“Perhaps best this never sees the light of day again!!”

Yes, perhaps that would be best... for JPMorgan, that is.

The money quote comes from a JPM employee referring to a meeting agenda where the bank was discussing its dealings with Bernie Madoff.

News accounts have long pointed out that Madoff could not have been doing what he was doing without leaving all kinds of traces. One of the traces he was leaving behind was a total lack of account activity. Madoff claimed that his accounts were small, that the bulk of his money was tied up in all the trades he was making for his customers.

Only with a Ponzi scheme, you aren't making trades - the money is just sitting around waiting for a withdrawal (by Madoff or one of his customers/dupes). Bernie didn't keep the money in a matress, he kept it in a bank. JPMorgan Chase, to be precise.

According the the (just) unsealed lawsuit

The bank “had only to glance at the bizarre activity” in the Madoff accounts “to realize that Madoff was not operating a legitimate business,” the trustee asserted in the suit. The money coming in was not from the sale of securities, and the money going out was not for the purchase of securities — at a time when Mr. Madoff was supposedly making billions of dollars in trades as part of his investment strategy, ...

What does JPMorgan do?

Nothing. No calls to the SEC, no black listing - JPM continues to do deals with Madoff, even as their own risk people are screaming for them to pull the plug.

And here's a nice tidbit: Madoff was apparently into money laundering for wealthy clients -

According to [Madoff trustee Irving Picard], the flow of money just between the Madoff accounts and [a single] customer’s accounts should have set off warning bells at the bank.

On a single day in 2002, Mr. Madoff initiated 318 separate payments of exactly $986,301 to the customer’s account for no apparent reason, the trustee reported. In December 2001, Mr. Madoff’s account received a $90 million check from the customer’s account “on a daily basis,” according to the lawsuit.

Mr. Picard’s complaint does not speculate about the purpose of the transactions.

The transfers should have caused the bank’s money-laundering software to start flashing, Mr. Picard’s complaint asserted.

Yet another revelatory and embarrassing lawsuit that names names.

What does it take to get indictments in this country, anyway?

(Via CJR)