Receiving Wide Coverage ...
Morgan Stanley Client Data: Morgan Stanley fired Galen Marsh, a 30-year-old wealth-management adviser, after he stole data from about 350,000 accounts and tried to sell the data online, anonymous sources told the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and Financial Times. Marsh's attorney said his client did obtain the account information but he didn't post it online and didn't try to sell it. Morgan Stanley has referred the matter to law enforcement. The FBI and Financial Industry Regulatory Authority are both investigating. According to the Times' account, six million account records were first offered for sale in mid-December on the Pastebin site. Two weeks later, a teaser with information from about 1,200 accounts was posted on the same site, linking to a different site if anyone was interested in buying additional account data.
Wall Street Journal
President Obama will nominate a community banker to one of two vacant seats on the Federal Reserve's Board of Governors, Politico reported, citing anonymous sources. [The Politico story is not available online; the Journal followed up with its own story.] The banker to be nominated has not yet been identified. Members of the Senate Banking Committee, both Republicans and Democrats, have urged the White House to put a community banker on the seven-member Fed board. The nomination is expected to be announced later this week or early next week.
The Journal takes a closer look at the Inspector General for the Federal Reserve, as the office will be central to the examination of whether the Fed is too tight with the banks it regulates. The IG's office has more than tripled in size since the financial crisis and has criticized the Fed on issues including oversight of large banks. It also slammed the Fed for missing a chance to limit JPMorgan's London whale fiasco. Oh by the way, the Fed's IG office also oversees the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
JPMorgan Chase would be worth more if broken up into two or perhaps four companies, a Goldman Sachs analyst said Monday. The concept is not new, as CEO Jamie Dimon addressed the issue in his 2013 shareholder letter. However, new capital rules are reviving the issue, the analyst said.
Financial Times
JPMorgan Chase has agreed to pay $100 million to settle civil lawsuits alleging it rigged foreign-exchange markets, according to a court document. JPMorgan would be the first bank the reach a settlement in the Forex civil lawsuits, if the agreement receives court approval. Eleven other banks have also been named in the same litigation, including Bank of America and Citigroup. JPMorgan has already paid $660 million to settle Forex investigations by officials in the U.S., U.K. and Switzerland.
Elsewhere ...
Politico: Politico has another interesting story, one that compares the U.S. government to a bank. The story adds up all of the loans the government makes or guarantees from the Federal Housing Administration to student loans and says no one is in charge of the $3 trillion loan portfolio.
Charlotte Observer: Bank of America agreed to settle a lawsuit that alleged the bank sold defective mortgage loans. The amount of the settlement was not disclosed. SecurityNational Mortgage, the Utah company that filed the lawsuit, recently reached settlement with Wells Fargo and other lenders.
