A review of roughly 1 million e-mails and tens of thousands of voice tapes suggests traders within the once-obscure Chief Investment Office "may have been seeking to avoid showing the full amount of losses" during the first quarter by placing inaccurate prices on their positions, the bank said Friday.
– JPMorgan reported a $4.4 billion trading loss this morning, a figure far worse than analysts were expecting, in the wake of the "London Whale" fiasco. That drove the bank's earnings down 8.7%, but still left it with $4.96 billion in profit for the second quarter, down only a bit from its $5.43 billion mark a year ago, the Wall Street Journal reports. "We are not proud of this moment, but we are proud of the company," Jamie Dimon said. "We're not making light of this error, but we do think it's an isolated event." At the same time, however, the bank said it would soon revise its first-quarter results southward, thanks to "recently discovered information that raises questions about the integrity of the trader marks and suggests that certain individuals may have been seeking to avoid showing the full amount of losses." Analysts tell Bloomberg that the larger-than-expected losses will leave the bank struggling to restore investor confidence. "The reputation problem will just get worse," one analyst said.