If there’s one thing to be gained from the Fail Whale trade, it’s that one section of the political class has rediscovered the need for stronger financial regulations. Even politicians running for office are starting to runn on the need for more reform.

Whale trade, proponents of stiffer regulation on Wall Street than what was ushered in with Dodd-Frank have offered a variety of solutions, including reenacting Glass Steagal or making banks smaller. All of them could be beneficial in tandem to reduce risk and political influence from the financial system.

Three JPMorgan Chase executives will take the fall for the “Fail Whale” trades that have so far cost the firm $2 billion. But Bruno Iskil, the actual London Whale, so far still has a job, for some reason, as does Jamie Dimon, the CEO who has been on an apology tour for his lack of awareness of the trading losses.

The Whale Trade fail shows that all banks are poised on the brink of disaster. When it happens, the government will pay, not the banks. So why shouldn’t Jamie Dimon’s operation try to make money betting with credit default swaps with someone else’s money?

If you can find another CEO answer a point-blank question about whether or not their company broke the law with, essentially, “I don’t know, the regulators should come in and find out,” you win a cookie.

The fallout from JPMorgan Chase’s “Fail Whale” trade (I’m trying to coin this phrase, so help me out, will you?) continues. But there’s been a thread in one section of the liberal blogosphere that has confounded me. For some reason, writers are trying to position this as a problem for Mitt Romney.

I spent most of yesterday afternoon laughing my ass off about Jamie Dimon’s London Whale loss, but it’s actually not all that funny.

Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase, showing no ill effects from a foreclosure fraud settlement that was supposed to penalize them for fraudulent misconduct, both announced robust earnings gains today. Matt Stoller has a good look inside the numbers. But I was intrigued by the fact that both banks attributed stronger mortgage lending numbers for their earnings gains.

I’ve been following Jeff Horwitz’ excellent series on credit card debt collection at American Banker, which I’ve chronicled in a couple posts. The short version is that the attention to detail in credit card debt information is as thorough and well-kept as it is in foreclosure and mortgage information. Now Joe Nocera has picked up on this series and brought it from more of a trade publication to the pages of the paper of record. Good for him.

We learned a few weeks ago about the JPMorgan Chase debt collection scandal, which featured robo-signing, shredded documents, and loads of criminal activity. Now there’s evidence that this was more of an industry standard, as Bank of America suffers from similar problems in their debt collection business.