JPMorgan Chase

In November 2013, the DOJ, along with other federal agencies and six states, reached a settlement with JPMorgan Chase for $13 billion over its fraudulent sale of residential mortgage-backed securities. As the DOJ observed when announcing the settlement, the bank was “packaging risky home loans into securities, then selling them without disclosing their low quality to investors,” eventually “sow[ing] the seeds of the mortgage meltdown.”

Earlier, in November 2012, JPMorgan Chase and Credit Suisse agreed to pay a combined $417 million to settle SEC charges that the two firms misled investors in the sale of nearly $2 billion in troubled mortgage securities. The director of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement observed that “misrepresentations [like these] in connection with the creation and sale of mortgage securities contributed greatly to the tremendous losses suffered by investors once the U.S. housing market collapsed.”