Jamie Dimon rues the day he mocked the beast, calling it a “tempest in a teapot.”
Now the London whale is giving Capt. Dimon a sinking feeling.
The choppy sea of billion-dollar fines is washing over the S.S. JPMorgan, weighing it down to the tune of $17.7 billion since 2008, according to analysts.
The latest punishment for Capt. Dimon’s sprawling bank comes in the form of a $920 million settlement with financial watchdogs, including a UK regulator.
And it’s not only digging into the bank’s coffers that must gall the bank boss, who helped his firm navigate the choppiest of waters during the financial crisis. Indeed, Thursday’s penalties forced Dimon to acknowledge the firm’s shortcomings.
Securities and Exchange chief Mary Jo White got a rare admission from the bank that it’s poor handling of the London whale trade “violated the federal securities laws.”
Thursday’s fines included the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which fined the bank $300 million, and the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority is collecting roughly $220 million from Dimon’s vaults.
The bank will also write the Federal Reserve and the SEC a $200 million fine check each.
Thursday’s punishment comes more than a year after JPMorgan blew up its London trading office, putting a $6.2 billion hole in its balance sheet.
On Wall St. the hard-charging Dimon still boasts a stellar reputation, but now the bank’s recent run-ins with regulators is garnering it the dubious distinction of No. 1 fined bank.
In fact, Thursday’s whale penalties came on the same day the bank was dinged for practices related to its credit- card business.
Since 2008, the firm has tallied more legal fines than Bank of America at $16.1 billion, according to research by FBR Capital Markets.
Still looming is an expected fine from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
Analyst Jeff Harte of Sandler O’Neill is estimating that JPMorgan will face a total of $3.7 billion in fines for 2013, including $2.1 billion for the second quarter alone.
Dimon told some senior employees that he was “proud of their £efforts” to correct risk problems.
However, he added that “we have a lot of work to do,” people familiar with the situation said.