A Senate panel on Thursday issued a scathing assessment of JPMorgan's $6.2 billion trading loss last year. The investigation found that bank executives ignored growing risks and hid losses from investors and federal regulators. 
 
 Executives at JPMorgan understated the trading losses to federal examiners by hundreds of millions of dollars and dismissed questions raised about the trading risks, according to the report from the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. 
 
 The report suggests that key executives, including CEO Jamie Dimon, were aware of huge losses at the bank, even while they were downplaying the risks publicly. The report also blames federal regulators for lax oversight that allowed America's largest bank to pile up risky bets. 
 
 On Thursday, JPMorgan acknowledged it made mistakes but rejected any assertions that it concealed losses or risks. A spokesman declined to comment directly on the accusation that Dimon knew of the trading loss in April. 
 
 "While we have repeatedly acknowledged mistakes, our senior management acted in good faith and never had any intent to mislead anyone," JPMorgan said in a statement Thursday. "We know we have made many mistakes .... We have taken significant steps to remediate these issues and to learn from them." 
 
 Sen. Carl Levin, the subcommittee's chairman, said the probe showed "many, many failures" at the bank, some of them "serious and indeed egregious." 
 
 The committee will question bank executives and regulators Friday at a hearing on the trading loss. 
 
 In April, news reports said a trader in JPMorgan's London office known as "the whale" had taken huge risks that were roiling the markets. Dimon immediately dismissed the reports as a "tempest in a teapot" during a conference call with analysts. 
 
 But in May, Dimon acknowledged that the bank had lost roughly $2 billon. And during testimony to a separate Senate panel in June, Dimon said the bank showed "bad judgment," was "stupid" and "took far too much risk." 
 
 The figure was later revised to more than $6 billion. 
 
 JPMorgan executives said publicly that the trades were made for the purpose of hedging against risk. An internal report at the bank blamed traders in the London unit for trying to hide the size of the loss and not keeping bank executives informed. 
 
 But the Senate report says executives inaccurately said the trading decisions were based on a long-term strategy and that the trading positions were fully transparent to regulators. And, it says there is evidence that Dimon and other key executives had information in April about the operation's huge and complex portfolio, as well as its losses for three straight months. 
 
 The bank "gambled away billions of dollars through risky and exotic trades, then intentionally hid its losses from investors and the public, showing complete disregard for risk management procedures and regulatory oversight," Sen. John McCain, the subcommittee's senior Republican, said Thursday. 
 
 The loss came less than four years after the 2008 financial crisis and hurt the reputation of a bank that had come through the crisis known for taking fewer risks than its competitors. Three employees in the London office were fired _ two senior managers and a trader. And Ina Drew, the chief investment officer overseeing the bank's trading strategy, resigned. 
 
 The trading loss also raised concerns that the largest banks still pose risks to the U.S. financial system. 
 
 The Senate report criticized the oversight of JPMorgan's trading operation by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, a Treasury Department agency. It said the agency failed to investigate the trading even when the London operation several times blew through pre-set risk limits, failed to notice when the unit didn't submit several required monthly reports, and accepted other reports that omitted key data. 
 
 "The OCC takes this matter very seriously. ... We are very disappointed that the bank misinformed the OCC, which hampered our supervisory efforts," agency spokesman Bryan Hubbard said Thursday. "We will take additional action as appropriate." 
 
 The agency acknowledges that there were shortcomings in its oversight of JPMorgan, Hubbard said. As a result of its review, the OCC has taken steps to improve its supervision of financial institutions, he said. 
 
 In January, the OCC and the Federal Reserve ordered JPMorgan to take steps to correct weak risk management that led to the trading loss. The bank wasn't fined under the agreements. It promised to strengthen its policies and procedures to control risk. 
 
 Drew will be among several witnesses Friday. So will former Chief Financial Officer Douglas Braunstein, who is accused in the Senate report of misleading investors during the April conference call. Comptroller Thomas Curry and two other agency officials also are scheduled to testify. 
 
