WASHINGTON (Reuters) - JPMorgan Chase & Co has reached a tentative $13 billion agreement with the U.S. Justice Department to settle government agency investigations into bad mortgage loans the bank sold to investors before the financial crisis, a source said on Saturday.
The tentative deal does not release the bank from criminal liability for some of the mortgages it packaged into bonds and sold to investors, a factor that had been a major sticking point in the discussions, the source said.
As part of the deal, the bank will likely cooperate in criminal inquiries into certain individuals involved in the conduct at issue, the source, who declined to be identified, said.
Officials at JPMorgan and the Justice Department declined to comment.
Another source close to the discussions characterized a deal as likely, but cautioned that parts of the agreement are still being hammered out, and the settlement could conceivably fall apart.
The record settlement could help resolve many of the legal troubles the New York bank is facing. Earlier this month JPMorgan disclosed it had stockpiled $23 billion in reserves for settlements and other legal expenses to help cover the myriad investigations into its conduct before and after the financial crisis.
The deal is being hammered out by some of the most senior officials at the Department of Justice and the largest U.S. bank. Attorney General Eric Holder and JPMorgan Chief Executive Jamie Dimon spoke on the phone on Friday night to finalize the broad outlines of the broad deal, the first source said.
The bank's general counsel Stephen Cutler and Associate Attorney General Tony West are negotiating a statement of facts that will be part of a final agreement, the source said.
Long considered one of the best-managed banks, JPMorgan has stumbled in recent years, with run-ins with multiple federal regulators as well as authorities in several states and foreign countries over issues ranging from multibillion-dollar trading losses and poor risk controls to probes into whether it manipulated a power market.
In September, as the Justice Department prepared to sue the bank over mortgage securities that the bank sold in the run-up to the financial crisis, JPMorgan tried to reach a broader settlement with DOJ and other federal and state agencies to resolve claims over its mortgage-related liabilities stemming from the bust in house prices.
Dimon went to Washington to meet with Holder on September 25, and discussed an $11 billion settlement at that point.
Some of the problems relate to mortgage bank Washington Mutual and investment bank Bear Stearns, two failing firms that JPMorgan took over in 2008.
The bank and the Justice Department have been discussing a broad deal that would resolve not only the inquiry into mortgage bonds it sold to investors between 2005 to 2007 that were backed by subprime and other risky residential mortgages, but also similar lawsuits from the Federal Housing Finance Agency, the National Credit Union Administration, the state of New York and others.
The broader settlement is a product of a government working group created nearly two years ago to investigate misconduct in the residential mortgage-backed securities market that contributed to the financial crisis. Officials from the Justice Department, the New York Attorney General and others helped to lead the group.
Reuters reported late Friday that JPMorgan and FHFA had reached a tentative $4 billion deal. That agreement is expected to be part of the larger $13 billion settlement.
(additional reporting by David Henry and Karen Freifeld in New York)
(Reporting by Aruna Viswanatha; Editing by Doina Chiacu and Gunna Dickson)
Contact: David Ruth david@rice.edu 713-348-6327 Rice University
Common catalyst cerium oxide opens door to nanochemistry for medicine
Scientists at Rice University are enhancing the natural antioxidant properties of an element found in a car's catalytic converter to make it useful for medical applications.
Rice chemist Vicki Colvin led a team that created small, uniform spheres of cerium oxide and gave them a thin coating of fatty oleic acid to make them biocompatible. The researchers say their discovery has the potential to help treat traumatic brain injury, cardiac arrest and Alzheimer's patients and can guard against radiation-induced side effects suffered by cancer patients.
Their nanoparticles also have potential to protect astronauts from long-term exposure to radiation in space and perhaps even slow the effects of aging, they reported.
The research appears this month in the American Chemical Society journal ACS Nano.
Cerium oxide nanocrystals have the ability to absorb and release oxygen ions -- a chemical reaction known as reduction oxidation, or redox, for short. It's the same process that allows catalytic converters in cars to absorb and eliminate pollutants.
The particles made at Rice are small enough to be injected into the bloodstream when organs need protection from oxidation, particularly after traumatic injuries, when damaging reactive oxygen species (ROS) increase dramatically.
