Should Scotland be celebrating JPMorgan's new office in Glasgow?

Mother Glasgow’s succour is perpetual, nestling the players and their kin. It seems the heights of Weegie Morgan are being deepened, with a brand-new building. Our sister paper The Herald reported that they’ve been here for 25 years, doing “technology and software development”, rising from a few hundred to 2600 employees. New hires are promised; local schools are being supported with tech clubs; there shall be (praise the Lord) lots of city-centre retail footfall.

So who could object, in the shining city of Glasvegas, to the looming presence of JPMorgan? Close the curtains. Or open them again. JPMorgan Chase (JPMC) – their official modern title – isn’t nearly the biggest commercial bank in the world by happenstance.

READ MORE: Greta Thunberg joins climate protest outside JP Morgan

Their long history is one thing. Key to the US’s railroad boom, founders of the world’s first billion-dollar company in 1901 (US Steel), regular purchasers of tottering enterprises that end up boosting its bottom line.

Their recent history is quite another. How, exactly, does a single company rack up fines totalling $39.34 billion, from 2000 to 2024, for financial violations?

Well, a large chunk of that ($13bn) was levied in 2013, as a conclusion to the US Justice Department’s investigation into Morgan’s “toxic” mortgage bonds, which contributed to the crash in 2007-8. (We should note that the bank had already received $25bn in 2008 from the Bush administration, to cover “troubled assets” related to domestic mortgages).

“Without a doubt, the conduct uncovered in this investigation helped sow the seeds of the mortgage meltdown,” said then attorney-general Eric Holder.

“JPMorgan was not the only financial institution during this period to knowingly bundle toxic loans and sell them to unsuspecting investors, but that is no excuse for the firm’s behaviour.”

Holder’s statement continues: “JPMorgan employees knew that the loans in question did not comply with [underwriting] guidelines and were not otherwise appropriate for securitisation, but they allowed the loans to be securitised – and those securities to be sold – without disclosing this information to investors.”

As The New Yorker’s John Cassidy wrote at the time: “This sounds a lot like securities fraud, which is a criminal offence.”

However, not a single JPMorgan executive went to prison for their “knowing”. Many commentators rewrote the phrase “too big to fail” as “too big to jail”.

Yet a casual keyword search shows that JPMorgan Chase has hardly moderated its fines-triggering behaviour since this world record settlement.

Here’s only a few:

- In 2014, the bank paid $2.6bn, as a settlement against claims that it had enabled the giant scam – or Ponzi scheme – perpetrated by Bernie Madoff.

- In 2016, the company paid $264 million in fines, settling charges that they practised bribery and nepotism in order to secure business deals in Hong Kong.

- In 2020, they settled with various US state bodies to the tune of $920m, facing charges that they manipulated precious metals futures and US government bond markets from 2008 to 2016 (a practice charmlessly known as “spoofing”).

Most alarmingly, JPMorgan Chase reached a settlement last year with the US Virgin Islands (USVI), paying them $75m. Why? USVI’s charges had been that the bank had “actively participated in Jeffrey Epstein’s sex-trafficking venture [on the Islands] from 2006 to 2019”.

A (now former) JPMorgan executive, Jes Staley, had been primarily in charge of Epstein’s  accounts, describing him in 2009 correspondence as a “most cherished” friend.

The bank dealt with Epstein even during his guilty plea for soliciting sex with a minor in 2008. The bank also settled for $290m with Epstein victims who had been suing them.

JPMorgan’s own testimony (revealed in court documents) showed that 14 other employees, in addition to Staley, visited Epstein’s various properties on business – including several managing directors and executives.

It's true that there were also a goodly number of internal warnings from JPMorgan staffers, as reported in the trial, that their business with Epstein should cease. But it’s undoubtedly a grim episode in the bank’s history.

Are there other reasons to be uncomfortable with JPMorgan Chase’s presence in the city of Glasgow? Quite a few. On a global level, they’re acting perniciously around fossil fuels and the climate crisis.

They are a massive global funder of fossil fuels – cutting $101bn of fossil fuel deals in 2021 and 2022 (with $71bn of low-carbon deals), according to BloombergNEF.

And they were out on the stump only a week ago, urging a “reality check” on the move to renewable energy. This was from a JMPC report that claimed it could take “generations” to hit net-zero targets. (Retrospectively, it’s a poor show to see Humza Yousaf, who also recently scaled down his own government’s net-zero goals, opening JPMorgan’s new Glasgow offices).

JPMorgan Chase’s CEO Jamie Dimon told Congress in 2022 that stepping away from their fossil fuels “would be the road to hell for America”.

This doubtless chimes with Dimon’s bloviations at Davos this year. “Trump was kind of right about Nato, kind of right on immigration. He grew the economy quite well. Tax reform worked. He was right about some of China. He wasn’t wrong about some of these critical issues.”

As they say, the business of business is … trimming your priorities to the incoming oligarch.

A most unpleasant sicht.

So, to transpose the famous lines written by US journalist Matt Taibbi to describe Goldman Sachs: Is JPMorgan Chase another “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money”?

Manifestly so.

But I always like to see a utopian glimmer from the depths – even within reckless major institutions currently driving us to the precipice.

What else could you do with 2600 software engineers housed comfortably in the centre of Glasgow? There are various conjectures as to what they are actually doing at JPMC.

Globally, the company is currently enduring 45bn cyber-attacks a day, double the amount of last year, which is blamed on Russian attackers and the rise of AI.

Given the billions-worth of fines imposed on JPMC for sharp financial practice, this has a certain irony.

No doubt many in Glasgow will also be “quants”, using the most advanced and responsive computation to react at light speed to market fluctuations.

This at a time when we want capital to be “patient”. Meaning that they should sustainedly invest in planet-restoring infrastructure and enterprises – rather than skitter around in the grip of manic robots, inhumanly obsessed with fractional profits.

Is there a point at which we look at these mounds of toxically-oriented computation, and harness them to something better? For example, what would it take to create a climate-guided financial app?

One which we trusted to accurately assess our consumption and spending, according to whether each expenditure fell within the “planetary boundaries” (as advocated by economist Kate Raworth)?

Surely this would be a revolutionary step. It would put our responsibilities to the earth directly in our hands and minds. It would open out an ethical space right at the core of an often condemned social media.

But trust would have to be baked into the whole process. Trust that industries and enterprises are being monitored properly for their carbon output. Trust that the interactive data of users isn’t being exploited for other clients or markets. Trust that the design is serving you with a clear function, rather than manipulating your responses and world-view.

Is this a project for a large, globally-powerful financial institution, with undoubtedly the right levels of expertise, reach and scale? It’d be nice to see someone step up to the challenge.

Let me suggest that, on recent form, the enterprise commenced in New York by John Pierpont Morgan in 1861 should not be in the room. However snazzy they look on the Glasgow skyline.