Receiving Wide Coverage ...
JPMorgan Widens Legal Exposure: Legal settlements continue to plague the banking industry. JPMorgan Chase is the latest, as on Monday night the bank reported its potential top end of legal costs are $1.3 billion higher, thanks to a Justice Department probe into how its traders may have manipulated foreign-exchange markets. In total, JPMorgan said it might be forced to pay out as much as $5.9 billion to cover legal settlements and investigations. Separately, JPMorgan raised its legal provisions to $1.06 billion, largely because of the expected settlements of foreign-exchange probes. British investigators are also on the case, and JPMorgan and five other banks including Citigroup are expected in the next few weeks to simultaneously settle investigations into foreign-exchange trading being conducted by the U.K.'s Financial Conduct Authority.
Virgin IPO: His private space-travel business may be struggling, but Richard Branson's banking business is on track for a big IPO in London. Virgin Money, which is co-owned by U.S. private equity king Wilbur Ross, expects to sell shares on the London exchange by the end of the month. Branson is aiming to raise about $240 million from the Virgin Money IPO and plans to use some of the proceeds to pay the U.K. government for its acquisition of Northern Rock. In issuing the new timing of its IPO, Virgin Money indicated it was "pleased" with British regulators' guidance on leverage ratios.
Wall Street Journal
Soltra Edge, the communications platform being developed to help banks share information about cyberattacks, is being readied for a Dec. 2 launch. It's hoped the platform will help banks get information faster on potential hacks into their systems. The response time "could be reduced to a few seconds from an average of seven hours when a bank analyst has to chase down threat information," a Soltra Edge spokeswoman said. Two groups are designing and running the platform the Financial Services Information Sharing Analysis Center, and Depository Trust & Clearing Corp. A total of 16 banks gave funds to help get the platform started, including JPMorgan Chase, U.S. Bancorp, BB&T and Citigroup.
Investors shouldn't expect to see loan growth surge any time soon, according to the "Heard on the Street" column. Loan growth is sluggish, at best, according to the Federal Reserve's latest survey of senior loan officers. The lackluster response from loan officers applied to both residential mortgage lending and business lending.
Financial Times
Banks in the U.S. and Europe are worried that they'll need to add tens of billions of dollars to cash reserves to gain regulators' approval of their living wills, anonymice tell the paper. Further clouding the picture is the debate on whether to eliminate the Fed's discount lending window.
A federal jury in Florida acquitted a former UBS banker of helping wealthy U.S. clients dodge taxes. U.S. authorities had been pursuing Raoul Weil since 2008 and the acquittal is seen as a setback for the government.
New York Times
In his "White Collar Watch" column, Wayne State University law professor Peter Henning expresses skepticism that investigators will have much success in their probe into banks' alleged manipulation of foreign-exchange markets. Past investigations have been successful because they focused on bank products sold in the U.S. But foreign exchanges may be out of American prosecutors' legal jurisdiction.
