JPMorgan Chase & Co. put allegations of currency-fixing largely behind it with a guilty plea, but it’s not out of the woods yet.
With its new felony record, America’s biggest bank needs to seek the Department of Labor’s permission to keep managing money in the $8 trillion private pension market. At the same time, there’s a cloud over the JPMorgan unit where pensions are managed: The Securities and Exchange Commission is well along in an investigation into conflicts of interest in the bank’s wealth-management unit, whose products include individual retirement accounts.
That puts the bank in a sticky position — arguing that a criminal conviction shouldn’t keep it from managing Americans’ retirement savings, while the SEC is investigating possible wrongdoing in the same division.
“When a bank has enforcement action after enforcement action, it becomes hard to argue that it won’t happen again,” says Urska Velikonja, an assistant law professor at Emory University whose research focuses on securities law.
This post was published at bloomberg
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