The JP Morgan apologists of CNBC (Felix Salmon)

[swag]

http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2013/09/29/the-jp-morgan-apologists-of-cnbc/

(video at link)
. . .

This view — that profits cleanse all sins, and that so long as you’re making money, nothing else matters — is not normally expressed quite as explicitly as it was here. After all, there are licit and illicit ways of making money, and surely if your profits fall into the latter category, you should not be able to remain comfortably ensconced as a celebrated captain of industry. Besides, banks shouldn’t be obscenely profitable: they’re intermediaries, and in an efficient economy their profits should be quite easily competed away. When bank profits are high, that’s a sign that the bank in question is extracting rents from the economy, rather than helping it to grow.

The rest of the interview is a glorious exercise in watching CNBC anchors simply implode in disbelief when faced with the idea that JP Morgan in general, and Jamie Dimon in particular, might be anything other than a glorious icon of capitalist success. In the world of CNBC, the stock chart tells you everything you need to know, while the New York Times is a highly untrustworthy organ of dissent and disinformation.

Eventually, Bartiromo asks Pareene, with a straight face, who would be the best CEO of JP Morgan “from a shareholder perspective”. Since, clearly, the shareholder perspective is the only one that matters. Except, of course, it isn’t. JP Morgan’s balance sheet shows assets of $2.4 trillion and liabilities of $2.2 trillion, leaving $200 billion in total stockholder equity. Sure, the shareholders matter — but even in terms of the balance sheet they only matter about 8.6%. And in terms of the systemic importance of JP Morgan to the nation as a whole, its shareholders matter even less. The country was seriously damaged by JP Morgan’s lies and misrepresentations about its mortgages — much more than it would be damaged if the share price went down instead of up. And the public has every reason to want the individuals running JP Morgan to be held accountable when it gets into serious regulatory trouble over and over again.

Right now, the banks aren’t lending money to homeowners — the government remains the only game in town, when it comes to mortgages, and that isn’t healthy at all. JP Morgan’s shareholders might be happy with Jamie Dimon, but that doesn’t mean the rest of us should be. Jesse Eisinger wants the banks executives to face personal charges; whether that happens or not, it still behooves them to take responsibility for the long series of egregious errors that JP Morgan has made. Shareholders might not want to see Dimon go. But if JP Morgan does end up paying an 11-digit fine, then resignation would surely be the honorable thing to do.

[muriel_volestrangler]

1. It is awful how the CNBC acolytes don't seem to understand "but the money was made illegally"

as a reason for why Dimon should go. The Balloon juice blog posted the video a couple of days ago:

This clip of Alex Pareene on CNBC is trolling at its best. Pareene says Jamie Dimon should step down as head of JP Morgan because of all the JP Morgan scandals. Who knows if he’s serious or not — though his point about bad PR is more relevant than his interviewers want to admit — but he gets Maria Bartiromo to sputter “the New York Times!”, revealing to all that she’s a teahadist whack job who has no place in journalism.

http://www.balloon-juice.com/2013/09/27/take-a-letter-maria/

(I actually disagree that what Pareene was doing was admirable 'trolling' - he didn't say it to wind up the CNBC people, or expose them as money-worshipping troglodytes, but because it's actually necessary to point out Dimon should be sacked, because CNBC hasn't been doing its job if it hasn't said it already. But he's right that when Bartiromo seems to think the NYT is on a par with the Weekly World News as far as evidence of wrong-doing goes, she shows herself to be unfit to clean the toilets for a media company, let alone present a program that should be based on accurate information)