JPMorgan Chase: Tales of Foreclosures, Trusts And Incompetence

In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.
Laurence John Peter, The Peter Principle

The consumer doesn't understand how hard it is to be a Big Bank and, therefore, expects the Big Bank to be just as concerned about its customers as the little bank was before the Big Bank swallowed it. I was reminded of that by Bill Moyers' Journal on October 9, 2009. It was a discussion of JPMorgan Chase (JPMC), which clients of mine had recently been taught was so big it could not possibly take care of its customers. In teaching them that lesson, it also taught them that it could charge tuition for the lesson. It was a very valuable lesson for me as well as for JPMC's customers, but I'll share my lesson at the end of this column. First, Bill Moyers.

One of the participants in the Moyers interview was Marcy Kaptur (and the quotations herein are all taken from that interview). She is a member of Congress from Ohio. Serving her 14th term in Congress, she is the longest-serving Democratic Congresswoman in the history of the House. She discussed foreclosures.

Foreclosures in Toledo have gone up 94 percent. When Ms. Kaptur was home in Toledo she met with realtors and asked them what she should know about what was happening and they said: "Well, first of all, you should know the worst companies that are doing this to us." Ms. Kaptur asked who the worst offender was and she was told it was JPMorgan Chase. That same night she had dinner with Jamie Dimon, the bank's president and during the course of the evening said to him: "[Y]our company is the largest forecloser in my district. And our realtors just said to me this morning that your people don't return phone calls. We can't do workouts." In response, Mr. Dimon told Ms. Kaptur that he talks to the Governor of Ohio frequently and also talks a lot to the Mayor of Columbus, an interesting, if irrelevant response, since it is unlikely any of those conversations pertained to the governor or the mayor trying to refinance his house in order to avoid foreclosure. Ms. Kaptur suggested he needed to talk to people in the Northern part of the state where foreclosures were abundant. His response was to give her his business card and tell her he'd have someone call her.

People at JPMorgan Chase are very busy. No one called Ms. Kaptur even though her office repeatedly called the bank. Then a funny thing happened. Ms. Kaptur was on a national news show and told the interviewer how her calls were not returned by JPMC. Within ten minutes the bank called her office and said: "Oh, we'll work with you. We'll try to do some workouts in your area." As Ms. Kaptur explained: "We planned the first one after working with them for weeks and weeks and weeks. Their people never showed up . . . We kept calling saying, 'Where's your person? Where's your person? And they finally sent somebody down from Detroit by 3:00 in the afternoon. But our people had been waiting all morning . . ."

Ms. Kaptur's experience resonated with me and causes me to share with readers the Tale of Two Trusts. JPMorgan Chase was the trustee. This tale would never have made it into print but for the fact that it proves that JPMorgan Chase is no respecter of persons. It treats the mighty and the lowly alike -- shamefully. The lowly in this tale were the three beneficiaries of two trusts worth less than $2 million. They were hardly worth noticing. JPMorgan Chase didn't. It assigned them to a trust officer who, among other things, did not return phone calls, used the assets of one trust to pay the bills of the other, put money belonging to one trust into the other, failed to make required distributions and issued no reports. When asked to resign, the bank said it would if all beneficiaries joined in the request. They did. Then a sad thing happened. The bank changed its mind (That may have been because its fortunes were declining. Less than two months after changing its mind it received a bailout of $25 billion dollars.). The bank said the beneficiaries would have to go to court if they wanted to compel it to resign. So the beneficiaries hired lawyers and the bank hired lawyers. After many months and thousands of dollars in legal fees, the bank corrected the errors it had made and agreed to resign. As part of its agreement to resign, however, it required the beneficiaries to agree that their trusts would pay the more than $12,000 in legal fees the bank had incurred after reneging on its agreement to resign.

JPMorgan Chase is a Big Bank. It is too bad that the writer and Ms. Kaptur don't have a better understanding of the problems Big Banks face. If we did, this column would never have been written.

Christopher Brauchli can be e-mailed at [e-mail]. For political commentary see his web page at http://humanraceandothersports.com

Comments

[omalley313]

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/30481512/wall_streets_naked_swindle

>>>>On Tuesday, March 11th, 2008, somebody — nobody knows who — made one of the craziest bets Wall Street has ever seen. The mystery figure spent $1.7 million on a series of options, gambling that shares in the venerable investment bank Bear Stearns would lose more than half their value in nine days or less. It was madness — "like buying 1.7 million lottery tickets," according to one financial analyst.

But what's even crazier is that the bet paid. ...... Whoever bought those options on March 11th woke up on the morning of March 17th having made 159 times his money, or roughly $270 million. This trader was either the luckiest guy in the world, the smartest son of a bitch ever or… >>>>>>>.

WHO WAS IT ??? IS ANYBODY GOING TO FIND OUT ???

[foxisms]

"We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated governments in the civilized world. No government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority but a government by the opinion and the duress of small groups of dominant men." ~Woodrow Wilson ~

[foxisms]

“I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous than standing armies.
If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issues of currency...the banks and the corporations that grow up around them will deprive the people of their property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.” ~ Thomas Jefferson ~

[foxisms]

"When a government is dependent upon bankers for money, they and not the leaders of the government control the situation, since the hand that gives is above the hand that takes. Money has no motherland; financiers are without patriotism and without decency; their sole object is gain". ~Napoleon Bonaparte--

[Joanne Marrella Iannace]

Congresswoman Kaptur is dead on about these lenders. Chase is followed by Bank of America in the list.

Go out to www.loansafe.org and read about what is really going on.

[omalley313]

broken link :(