The cerium particles go to work immediately, absorbing ROS free radicals, and they continue to work over time as the particles revert to their initial state, a process that remains a mystery, she said. The oxygen species released in the process "won't be super reactive," she said.
Colvin said cerium oxide, a form of the rare earth metal cerium, remains relatively stable as it cycles between cerium oxide III and IV. In the first state, the nanoparticles have gaps in their surface that absorb oxygen ions like a sponge. When cerium oxide III is mixed with free radicals, it catalyzes a reaction that effectively defangs the ROS by capturing oxygen atoms and turning into cerium oxide IV. She said cerium oxide IV particles slowly release their captured oxygen and revert to cerium oxide III, and can break down free radicals again and again.
Colvin said the nanoparticles' tiny size makes them effective scavengers of oxygen.
"The smaller the particles, the more surface area they have available to capture free radicals," Colvin said. "A gram of these nanoparticles can have the surface area of a football field, and that provides a lot of space to absorb oxygen."
None of the cerium oxide particles made before Rice tackled the problem were stable enough to be used in biological settings, she said. "We created uniform particles whose surfaces are really well-defined, and we found a water-free production method to maximize the surface gaps available for oxygen scavenging."
Colvin said it's relatively simple to add a polymer coating to the 3.8-nanometer spheres. The coating is thin enough to let oxygen pass through to the particle, but robust enough to protect it through many cycles of ROS absorption.
In testing with hydrogen peroxide, a strong oxidizing agent, the researchers found their most effective cerium oxide III nanoparticles performed nine times better than a common antioxidant, Trolox, at first exposure, and held up well through 20 redox cycles.
"The next logical step for us is to do some passive targeting," Colvin said. "For that, we plan to attach antibodies to the surface of the nanoparticles so they will be attracted to particular cell types, and we will evaluate these modified particles in more realistic biological settings."
Colvin is most excited by the potential to help cancer patients undergoing radiation therapy.
"Existing radioprotectants have to be given in incredibly high doses," she said. "They have their own side effects, and there are not a lot of great options."
She said a self-renewing antioxidant that can stay in place to protect organs would have clear benefits over toxic radioprotectants that must be eliminated from the body before they damage good tissue.
"Probably the neatest thing about this is that so much of nanomedicine has been about exploiting the magnetic and optical properties of nanomaterials, and we have great examples of that at Rice," Colvin said. "But the special properties of nanoparticles have rarely been leveraged in medical applications.
"What I like about this work is that it opens a part of nanochemistry -- namely catalysis -- to the medical world. Cerium III and IV are electron shuttles that have broad applications if we can make the chemistry accessible in a biological setting.
"And of all things, this humble material comes from a catalytic converter," she said.
###
Co-authors of the paper are Rice graduate students Seung Soo Lee, Wensi Song, Min Jung Cho and Hema Puppala; Rice alumna Phuc Nguyen; postdoctoral researcher Huiguang Zhu, and Laura Segatori, the T.N. Law Assistant Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and an assistant professor of biochemistry and cell biology. Colvin is vice provost for research at Rice and the Kenneth S. Pitzer-Schlumberger Professor of Chemistry and a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering.
Read the abstract at: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/nn4026806?prevSearch=%2522rice%2Buniversity%2522&searchHistoryKey=
This news release can be found online at http://news.rice.edu/2013/10/15/rice-scientists-create-a-super-antioxidant-2/
Follow Rice News and Media Relations via Twitter @RiceUNews
Oleylamine (red dots) and oleac acid (blue) layers serve to protect a cerium oxide nanosphere that catalyzes reactive oxygen species by absorbing them and turning them into less-harmful molecules. The finding could help treat injuries, guard against radiation-induced side effects of cancer therapy and protect astronauts from space radiation. (Credit: Colvin Group/Rice University)
Located on a 300-acre forested campus in Houston, Rice University is consistently ranked among the nation's top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice has highly respected schools of Architecture, Business, Continuing Studies, Engineering, Humanities, Music, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences and is home to the Baker Institute for Public Policy. With 3,708 undergraduates and 2,374 graduate students, Rice's undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is 6-to-1. Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and lifelong friendships, just one reason why Rice has been ranked No. 1 for best quality of life multiple times by the Princeton Review and No. 2 for "best value" among private universities by Kiplinger's Personal Finance. To read "What they're saying about Rice," go to http://tinyurl.com/AboutRiceU.
