JPMorgan's Exposure to GM: What You Don't Know

It would be natural to expect JPMorgan Chase (JPM) to suffer some serious collateral damage from all the turmoil in the auto industry, but the bank's shareholders don't have a whole lot of information to go on.

General Motors (GM) Monday became the second of the Big Three auto companies to file for bankruptcy this year. Giant suppliers like Delphi and Visteon have also sought protection from creditors, and GM's finance affiliate GMAC has been bailed out by the government.

JPMorgan is widely understood to be one of the biggest lenders to the U.S. auto industry, if not the single biggest. But CEO Jamie Dimon, when asked about the issue on the bank's first quarter conference call, said total losses in a worst-case scenario would be relatively small.

"The three companies, our total exposure -- in other words, how much can we possibly lose at the far end -- it would be well less than $1 billion," Dimon said, though he noted this did not include exposure to auto finance companies and suppliers.

Dimon has a reputation for being among the most forthright of bank CEOs, so his comments should give some comfort to shareholders. Still, finance affiliates like GMAC and Ford Motor Credit are large and complex, and their relationship to the manufacturers is far from clear cut. The GMAC exposure, for example, includes a nearly $10 billion structured finance vehicle called New Center Asset Trust, according to data from Thomson Reuters. So by leaving out finance company exposure, Dimon could be leaving out quite a lot.

Also worrisome is that -- as is typical with banks -- regulatory filings provide little if any information on who JPMorgan lends to, or whether those exposures are hedged.

A JPMorgan spokesman declined to elaborate on Dimon's comments.