More JPMorgan meetings with Treasury on Volcker rule

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JPMorgan executives, including CEO Jamie Dimon, attended several meetings at the Treasury Department last month to discuss the controversial Volcker rule and other matters related to the Dodd-Frank financial reform law, according to new meeting logs released by the agency Thursday.

In the weeks leading up to the bank's disclosure that it had lost at least $2 billion in the sort of hedging strategy that could come under question as agencies implement the Volcker ban on proprietary trading, JPMorgan executives attended three meetings at the agency, the logs show.

Two of those meetings, both on April 26 with Deputy Treasury Secretary Neal Wolin, involved explicit discussion of the Volcker rule. Dimon attended one of these meetings, along with a dozen other CEOs of financial institutions and a trade group, including Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs, Brian Moynihan of Bank of America, and James P. Gorman of Morgan Stanley. The second meeting was a larger session between Wolin and dozens of lower-level financial executives. Dimon and other banking executives have been critical of the ban on proprietary trading.

Overall, the meeting logs show a half dozen meetings with agency staff about the Volcker rule. Five were with banks and other financial institutions. One, on April 24, was with representatives of Better Markets, a financial watchdog group that has argued for a strong interpretation of the ban on proprietary trading.

The meeting logs do not show any meetings for Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner last month. Sunlight recently reported that Geithner had a private audience with Dimon to discuss the Volcker rule in March. That meeting was revealed only after the agency posted March meeting logs two weeks late, a delay discovered by Sunlight.

The agency, along with other major federal financial agencies, voluntarily makes such meeting logs public online, but each agency posts using a different format and on different time lines. The Treasury Department has a policy of releasing meeting logs on the last day of the month, showing meetings from the previous month. This month the agency published the meeting logs on schedule.