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A U.S. Senate report on JPMorgan deservedly excoriates the bank over last year's $6.2-billion trading loss. However the report – released on the fifth anniversary of the collapse of Bear Stearns – doesn't shed much new light on the "London whale": the bank run by Jamie Dimon had already admitted many of its mistakes. What stands out from the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations' probe is that JPMorgan's chief regulator, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, was a bumbling fool.

That's not to exonerate JPMorgan. The bank's Chief Investment Office (CIO) used flawed models and antiquated technology, had conflicting mandates and a suffered from a woeful lack of checks and balances.

The Senate report asserts that JPMorgan regularly misled the OCC. There's doubtless some truth to that – banks are not keen on giving away detailed trading positions at the best of times. And taking days or even longer to get requested information to the regulator looks suspicious.

But some of the subcommittee's claims appear more rooted in political grandstanding than impartiality. It seems harsh to accuse senior JPMorgan executives of trying to pull the wool over the OCC's eyes at the same time as describing how the top brass was not getting the full picture from the CIO's traders and risk managers.

The regulator, though, comes across as woefully inadequate. It did not, for example, bother to push for information on the structured products portfolio until informed by the bank of potential problems. Even after receiving some details early last year, the OCC ignored repeated risk-limit breaches in reports it was receiving from the bank. The subcommittee states that it "found no evidence that the OCC reviewed the risk reports when received, analyzed the breach data or asked any questions about the trading data."

After the losses came to light last April, the OCC latched on to the bank's responses to its initial questions and then "let the matter drop instead of investigating the trading activities." It's one thing for a regulator to claim a bank is stonewalling or to argue that it relies too much on the firm for information. But in this instance the OCC appears to have ceded its oversight to JPMorgan – which smacks of dereliction of duty.

Amazingly, Ina Drew, the former head of JPMorgan's Chief Investment Office, complained the OCC was "overly intrusive." If only that had been the case.

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SymbolName% changeLast
JPM-N
JP Morgan Chase & Company
+0.39%200.3

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