While JPMorgan Chase agreed to pay $13 billion in its mortgage settlement with the Justice Department, a record for a single company, the bank could have come out a lot worse, writes Peter Eavis of The New York Times.

The government focused on billions of dollars of subprime and Alt-A mortgages offered before the 2008 financial crisis by JPMorgan, Washington Mutual and Bear Stearns. JPMorgan bought the other two firms that year.

The Justice Department’s main beef it that the standard of the loans were too low for them to have been packaged into mortgage bonds that were sold to investors.

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"But the final $13 billion figure may be as much political theater as a real attempt to right wrongs," Eavis writes.

How fair the number is depends on how big JPMorgan's abuse was, he says.

"Yes, these are big numbers for newspaper headlines," Jeffrey Lewis, a senior portfolio manager at TIG Securitized Asset Fund, tells Eavis. "But relative to the losses, they could have been bigger."

On the other end of the spectrum, Wall Street Journal editors argue that the Justice Department was too harsh on JPMorgan.

"We've been critical of this government plundering of a bank that did not need a bailout in 2008, but we defy anyone to follow the logic of [the] agreement," they write in an editorial.

The Justice Department says other financial institutions were victimized by purchasing rotten mortgage-backed securities from JPMorgan.

"But the alleged victims include institutions where the government has separately accused managers of their own mortgage misdeeds," the editorial says.

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