JPMorgan Chase & Co. has an "agreement in principle" to settle an investigation into how its Bear Stearns unit handled mortgage securities it packaged and sold to investors, and plans to resume a $3 billion stock buyback in the first quarter of 2013, the bank said in its third-quarter filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the Wall Street Journal reported today. The mortgage case involves whether Bear Stearns, which JPMorgan acquired at the onset of the financial crisis in 2008, received compensation from lenders for bad loans that it purchased to bundle into mortgage securities, but then failed to pass that money on to the investors in the securities.
