JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s chief executive officer, Jamie Dimon, initially called the bank’s “London whale” trading debacle a “tempest in a teapot.” Some teapot. Today the bank agreed to pay $100 million to settle an action brought by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. But more important than that relatively modest sum is the bank’s admission that its traders were “recklessly aggressive.”
The new settlement brings to more than $1 billion the penalties the bank has had to pay for the London whale and, with more cases to come, that figure could grow. The real news, though, is that after decades of allowing companies to “neither admit nor deny” wrongdoing when settling cases, regulators are insisting that they admit guilt.