 Shares in New York-based JPMorgan Chase & Co fell 26 cents, or 2 percent, to $49.96 in extended trading Thursday after the committee issued its report. ||||| Barely four years after Wall Street's wrong-way bets plunged the world into a financial crisis, JPMorgan Chase & Co. admitted it lost $2 billion from a trading portfolio that was supposed to have helped the bank manage credit risk."These were egregious mistakes," said Chief Executive Jamie Dimon , who is considered one of the world's savviest bankers. "We have egg on our face, and we deserve any criticism we get."The announcement stunned the financial industry, in part because it came from such a highly regarded bank. Dimon had navigated JPMorgan through the crisis in good shape by clamping down on some of the excessive risks that torpedoed rivals.Dimon told analysts that the bank racked up $2 billion in trading losses during the last six weeks, and that could "easily get worse." He said JPMorgan could suffer an additional $1-billion loss from the portfolio during the second quarter."My jaw is on the table," said Nancy Bush of SNL Financial. "I never expected this right now — not in a million years."The losses stemmed from derivative bets that backfired in the company's Chief Investment Office. This part of the bank was in charge of trading to balance the company's assets and liabilities, although it had been criticized by some analysts for operating more like a hedge fund.There had been media reports that a single JPMorgan trader in Europe, known in the bond market as "the London whale," was making massive bets that were influencing prices in the $10-trillion market.Investors bailed out of JPMorgan stock in after-hours trading, a sign it will open sharply lower in New York on Friday. The stock fell 6%, and rivals such as Citigroup Inc. Wells Fargo & Co., andBank of America Corp. also posted modest declines.The blowup at the nation's largest bank came amid a heated debate in Congress over how much regulation is needed to rein in the risk-taking that caused the near-meltdown of the financial system in 2008.The crux of the argument had been whether the so-called Volcker rule, which limits how much federally insured banks can risk in trading for their own accounts, had gone too far.Indeed, Dimon acknowledged that the trading losses might lead to more calls for stronger banking regulations."It's very unfortunate, plays right into all the hands of a bunch of pundits out there, but that's life and I'll have to deal with that," he said.Critics of Wall Street lost no time in calling for regulators to proceed with cracking down on big banks such as JPMorgan, which began the year with $863 billion in federally insured domestic deposits."The enormous loss JPMorgan announced is just the latest evidence that what banks call 'hedges' are often risky bets that so-called 'too big to fail' banks have no business making," U.S. Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) said in a statement.This "is a stark reminder of the need for regulators to establish tough, effective standards to protect taxpayers from having to cover such high-risk bets," he said.Bank lobbyists had argued that the biggest U.S. banks need more flexibility if they are to compete against global financial giants. But the latest debacle provided new fodder for critics.At a minimum, JPMorgan's admission shows that large and unforeseen losses can erupt at any time despite the banks' efforts to limit risk-taking."It demonstrates that even at an institution like JPMorgan, which has done a remarkable job at staying out of trouble compared to other banks, a bolt out of the blue can come at any time," said Anthony Sabino, a law professor at St. John's University in New York.The problems at JPMorgan stem from the trading of synthetic credit products, which are derivatives whose values are tied to a portfolio of underlying bonds. The bank lost money when it was trying to unwind these exotic instruments, which were originally intended to hedge JPMorgan's credit exposure.
– JPMorgan's $2 billion trading loss has become a $3 billion-and-counting loss with dizzying speed, insiders tell the New York Times. CEO Jamie Dimon predicted that the loss could double within a few quarters, but the extra billion in trading losses has come in just four trading days as hedge funds and other investors smell blood and bet against the positions the bank is believed to have held to hedge against defaults. JPMorgan's "London whale" trader was such a big player on the obscure indexes at the heart of the bank's problems that other traders are finding it easy to identify his trading positions, Reuters notes. "When someone is that big in the market, anonymity really goes out the window," notes a debt trader. The Justice Department and Federal Reserve are probing the losses, which experts say should never have been allowed to happen at a bank with government-backed deposits. But JPMorgan remains relatively healthy, despite the losses. The $3 billion loss would need to double to wipe out its profit from the second quarter of this year.