaintiffs: It seems to have done more bad things than you could sue it for in one lifetime, and it has essentially unlimited money. Regulators have to have something to fill their days, and how could they give up such a juicy source of activity for a mere $11 billion fine?