JPMorgan Chase & Co

WASHINGTON (AP) -- It's something any bank would demand to know before handing out a loan: Where's the money going?

But after receiving billions in aid from U.S. taxpayers, the nation's largest banks say they can't track exactly how they're spending the money or they simply refuse to discuss it.

"We've lent some of it. We've not lent some of it. We've not given any accounting of, 'Here's how we're doing it,'" said Thomas Kelly, a spokesman for JPMorgan Chase, which received $25 billion in emergency bailout money. "We have not disclosed that to the public. We're declining to."

.....JP Morgan, for example, has teamed up with fin4cast to provide weekly sets of data relating to specific trading strategies, from which the bank creates a range of indexes. These indexes are then used as underlyings for more complex structured products, such as call options, call spreads and synthetic portfolio insurance (essentially constant proportion portfolio insurance) structures.