JPMorgan Chase is to take a charge of about $9bn – half as much again as its estimate – to clean up Bear Stearns’ balance sheet and pay for redundancies and litigation arising from its cut-price takeover of the stricken investment bank. Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan’s chairman and chief executive, told a banking conference that the higher costs were driven by the losses suffered by Bear this year and the larger-than-expected amount of bad assets on its books. Dimon said he remained optimistic on the long-term benefits of the $1.5bn takeover of Bear but described it as “mission not accomplished”,
