DeWine: JPMorgan settles for $150M

DeWine: JPMorgan settles for $150M

COLUMBUS

JPMorgan Chase has agreed to pay $150 million to public pension funds and individuals hurt by its $6 billion “London Whale” trading loss, Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine announced Monday.

The settlement deal came in a 2012 class-action lawsuit that alleged JPMorgan Chase issued false and misleading statements regarding its trading activity, describing risky and speculative trading strategies as mere “hedges” or “risk management” devices.

Huge losses from transactions booked through the London office of JPMorgan’s chief investment office caused the bank’s stock value to plummet, harming investors.

The Ohio Public Employees Retirement System, the state’s largest public pension fund and one of the largest in the U.S., lost $2.5 million.

FTC rejects updated offer from Staples

NEW YORK

Federal regulators rejected an offer from Staples to sell $1.25 billion in contracts, an attempt on the part of the office-supply retailer to ease monopoly fears as it tries to acquire rival Office Depot.

The Federal Trade Commission sought to block the deal earlier this month believing that a tie-up between the last of the major retailers in the sector would throttle competition.

CDC reports new E. coli cases tied to Chipotle in Nov.

NEW YORK

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Monday it is investigating a more-recent batch of E. coli cases linked to Chipotle, and that it does not know yet if they are linked to a larger outbreak that began in October.

So far, the agency said five people have been reported sick in the new outbreak, with illnesses starting between Nov. 18 and 26. They include one person in Kansas, one in North Dakota and three in Oklahoma. All five said they ate at a Chipotle the week before they got sick.

The development is the latest bad news for Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc., which saw its sales plummet after the emergence of the larger E. coli outbreak that has sickened 53 people in nine states. The most-recent illness linked to Chipotle among those cases started Nov. 10.

Pew: Fewer use home broadband

NEW YORK

More Americans are shunning costly home broadband and using their cellphones to get online, a new survey shows.

Eighty percent of U.S. adults had Internet access this year, whether through a smartphone or a home Internet connection, up from 78 percent two years ago, according to the survey published Monday by the Pew Research Center.

But after years of home broadband growth, slightly fewer adults in 2015 got Internet from providers such as a home phone or cable company, mostly because it’s too expensive for them. The number dropped to 67 percent from 70 percent in the center’s 2013 survey.

Meanwhile, the number of people relying on cellphones alone for Internet rose to 13 percent this year from 8 percent in 2013.

Associated Press