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Alan Buckwalter’s resume is a monument to the massive consolidation of the U.S. banking industry. Buckwalter was an executive at Texas Commerce Bank when it merged with Chemical Bank in 1987. Chase Manhattan swallowed up Chemical in 1996, creating the nation’s largest U.S. bank holding company. Four years later, Chase merged with JP Morgan, with Buckwalter becoming chair of the behemoth’s southwestern region until his retirement in January 2003. The following year the bank announced a merger with Bank One (see Tyree Miller). J.P. Morgan agreed to pay $163 million in 2003 to settle federal charges that it loaned billions of dollars to Enron in tricky deals that made this debt look like energy-trading earnings. The bank paid $25 million in 2003 to settle federal charges that it improperly doled out hot initial public offering stocks to preferred customers to entice them to buy more shares. JP Morgan was one of 10 major Wall Street firms that paid a record $1.4 billion in 2002 to settle charges that their researchers promoted the stocks of companies that provided their firms with lucrative underwriting contracts. Investors won a $1 billion settlement in 2003 from 309 companies accused of conspiring with investment banks to rig initial public stock offerings. Plaintiffs firm Milberg Weiss Bershad Hynes & Lerach (see Sandra Stein) is seeking to recover much of this settlement from JP Morgan and other top investment banks. JPMorgan bankers internally expressed doubts about WorldCom’s fiscal soundness in 2001 before helping to sell billions of dollars in company bonds to unsuspecting investors. After lobbying U.S. treasury officials, an international bank consortium led by JP Morgan won an exclusive 2003 contract to run a new Iraqi reconstruction Trade Bank. JP Morgan received almost $30 million in federal contracts in fiscal 2002, most of it for financial services to the Department of Housing and Urban Development. JP Morgan made the top-10 list in 2003 when the Maine-based Corporate Library identified the corporations with the least independent boards of directors. In 2002, JP Morgan and Ernst & Young (see Leslie Brorsen) representatives on the industry-controlled Financial Accounting Standards Board cast deciding votes to kill a proposal to clamp down on Enron-style abuses of mark-to-market accounting in energy trades. Buckwalter sits on the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas (along with Ray Hunt and S. Reed Morian). After leaving J.P. Morgan Chase he joined the board of Plains Exploration and Production Co.
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Membership
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Of Special Interest
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| Profile last updated
Apr 1, 2004
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