> It's not as bad as it could be. JPMorgan spent 9 billion dollars to keep her off the witness stand. ...but they didn't really spend 9 billion if you read the

> It's not as bad as it could be. JPMorgan spent 9 billion dollars to keep her off the witness stand. ...but they didn't really spend 9 billion if you read the article: For starters, $4 billion of the settlement was largely an accounting falsehood, a chunk of bogus "consumer relief" added to make the payoff look bigger. What the public never grasped about these consumer--relief deals is that the "relief" is often not paid by the bank [...] but by the bank's other victims Moreover, in this case, a fine-print addendum indicated that this consumer relief would be allowed only if said investors agreed to it – or if it would have been granted anyway under existing arrangements. [...] The average person had no way of knowing what a terrible deal the Chase settlement was for the country. The terms were even lighter than the slap-on-the-wrist formula that allowed Wall Street banks to "neither admit nor deny" wrongdoing – the deals that had helped spark the Occupy protests. EDIT: And, to add insult to injury: Because most of the settlement monies were specifically not called fines or penalties, Chase was allowed to treat some $7 billion of the settlement as a tax write-off. Couple this with the fact that the bank's share price soared six percent on news of the settlement, adding more than $12 billion in value to shareholders, and one could argue Chase actually made money from the deal. I would argue that it is much worse than you initially imagined.