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Rice scientists create a super antioxidant
Public release date: 15-Oct-2013 [
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Contact: David Ruth david@rice.edu 713-348-6327 Rice University
Common catalyst cerium oxide opens door to nanochemistry for medicine
Scientists at Rice University are enhancing the natural antioxidant properties of an element found in a car's catalytic converter to make it useful for medical applications.
Rice chemist Vicki Colvin led a team that created small, uniform spheres of cerium oxide and gave them a thin coating of fatty oleic acid to make them biocompatible. The researchers say their discovery has the potential to help treat traumatic brain injury, cardiac arrest and Alzheimer's patients and can guard against radiation-induced side effects suffered by cancer patients.
Their nanoparticles also have potential to protect astronauts from long-term exposure to radiation in space and perhaps even slow the effects of aging, they reported.
The research appears this month in the American Chemical Society journal ACS Nano.
Cerium oxide nanocrystals have the ability to absorb and release oxygen ions -- a chemical reaction known as reduction oxidation, or redox, for short. It's the same process that allows catalytic converters in cars to absorb and eliminate pollutants.
The particles made at Rice are small enough to be injected into the bloodstream when organs need protection from oxidation, particularly after traumatic injuries, when damaging reactive oxygen species (ROS) increase dramatically.
The cerium particles go to work immediately, absorbing ROS free radicals, and they continue to work over time as the particles revert to their initial state, a process that remains a mystery, she said. The oxygen species released in the process "won't be super reactive," she said.
Colvin said cerium oxide, a form of the rare earth metal cerium, remains relatively stable as it cycles between cerium oxide III and IV. In the first state, the nanoparticles have gaps in their surface that absorb oxygen ions like a sponge. When cerium oxide III is mixed with free radicals, it catalyzes a reaction that effectively defangs the ROS by capturing oxygen atoms and turning into cerium oxide IV. She said cerium oxide IV particles slowly release their captured oxygen and revert to cerium oxide III, and can break down free radicals again and again.
Colvin said the nanoparticles' tiny size makes them effective scavengers of oxygen.
"The smaller the particles, the more surface area they have available to capture free radicals," Colvin said. "A gram of these nanoparticles can have the surface area of a football field, and that provides a lot of space to absorb oxygen."
None of the cerium oxide particles made before Rice tackled the problem were stable enough to be used in biological settings, she said. "We created uniform particles whose surfaces are really well-defined, and we found a water-free production method to maximize the surface gaps available for oxygen scavenging."
Colvin said it's relatively simple to add a polymer coating to the 3.8-nanometer spheres. The coating is thin enough to let oxygen pass through to the particle, but robust enough to protect it through many cycles of ROS absorption.
In testing with hydrogen peroxide, a strong oxidizing agent, the researchers found their most effective cerium oxide III nanoparticles performed nine times better than a common antioxidant, Trolox, at first exposure, and held up well through 20 redox cycles.
"The next logical step for us is to do some passive targeting," Colvin said. "For that, we plan to attach antibodies to the surface of the nanoparticles so they will be attracted to particular cell types, and we will evaluate these modified particles in more realistic biological settings."
Colvin is most excited by the potential to help cancer patients undergoing radiation therapy.
"Existing radioprotectants have to be given in incredibly high doses," she said. "They have their own side effects, and there are not a lot of great options."
She said a self-renewing antioxidant that can stay in place to protect organs would have clear benefits over toxic radioprotectants that must be eliminated from the body before they damage good tissue.
"Probably the neatest thing about this is that so much of nanomedicine has been about exploiting the magnetic and optical properties of nanomaterials, and we have great examples of that at Rice," Colvin said. "But the special properties of nanoparticles have rarely been leveraged in medical applications.
