Market Cap: $387.7 Billion

Industry: Banking

Founded: 1968

Chief Executive Officer: Jamie Dimon

Employees: 252,539

Sales: $118.18 Billion

Headquarters: New York, NY

 

Summary: JPMorgan Chase & Co. is a well-known financial holding company. It provides financial and investment banking services to people worldwide, offering a range of investment banking products in all major capital markets. JPMorgan Chase & Co. Advises on corporate strategy and structure, works on capital-raising in equity and debt markets, assesses sophistical risk management, partakes in market-making in cash securities and derivative instrument, and provides prime brokerage and research. The company operates through consumer and community banking, corporate and investment banking, commercial banking, and asset management. They are perhaps best-known for their mortgage banking, which includes mortgage origination and servicing activities and portfolios for residential mortgages and home equity loans.

 

Why you should care: JPMorgan Chase & Co. ranks as the third-largest company in the world. They are currently number ten in profit and number eight in assets. Consumers should care about this company because their activities in the early 2000s facilitated the 2008 financial crash. Then, in February of 2012, US Attorney General Eric Holder announced the National Mortgage Settlement, which fined JPMorgan Chase (and four other megabanks) a total of $25 billion. Allegedly, JPMorgan met part of its settlement burden by forgiving loans it no longer owned.