The 2007 implosion of two Bear Stearns hedge funds that invested in risky mortgage bonds led to the wider crash of the financial system, and as it turns out years later, a fairly sizable and eyebrow raising settlement paid by mega bank JPMorgan to the convicted pedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein.
The hedge funds went belly-up in the summer of 2007, the first public casualty of the smoldering financial crisis that would take down Bear, then Lehman Brothers, and were it not for a government bailout, the entire financial system in 2008.
After Bear’s collapse, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, at the insistence of the government, took over the firm, its assets and many of its liabilities, including claims by investors that they were misled about the financial condition of the hedge funds before their collapse.
Epstein was one of those investors, placing more than $57 million of his cash into something called the “Bear Stearns High-Grade Structured Credit Strategies Enhanced Leverage hedge fund,” On the Money has learned.
Yes, the fund’s name was a mouthful and should have served as a warning signal to anyone who wanted to invest in it. So it’s a logical question why JPM needed to settle with the creep?
A JPM spokesman had no comment, so we can only speculate. Meanwhile, Epstein’s ties to the hedge funds were buried in the recent New York Times opus about JPMorgan’s long banking relationship with the sexual predator.
Hellbound and Down 