"What I like about this work is that it opens a part of nanochemistry -- namely catalysis -- to the medical world. Cerium III and IV are electron shuttles that have broad applications if we can make the chemistry accessible in a biological setting.
"And of all things, this humble material comes from a catalytic converter," she said.
###
Co-authors of the paper are Rice graduate students Seung Soo Lee, Wensi Song, Min Jung Cho and Hema Puppala; Rice alumna Phuc Nguyen; postdoctoral researcher Huiguang Zhu, and Laura Segatori, the T.N. Law Assistant Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and an assistant professor of biochemistry and cell biology. Colvin is vice provost for research at Rice and the Kenneth S. Pitzer-Schlumberger Professor of Chemistry and a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering.
Read the abstract at: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/nn4026806?prevSearch=%2522rice%2Buniversity%2522&searchHistoryKey=
This news release can be found online at http://news.rice.edu/2013/10/15/rice-scientists-create-a-super-antioxidant-2/
Follow Rice News and Media Relations via Twitter @RiceUNews
Oleylamine (red dots) and oleac acid (blue) layers serve to protect a cerium oxide nanosphere that catalyzes reactive oxygen species by absorbing them and turning them into less-harmful molecules. The finding could help treat injuries, guard against radiation-induced side effects of cancer therapy and protect astronauts from space radiation. (Credit: Colvin Group/Rice University)
Located on a 300-acre forested campus in Houston, Rice University is consistently ranked among the nation's top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice has highly respected schools of Architecture, Business, Continuing Studies, Engineering, Humanities, Music, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences and is home to the Baker Institute for Public Policy. With 3,708 undergraduates and 2,374 graduate students, Rice's undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is 6-to-1. Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and lifelong friendships, just one reason why Rice has been ranked No. 1 for best quality of life multiple times by the Princeton Review and No. 2 for "best value" among private universities by Kiplinger's Personal Finance. To read "What they're saying about Rice," go to http://tinyurl.com/AboutRiceU.
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| Share
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Fitch Ratings, one of the big three credit ratings agencies, issued a warning shot today, saying that while it affirmed the United States' AAA credit rating, it was placing it on "rating watch negative."
In other words, it was placing the country's long-term credit rating under review for a potential downgrade.
"The prolonged negotiations over raising the debt ceiling (following the episode in August 2011) risks undermining confidence in the role of the U.S. dollar as the preeminent global reserve currency, by casting doubt over the full faith and credit of the U.S.," Fitch said in a statement. "This 'faith' is a key reason why the U.S. 'AAA' rating can tolerate a substantially higher level of public debt than other 'AAA' sovereigns."
Reuters reports the U.S. Treasury said the threat from Fitch is a reminder of just how close the country is from defaulting for the first time in history.
"The announcement reflects the urgency with which Congress should act to remove the threat of default hanging over the economy," a Treasury spokesperson told Reuters.
In the last couple of years, there's been a surge of what you might call "cool PBS," by which I just mean social-media-friendly stuff like Sherlock and Downton Abbey that sort of expands people's ideas of what public television is and especially what its relationship to pop culture is.
But that's not a reason to overlook classic, documentary-making, nature-liking, animal-hugging PBS, which brings us to tonight's return of Nature, produced by WNET in New York, which debuts its new season Wednesday night with "Saving Otter 501." (8:00 pm in many places, but check your local listings, as always.)
This is the story of how the Monterey Bay Aquarium makes its 501st attempt to save an orphaned otter and release her back into the wild. They feed her, they teach her, they even place her with a surrogate mother. (The whole thing is narrated by Daniel Stern, which, for children of the '80s, gives it a whole nostalgic Wonder Otter Years quality that's downright diabolical.) While the special contains more adorable, awesome otter footage than you can shake a ... flipper? ... at, it doesn't take a monster to ask the question: Is this worth it, for one baby otter?
Well, as it turns out, California's wild otter population is pretty tiny and heavily concentrated, and there's that funny thing about ecosystems: otters are one of the few predators that urchins have, and urchins eat kelp, so if you follow the math, otters are necessary to protect kelp from being overrun in the creation of — no kidding — "urchin barrens." Yikes.
