JPMorgan Chase has agreed to pay $410 million to the nation’s energy regulator, a move that will allow the bank to settle accusations that traders in its Houston offices manipulated electricity markets in California and Michigan, the New York Times DealBook Blog reported yesterday. The agreement is a record settlement for the regulator, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which has ramped up its policing of Wall Street trading in recent months. While the commission fined the bank, it stopped short of penalizing individual JPMorgan executives. That decision is a reversal from earlier this year, when the agency warned JPMorgan that it might seek to sanction Blythe Masters, the influential leader of the bank’s commodities business. Initially, investigators also planned to recommend that the agency hold three of her employees “individually liable.”
