[UrbanPat]

I disagree. The racetrack is a bad analogy, particularly when bankers are specifically hired for their advice. If I sell you a car I designed and the car blows up from a design flaw several years later, I'm culpable. If you hired me specifically to advise you on which car to buy, I'm even more culpable. And If I bribed you to pay me four times the going rate for this really bad advice, then I'm REALLY culpable.

And this bribery wasn't some minor ethics violation. They didn't give away free meals. The president of the county commission received $236,000 in gifts from an investment banker.

[yummyfajitas]

I never disputed that JPM deserves penalties for the acts of bribery performed by their consultants. However, the penalty for bribery should be proportional to the $227M they gained from bribery. About 91% of the county's debt, or $2.8B, has nothing to do with acts of bribery.

And in general, giving advice does not make you culpable for movements of the market. A car can be expected to drive reliably within certain parameters, but investment vehicles are not cars. TD Ameritrade gives me investment ideas all the time, but I don't get to demand they pay me if I buy AAPL and it goes down.

There are exceptions for negligence - e.g., if I say "I want a long position", and they advised me to buy a put.