JPMorgan Expected to Admit Fault in ‘London Whale’ Trading Loss

For JPMorgan Chase, fines totaling billions of dollars are no longer sufficient to placate the government. Now the bank’s regulators want something stiffer: a mea culpa.

A month after JPMorgan acknowledged that “severe breakdowns” had allowed a group of traders in London to run up $6 billion in losses, the bank has preliminarily reached a rare agreement to admit that the trading blowup itself represented reckless behavior, according to people briefed on the negotiations.

The bank could settle with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission as soon as this week, according to the people briefed on the negotiations, who were not authorized to discuss the private settlement talks. Aside from admitting some wrongdoing, the bank is expected to pay about $100 million to resolve the case, a trading debacle last year that has come to be known as the London Whale episode.