[lordnacho]

But there's a market where you can exchange the two, so they are roughly the same thing. If you have your 1% shares fined away, you can buy back the upside, if that's what you want. Or if you have a fine of 1% equivalent in cash, you can sell shares to pay for it.

Either way you've lost 1%, but you can decide whether to hold the upside exposure and voting control.

I think the key is the size of the fine. $1B to JPM is not really a whole lot. Maybe scaling the fine according to the size of the entity might make sense, but then there's a question of why everyone else at JPM is getting fined simply for doing their job in the same building as the guys who did this.

Edit. On second thought I guess you mean there will be a restriction on buying back the shares?

[Traster]

I think it's really important for people to understand that $1Bn isn't a lot of money to JPM because they do lots of things. They made $30Bn last year - but this specific trading business probably made nothing like that. They're doing consumer banking, investment banking, commercial banking, asset and wealth management. It might be true that $1Bn isn't a huge sum compared to the total profitability of JPM but I don't see why JPM's consumer banking arm has anything to do with the fine. Most likely these trading desks sum up to around 50-100 people at most. It's a very profitable sector (when you're breaking the law) but it's a tiny tiny part of what JPM do, and the idea that we should fine JPM more because they have lots of other businesses is just kind of crazy.