'Jamie Dimon Agrees With Occupy Wall Street: 'Too Much Inequality'

[sabrina 1]

Or so he says NOW:

Jamie Dimon Agrees With Occupy Wall Street: 'Too Much Inequality'

According to Chris Otts of The Courier-Journal, Dimon told his audience that the United States has "too much inequality." This isn't a novel insight -- the Occupy Wall Street protests were predicated on this idea, expressed through the slogan "we are the 99 percent" -- but it's striking to hear it coming from Wall Street's most outspoken defender of financial elites.

"It doesn't mean we blame the successful," Dimon continued, sounding more characteristic, "but it's true. You want to have problems in society? Have inequality." Dimon mentioned "struggling inner-city public schools" in particular, Otts reports.

The statements represent a slight rhetorical softening for Dimon, who has in the past rejected the anti-banker sentiment that arose after the financial crisis of 2008. "Acting like everyone who's been successful is bad and because you're rich you're bad, I don't understand it," he said in late 2011 at an investors' conference in New York. Since then, a lot has changed for JPMorgan: the bank, seen as the most successful of the financial behemoths during the crisis, was recently the subject of a "riveting and devastating" Senate panel report that accused Dimon and other executives of hiding trading losses from investors and regulators.

According to The New York Times, a criminal investigation of this affair -- known popularly, after the trader who caused the losses, as "the London Whale" -- is "at an advanced stage."

Emphasis mine. 'Acting like everyone who has been successful is bad and because you're rich you're bad, I don't understand it'.

Well, not EVERYONE Jamie. But it sure looks like JPM was 'bad' and maybe even Jamie Dimon himself. We can't say that definitively yet I suppose, because despite all the evidence already revealed about the practices of Wall St Banks, such as his own JPM, we have yet to see any prosecutions in the courts where the evidence can be presented and people are under oath.

Eg:

Out Of Control: New Report Exposes JPMorgan Chase As Mostly Criminal Enterprise

"Exposes JPMorgan Chase As A Mostly Criminal Organization"

I don't know Jamie, but that sounds 'bad' to me and having read the report I find it difficult to understand why there have not yet been any criminal investigations! s

I urge you to read an astonishing new report, which I’ve embedded below, from analyst Josh Rosner of Graham-Fisher and Co. The best way to describe the report, “JPM – Out of Control,” is that it reads like a rap sheet. Notably, Rosner takes mortgage abuses almost entirely out of the equation, and yet still manages to fill a 45-page report with documented case after documented case of serious fraud and abuse, most of which JPM has already admitted to (at least in the sense of reaching a settlement; given out captured regulatory structure the end result is invariably a settlement with the “neither admit nor deny wrongdoing” boilerplate appended). Rosner writes, “we could not find another ‘systemically important’ domestic bank that has recently been subject to as many public, non-mortgage related, regulatory actions or consent orders.”

The author continues, after reading the report, to try to list the illegal activities of JPM, a daunting task as it turns out:

It’s hard to summarize all of the documented instances in this report of JPM has been breaking the law, but here’s my best shot. I try to keep up on these matters, and yet some of these I’m learning about for the first time:

Bank Secrecy Act violations;

Money laundering for drug cartels;

Violations of sanction orders against Cuba, Iran, Sudan, and former Liberian strongman Charles Taylor;

Violations related to the Vatican Bank scandal (get on this, Pope Francis!);

Violations of the Commodities Exchange Act;

Failure to segregate customer funds (including one CFTC case where the bank failed to segregate $725 million of its own money from a $9.6 billion account) in the US and UK;

Knowingly executing fictitious trades where the customer, with full knowledge of the bank, was on both sides of the deal;

Various SEC enforcement actions for misrepresentations of CDOs and mortgage-backed securities;

The AG settlement on foreclosure fraud;

The OCC settlement on foreclosure fraud;

Violations of the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act;

Illegal flood insurance commissions;

Fraudulent sale of unregistered securities;

Auto-finance ripoffs;

Illegal increases of overdraft penalties;

Violations of federal ERISA laws as well as those of the state of New York;

Municipal bond market manipulations and acts of bid-rigging, including violations of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act;

Filing of unverified affidavits for credit card debt collections (“as a result of internal control failures that sound eerily similar to the industry’s mortgage servicing failures and foreclosure abuses”);

Energy market manipulation that triggered FERC lawsuits;

“Artificial market making” at Japanese affiliates;

Shifting trading losses on a currency trade to a customer account;

Fraudulent sales of derivatives to the city of Milan, Italy;

Obstruction of justice (including refusing the release of documents in the Bernie Madoff case as well as the case of Peregrine Financial).

