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by plebianRube 1661 days ago
I don't think people realize how much money JP makes.

A cursor search shows that the fine is less than 10% of their last quarter NET income of 12.1 billion.

I would certainly keep doing illegal things if my only penalty was a simple fine like that every 10 years.
3 comments
ycombobreaker 1661 days ago
JPM makes a lot of money doing a lot of things. You need to compare the fine vs. their trading revenue.
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plebianRube 1661 days ago
Why would I look at just their trading revenue?

The fine was levied against the entire company, not just their trading subsidiary.

>settling charges against JPMorgan Chase & Company (JPMC & Co.) and its subsidiaries, JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A., and J.P. Morgan Securities LLC (JPMS) (collectively, JPM)

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gruez 1661 days ago
> Why would I look at just their trading revenue?

Why should you? Suppose you did a bad. Let's it was a side hustle where you took refurbished ipads and resold them as brand-new ipads. Over the past year you made $2000 in profit from doing so. The cops caught you doing it and fined you $10k. That sounds like a pretty serious penalty. However, you're also a bay area software engineer making $400k total comp, so $10k is a drop in the bucket. Should they fine you $200k instead, just because you happen to be a software engineer?

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__del__ 1659 days ago
> Should they fine you $200k instead

Yes, the fines should be punitive, not proportional to the damage.

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swsieber 1661 days ago
Because if these are trading actions that lead to these fines then a rational actor might decide against taking then in the future lest trading become a net negative.
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bojangleslover 1661 days ago
Yes but they have nearly 200k employees and most of banking compensation is in the bonus, which draws from this net income. This leaves $63k excess which is obviously not distributed equally but, considering the fairly low base salaries compared to strong SWE roles, probably map to similar compensation.

It's hard to not feel shocked when seeing numbers in the billions but you can't forget they are often accompanied by an equally shocking denominator.

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missedthecue 1661 days ago
Trading in the silver markets is not JP Morgan's only source of revenue...
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