There's a nice line-straddling here between "Look at nature; nature is cool!" and "Look how much we're having to do just to keep from wiping out this entire animal, like, as a thing that exists." The scientists are careful to stress that this is only worth doing if it ultimately benefits the wild population, not if it results in a bunch of hand-raised otters being released into Monterey Bay to take food out of the mouths of the wild otters that remain.
They've been making Nature for 30 years; long enough that I remember griping about my parents using our first VCR to tape it when I undoubtedly was desperate to tape something else (probably something terrible). It might not be slick, but it's entertaining and informative, and if you're wildlife-minded, it's worth remembering that it's still there, as lovely as ever.
The Warner Bros. astronaut adventure starring Sandra Bullock and George Clooney landed in the top spot at the box office for the second weekend in a row, earning $43.2 million and raising its domestic total to $122.3 million.
Sony's pirate drama "Captain Phillips" starring Tom Hanks launched in second place with a $25.7 million.
The animated Sony movie "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2" rolled into third place in its third weekend with $13.7 million, bringing its domestic haul to $77.6 million.
The weekend's only other new wide release, the gun-filled sequel "Machete Kills," opened in fourth place with $3.8 million.
___
The top 20 movies at U.S. and Canadian theaters Friday through Monday, followed by distribution studio, gross, number of theater locations, average receipts per location, total gross and number of weeks in release, as compiled Monday by Rentrak, are:
Detroit (AFP) - Mike Napoli's seventh-inning solo homer off Detroit ace Justin Verlander was the only run Boston needed to beat the Tigers 1-0 Tuesday and edge ahead in the American League Championship Series.
John Lackey and the Boston bullpen made the run stand up and the Red Sox took a 2-1 lead in the best-of-seven set that will send the winners to Major League Baseball's championship World Series.
Detroit will try to get back on even terms when they host game four on Wednesday. Detroit will send Doug Fister to the mound and the Red Sox will give the ball to Jake Peavy.
Boston managed only four hits and struck out 10 times in eight innings against Verlander, but shut down the potent Tigers lineup.
Detroit sluggers Miguel Cabrera and Prince Fielder both struck out with runners at first and third in the eighth inning.
The Tigers went 0-for-7 with runners in scoring position, in a game that was delayed for 17 minutes in the second inning because a power problem that saw the floodlights go out.
Lackey was superb in his 6 2/3 innings. He surrendered four hits and struck out eight without a walk.
"He just never gave in," said Red Sox catcher Jarrod Saltalamacchia of Lackey. "He got in some situations, first and third, and never gave in, never wanted to leave anything over the plate. Some big at-bats we were able to keep in our favor."
Three Red Sox relievers finished the shutout, with Japanese pitcher Koji Uehara getting the last four outs for the save.
Verlander kept Boston's bats at bay through the first six innings, giving up just two hits and a walk.
Lackey matched him, allowing only a double to Jhonny Peralta between the second and sixth.
David Ortiz, whose game-two grand slam sparked Boston's come-from-behind 6-5 game-two victory, grounded to short to open the seventh.
Verlander then got ahead in the count against Napoli, who launched a high fast ball into the bullpen behind left center field.
"He's tough," said Napoli, whose blast came on Verlander's 100th pitch of the game. "He was on his game tonight and he was keeping us all off balance. I got a 3-2 fastball and put a good swing on the pitch."
Boston's bullpen thwarted a Tigers' rally bid in the eighth after a walk to Austin Jackson and Torii Hunter's single off Junichi Tazawa put runners at first and third with one out.
Tazawa came up with a huge strikeout of AL batting champion Cabrera and Uehara struck out Fielder to preserve the one-run lead.
"The eighth inning, Taz, that was huge," Saltalamacchia said. "Cabrera's such a great hitter. One out, those are situations he thrives in. He gets in situations where he can get an RBI and it's tough to get him out, let alone strike him out."
Martinez led off the bottom of the ninth with a single, but Uehara induced Peralta to hit into a double play then struck out Avila to end it.
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