Federal regulators are seeking to level civil charges against JPMorgan Chase and extract a rare admission of wrongdoing from the nation’s biggest bank as an investigation into a multibillion-dollar trading loss enters its final stage, the New York Times DealBook blog reported yesterday. If JPMorgan concedes to some wrongdoing in a settlement, such an admission would set an important precedent for the Securities and Exchange Commission, coming after decades of allowing defendants to “neither admit nor deny wrongdoing.” The losses in the case — which have now swelled to more than $6 billion — stemmed from outsize derivatives wagers made by traders at JPMorgan’s chief investment office in London.
