JP Morgan Chase has admitted that they violated the law and charged 4,000 military families, some of them with members on active duty, too much interest on their mortgages. They also foreclosed on at least 14 of those families.
The penalty for violating the law is a fine or up to one year of imprisonment. I suppose that they’d withhold their productivity if it happened, but why shouldn’t we see some JPM mortgage executives spend a few nights in federal prison over this?
greennotGreen
Or they could go to Florida and be elected governor.
Barkley G
I’d say so. If someone shoplifts a DVD from Walmart, that person pays the price and receives no special treatment.
This is far worse.
kerFuFFler
“…shall be fined as provided in title 18, United States Code, or imprisoned for not more than one year, or both.”
I’m rooting for “both”! Can the victims sue for damages as well?
c u n d gulag
You can’t send THEM to jail!
Not until you get the riff-raff out, and stock the place with top shelf furniture, caviar, porterhouses, lobster, artesonal cheese, heirloom tomato’s, home baked bread, Dom Peringnon, and other wines appropriate for a captive audience.
Oh yeah, I-pod’s, latops and 52 inch HDTV’s. With a quality male/female escort service nearby.
Then, they may decide to go if we have the sheer gall to indict them.
dr. bloor
I’d rather just send the important identifying data of the JPM execs to some poor Marine coming back from his eleventeenth tour in Hellistan to find that they illegally foreclosed on his house. Or better yet, give it to his wife.
Hilarious hijinx ensue.
electricgrendel
Because they are all very special and noble capitalist to whom the laws don’t apply.
liberal
Honestly, this is a huge problem: white collar crime is (a) rarely punished and (b) gets easy sentences.
ET
They should buy houses outright for all of those 14 families and return all the overcharged money AND there should be a HUGE find and jail time. Of course that ain’t gonna happen.
bkny
watch some paralegal take the hit….
morzer
Compulsory hard labor building roads in Afghanistan seems about the ticket to me.
El Cid
__
Are you kidding?
Haven’t they suffered enough when the anti-business government elites criticized the huge bonuses received by people running failed institutions?
burnspbesq
Good luck with that prosecution. You have to prove actual knowledge, and the C-level execs that y’all fantasize about putting in prison almost certainly didn’t have it.
One assumes that this is a systems failure that went unrecognized for too long, e.g., indicators not put on accounts when a reservist is called to active duty, so that ARMs adjusted according to the original terms. Would be nice if the NBC report had gone into more detail as to how it happened and what JPMC has done to fix it.
David Hunt
Well, I’m for some high level executives serving 4000 one year sentences consecutively. It’s about the only thing that will stop this ongoing crime wave. Unfortunately , we can’t punish them because…well, just because. I’m sure David Brooks could explain it.
Shrillhouse
I’m sorry, but that’s very uncivil of you to say. These allegations of massive title fraud and illegal foreclosures have been totally overblown and it’s really just a few bad apples who were responsible anyways…
D0n Camillo
I don’t know about cruel, but wouldn’t imprisoning the wealthy and powerful be considered unusual?
Jinchi
Nice thought. But it’s the clerk in the main office who’d actually do the time. Just like Specialist Lynndie England served time for torture, while George Tenet got the Medal of Freedom.
cintibud
In the unlikely case that someone is even indited, who will the Repubs put up to officially apologize to the
oppressedlynched banksters?Left Coast Tom
@burnspbesq: Wouldn’t one expect a simple systems failure to be independent of whether the beneficiary of the failure is the bank or the customer? For example, if they weren’t careful about putting active duty notations on accounts, then they wouldn’t have been careful about _removing_ such notations.
susteph
@bkny: yep. or some $8/hour file clerk or data entry drone.
Hocking Hick
No Fed Pen for them…
I recommend Covington, KY County Jail, the US version of The Gulag.
They need to spend a few nights with some mean-ass up-holler boys, after the red-necks are informed that the bankers are there to repo their coon-dogs.
Tsulagi
Yeah, right. Somehow I’m guessing you won’t see a SWAT raid on Chase headquarters with a top exec there in his office holding a golf club taking three rounds.
Benjamin Cisco
@dr. bloor:__
Neither the helicopters nor the Marines on them would be laughing.
Origuy
@burnspbesq:
Well, somebody at Chase knew about it, and if the execs didn’t make sure they had policies in place to prevent it, they could still be liable, am I right?
From the link posted by mistermix:
cckids
@morzer:
I’d say unending bedpan & garbage detail at the largest VA hospital in their area. But that would mean that they would still be inflicting their presence on the people in the armed forces.
Jail it is. Plus fines–personal ones, big enough that they lose their houses.
bob_is_boring
“I suppose that they’d withhold their productivity”
Look: I’m not an economist, but isn’t that only a threat if employment is 100%?
Jay in Oregon
@Tsulagi:
Nice mental picture, though…
burnspbesq
@Origuy:
“Well, somebody at Chase knew about it, and if the execs didn’t make sure they had policies in place to prevent it, they could still be liable, am I right?”
Probably not. Ordinarily, when a criminal statute has knowledge as the mental state, it means actual knowledge, which allows for a pure heart empty head defense. What you’ve described is constructive knowledge.
burnspbesq
@Left Coast Tom:
I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt by assuming that the cause is a systems failure. If evidence emerges along the lines you have hypothesized, then we are in an entirely different ballgame.