And, exhale.

The sheer litany of illegal activities just overwhelms you. And these are only the ones where the company has entered into settlements or been sanctioned; it doesn’t even include ongoing investigations into things like Libor, illegally concealing inclusions of mortgage-backed securities in employer funds (another ERISA violation), the Fail Whale trades, and especially putback suits for mortgages, where a recent ruling by Judge Jed Rakoff has seriously increased exposure. While the risks are still very much alive and will continue to weigh on the firm, ultimately shareholders will pay, certainly not executives as long as the no-prosecutions standard holds.

You can read this devastating report here if you are interested:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/130291230/GF-Co-JPM-Out-of-Control

A Whale’s Tale – a Whitewash Report

When compared to the report the Board of Freddie Mac undertook, JPM’s “Task Force” was a whitewash.

Freddie initiated a truly independent investigation by anunaffiliated firm and directed

all employees of the Company to fully cooperate with theinvestigation. There were no limitations proscribed on the scope of the review and as theinvestigators or the Firm’s independent auditors discovered additional matters they werealso looked into

x



In contrast, JPMorgan’s “Task Force” issued a report of questionable independence andlimited in scope. Michael Cavanagh, co-Chairman of JPMorgan’s investment bank, ledthe “Task Force”. Cavanagh reports directly to Jamie Dimon and is both a longtime“lieutenant” and his possible successor

xi

.For Michael Cavanagh to be tasked with investigating another executive that reporteddirectly to Jamie Dimon

xii

about losses in a unit that he knew, as early as 2010, appearedto have inadequate controls

xiii

is more troubling.

As former SEC Chairman Harvey Pitt said, "It's incomprehensible to me that they did these reports internally,

it's like asking Joe Paterno to do the Penn State [sexual abuse] investigation instead of [former FBI director] Louis Freeh…

having picked Cavanagh to do this strikes me as potentially foolish in the extreme, the only reason you do a review this way is because you don't want to find anything unduly damaging

All this and more, and STILL no criminal charges filed.

Just one of the above infractions would result in prosecutions for any member of the 99%.

So again, to Jamie, no one said ALL rich people are 'bad'.

But just what is the definition of 'bad' to Jaimie Dimon I would like to know?

Maybe those laws are only meant for the 99% and he genuinely doesn't see anything wrong with a member of the 1% paying no attention to them after all.

It's nice, though that he does feel there needs to be 'more equality'.

I wonder if they are beginning to worry that maybe they have gone just a little too far this time and that the people might start reacting, finally?

It's happened before!

Ask the French!

[Blanks]

1. Is this why the senate voted unanimously against TBTF? eom

[sabrina 1]

2. It could be. But that vote, against subsidies for the Too Big To Fail Banks, is non-binding. So if

they voted this way because of the report, from what I'm reading, it doesn't really mean much. Most of the articles I've read say that there is no chance at all of Congress ever breaking up the Big Banks.

I'll see if I can find some of the articles on what it means.

[hay rick]

3. Too much inequality.

From their point of view, I suspect too much inequality describes the situation in which the parasite kills the host. If their usual blind greed is ever interrupted by an "enlightened self-interest" epiphany, they might realize that when they suck too much wealth out of the economy they are destroying the ability of the masses to sustain consumer demand. The economy is pushed into chronic under-utilization and their ill-gotten hoard of cash sits uselessly on the sidelines for lack of productive investment opportunities.

I had to laugh when I read that the NYT says the London Whale criminal investigation is at an advanced stage. The slap-on-the-wrist fine and the consent decree must be ready to pull out of the oven. Will the dish include a low-level scapegoat as garnish?

[sabrina 1]

4. 'too much inequality describes the situation in which the parasite kills the host.'

I think you got it right. I have no illusions that Jamie Dimon has suddenly become concerned about something he never cared about before. But you probably figured it out perfectly. I think some of them are becoming a bit scared, realizing finally that maybe they have gone too far, for THEIR OWN good.

I also agree regarding the Times pretending that anything serious is going to happen as a result of any investigation of these criminals.

I'm sure the now familiar 'agreement' is already prepared with another slap on the wrist for public consumption.

As for a scapegoat, that would be nice. Another Bernie Madoff maybe? I'm sure there are plenty of them. And the public may need something more than a 'fine' this time. A few people are probably worried. But it's unlikely unless absolutely necessary imo.