Can Jamie Dimon weather the storm?

This morning, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon arrived at the Justice Department to meet with Attorney General Eric Holder about an investigation into the company's sale of shoddy mortgage-backed securities in the run-up to the recession.

After last week's painful $920 million settlement for charges related to the London Whale trading loss, a source told Bloomberg that Dimon is now facing fines up to $11 billion ($7 billion in penalties plus $4 billion in consumer relief). Depending on the final number, and how many charges go into the bundle, it easily will be the biggest settlement a bank has paid in the history of financial regulation.

The recent swirl of settlements sheds new light on JPMorgan, which back in 2008 was credited with emerging from the financial crisis relatively unscathed. In March of that year, Dimon "acted boldly" to "scoop up the remains of the wrecked investment bank Bear Stearns in a government-orchestrated salvage operation that forestalled even greater panic," says Paul M. Barrett in Bloomberg Businessweek. "His generally savvy stewardship" left JPMorgan relatively in the clear, as the financial industry crumbled around them.

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But now, as the bank forks over bigger and bigger fines for the kinds of misbehavior it allegedly avoided before the crisis, Dimon's reputation is taking a beating. If the Feds had their way, he'd pay with his job, says Charles Gasparino at the New York Post. He explains:

Not only that, but with Dimon, "the Obama administration would finally have its financial crisis CEO scalp, even though he had nothing to do with the financial crisis in the first place," says Gasparino.

But Washington aside, what about the bank's board of directors?

"When it comes to holding Dimon accountable for the London Whale scandal, Chase has sent decidedly mixed messages," says Jason Gold at US News. "Its boards of directors cut Dimon's stratospheric pay in half – to $11.5 million from $23 million – but let him keep both titles: Chairman of the board and CEO."

Whatever the outcome, all the regulatory attention has shed a new light on the bank, which was "never as well managed as it appeared," says Joe Nocera in The New York Times:

Critics of the big banks aside, Gold says, these investigations will have a positive impact on the financial system. "No doubt Dimon — and his fellow CEOs — will be running a tighter ship in the future."