""JPMorgan Chase"":http://www.jpmorganchase.com kicked off the third-quarter earnings season Wednesday. It's the first major bank to report July-through-August results, and the company says profits are up 23 percent from a year ago.
[IMAGE]The New-York based financial firm brought in $4.4 billion in net income ""during the quarter"":http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/ONE/854362774x0x409163/14a3f375-5913-4c58-a4ce-3eb855569bf2/3Q10_Earnings_Press_Release.pdf, beating analysts' expectations. Earnings per share were $1.01, compared with 82 cents in the third quarter of 2009.
During a conference call with investors, CEO Jamie Dimon announced the company has expanded its foreclosure review to 41 states and 115,000 loan files. Previously the company had halted foreclosures in 23 states and was reviewing 56,000 files.
[COLUMN_BREAK]Though the company said it did find cases of servicing executives acting as ""robo-signers"" and signing large amounts of foreclosure filings without reviewing the appropriate paperwork and abiding by strict processing guidelines, Dimon said there haven't been signs that people were mistakenly evicted.
JP Morgan also announced it will be the first bank to absorb legal costs related to the influx of foreclosures.
In Q3 it set aside $1.3 billion in litigation reserves to cover things including matters related to mortgages, and added $1 billion to its reserves tied to bad mortgages which it may have to repurchase from buyers.
The bank suffered a loss of $1.5 billion in repurchase losses to the GSEs in Q3. That $1.5 billion loss reduced their total production for the quarter by more than half, bringing it down to $1.2 billion.
Dimon also said the company has stopped using the Mortgage Electronic Registration System due to issues with the system's ability to prove the ownership of mortgages.
In their earnings announcement released Wednesday, JP Morgan announced it is on track to hire more than 10,000 people in the United States in 2010.
It has offered nearly one million loan modification and approved 292,000 of those modifications since the beginning of 2009.