JPMorgan Chase & Co.

JPMorgan Chase & Co. is an American multinational banking and financial services company formed through the December 2000 merger of J.P. Morgan & Co. and The Chase Manhattan Corporation. It is headquartered in New York City. JPMorgan Chase is the largest of the “big four” banks in the United States and is the world’s largest bank by market capitalization as of 2024.

Primary services and operations

JPMorgan Chase has an expansive suite of services and operations—from consumer, corporate, and investment banking to financial technology—categorized into four core business areas.

Origins

The Morgan branch of the corporation traces its history back to Drexel, Morgan & Co., which was founded in 1871 by J.P. Morgan and Anthony Drexel and played a crucial role in financing American industry. The firm was instrumental in reorganizing major railroads and financing industrial consolidations that led to the formation of U.S. Steel, the world’s first billion-dollar corporation.

After Drexel’s death in 1893, J.P. Morgan reorganized the company, renaming it J.P. Morgan and Company, Inc. in 1895. Under Morgan’s leadership, it would become a major powerhouse in commercial, investment, and private banking.

In 1914 (the year after the death of founder J. Pierpont Morgan), J.P. Morgan and Co. established its headquarters at 23 Wall Street, an iconic building subsequently dubbed the “House of Morgan,” symbolizing J.P. Morgan’s banking empire.

Controversies

Like many companies of similar size and influence, JPMorgan Chase’s history is not without its share of controversy.

Antitrust scrutiny. Allegations of (and occasional penalties for) anticompetitive behavior have been a part of the company fabric for more than a century. Even J.P. Morgan’s role in government bailouts in 1893, 1907, and 2008 has been seen by many as opportunities to expand the bank’s reach. Although such regulatory actions don’t typically involve monopolistic consumer pricing, it often concerns incidents of collusion, such as long-running litigation tied to alleged rigging of interest rate swaps between JPMorgan Chase and nine other major banks.

Mortgage-backed securities (MBS) scandal. In company with many major banks, JPMorgan Chase was accused of knowingly selling faulty residential MBSs before 2008, misleading investors and contributing to the ensuing financial crisis. In 2013, the bank agreed to a $13 billion settlement with the U.S. Justice Department.

The “London whale.” In 2012 Bruno Iksil, a JPMorgan trader later dubbed the “London whale,” executed massive credit derivatives trades whose sheer volume distorted the markets and ultimately resulted in over $6 billion in losses for the bank. In addition to paying $1.02 billion in fines to U.S. and U.K. regulators, JPMorgan Chase suffered reputational damage, partly due to CEO Jamie Dimon’s early comment dismissing the issue as a “tempest in a teapot.”

Anti-money-laundering failures and the Bernie Madoff scandal. As Bernie Madoff’s primary banker, JPMorgan Chase was accused of failing to report suspicious activity despite several red flags. Madoff’s wealth management business, as it was later discovered, was the world’s largest Ponzi scheme, according to the Justice Department. In 2014, the bank paid $2.6 billion to the U.S. government to settle allegations that it failed to report Madoff’s suspicious activities to authorities.

Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking scandal. Jeffrey Epstein was a client of JPMorgan Chase from 1998 to 2013, when the bank terminated its client relationship. Epstein, a hedge fund manager and convicted sex trafficker, had been facing multiple investigations and cases since 2005 prior to his final conviction and mysterious death in 2019. In 2023, JPMorgan Chase paid $75 million to the U.S. Virgin Islands (USVI) to settle a lawsuit alleging the bank turned a blind eye toward Epstein’s suspicious transactions supporting his illegal operations. That same year, the bank also paid $290 million to several of Epstein’s victims in a separate class-action lawsuit.

Market manipulation. In 2020, JPMorgan Chase agreed to pay over $920 million to settle a Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) investigation into its alleged market manipulation practices—the largest monetary penalty ever imposed by the CFTC in its history. Federal regulators found that from 2008 to 2016, JPMorgan Chase had been placing massive buy orders in the precious metals and Treasury markets with the intent to cancel those orders before execution—a practice known as “spoofing.”