A while back Bear Stearns sold some mortgage-backed securities to a thing called FSAM, which was basically a subsidiary of Franco-Belgian monstrosité Dexia, and FSAM sold the RMBS on to Dexia, and the mortgages were all terrible, and their value dropped, and Dexia sued JPMorgan, currently the proud owner of Bear Stearns, and today JPMorgan won:

JPMorgan Chase & Co has won the dismissal of the vast majority of a lawsuit accusing it of misleading the Belgian-French bank Dexia SA into buying more than $1.6 billion of troubled mortgage debt.

The decision, made public Wednesday by U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff in Manhattan, is a victory for the largest U.S. bank, in a case that gained notoriety after emails and other materials were disclosed that suggested the bank and its affiliates knew the debt was toxic, but sold it anyway.

Despite the notoriety this is kind of a boring case: it’s a garden-variety RMBS fraud case; Bear said various things in the offering documents that maybe weren’t so true, and the market crashed and the investors lost a lot of money, and now they’re mad. There’s like a zillion of those cases; actually there’s like a zillion of those cases just against Bear Stearns (here are two).

But the fact that the bank won is pretty interesting? Like, if JPMorgan can win a garden-variety RMBS case then so can anyone? I guess? So I suppose it’s worth spending a minute figuring out what this means for other banks.

We run into immediate problems because it’s hard to know exactly why JPMorgan won; the judge’s order is two pages of “opinion to follow.” But reading JPMorgan’s submissions you can get behind CNBC’s interpretation: Read more »