MICROSCOPE

Bank Regulators Under Scrutiny

After multibillion-dollar loss at JPMorgan Chase.

More than 110 regulators from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency work in JPMorgan Chase’s offices, and they keep an eye on the bank’s operations. Except when they don’t. Somehow, these scores of government regulators missed the bum trades in the chief investment office that led to massive losses at one of the nation’s largest banks. Anonymous sources told The New York Times that even as this unit of the bank continued to grow, making increasingly larger investments, regulators did not increase their oversight and failed to place personnel in key offices in London and New York.