Submitted by Stanley Haar of Haar Capital Management, LLC
What....., me worry?
The Golden Rule of government, “Whoever has the gold makes the rules”, was on full display in Washington over the past week as JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon appeared at hearings held in both the Senate and the House to answer questions about the bank’s recently reported trading loss.
I am in full agreement with the argument that it is actually none of the government’s business when the shareholders of a private bank lose money due to the bad decisions of management, as long as the loss was incurred legally and does not threaten the integrity of the financial system.
However, the Congressmen and Senators missed an excellent opportunity to ask Mr. Dimon about any number of financial scandals (Madoff, Jefferson County, robo-signing, etc.) in which JP Morgan Chase has been involved, including the on-going MF Global scandal.
In our representative democracy, where Senators and Congressmen are supposed to serve the public interest, not the interests of big campaign bundlers, it is sad to report that not one member of Congress had the courage to ask Jamie Dimon the following questions:
1. It is reassuring to hear that JP Morgan has more than enough of its own capital to cover the trading losses that triggered this hearing. But suppose for the moment that under some circumstances the size of the loss were to grow to a substantially larger amount than you now anticipate. If you didn’t have enough capital to cover the loss, would you ever consider taking money from your customers’ accounts to cover the losses? That would be illegal, wouldn’t it?
Permit me to ask your one more not-so hypothetical question: If you were standing in the lobby of a JP Morgan Chase branch, and you saw through the window that one of your customers was robbing the candy store across the street, and the customer then ran into your bank with a bag of cash, would you let that guy pay off his car loan with the cash in his bag?
Isn’t that in essence exactly what happened last October with your customer, MF Global? According to the very detailed report released on June 6 by Trustee Giddens, the infamous transfer of $175 million from MF Global to your bank on October 28 to pay off an overdraft was a transfer entirely between JP Morgan accounts: from the segregated customer trust account to the MF Global Treasury house account to a JP Morgan London account. All of these moves were completely
transparent on your blotter.
Your own employees, Donna Dellosso and Barry Zubrow, witnessed those transfers and were so concerned about them that they immediately requested a letter from Jon Corzine and Laurie Ferber, basically stating that they were not stealing customer money. You never got that letter, but kept the money anyway. Weren’t you concerned about receiving stolen property, and potentially being an accessory to the looting of customer accounts? Did you call the CFTC or SEC to report your suspicions?
[Mr. Dimon told the Senate Banking Committee that his bank received verbal assurances that the transfer was legitimate; however the Giddens report directly contradicts this………see page 134: MF’s in-house attorney, Dennis Klenja, “advised that he made no assurances of any kind to JPM”.]
JP Morgan was MF’s primary banker. You knew that they were scrambling to come up with cash to stay alive, day-by-day, hour-by-hour. Did you really think that they suddenly found a couple of hundred million dollars of excess cash in the segregated account? Or did you watch them steal customer money from a JP Morgan account, and then ask for the letter as a CYA in case they got caught?
2. Last month, your bank returned approximately $168 million in funds to the MF Global estate, money that you had been holding for over 7 months. Mr. Giddens believes that JP Morgan is still holding on to money that rightfully belongs to MF Global, and stated in his report that he will be suing you if no agreement to return the money is reached within 60 days. Are you aware of that? Can you tell us here today how much MF Global money is still being held by your bank?
Do you have systems and controls in place to identify what money belongs to you and what money belongs to your customers?
Millions of people have custodial accounts at JP Morgan for their retirement funds or their children’s education. Should they be worried about their funds being commingled with the bank’s own funds?
It seems that JP Morgan has a habit of commingling its own funds with customer segregated funds. Weren’t you fined 33 million pounds in the UK last year for failing to properly segregate 23 billion dollars in client assets? That improper commingling took place over a period of 7 years, correct? And isn’t it true that in April of this year the CFTC ordered you to pay a fine of $20 million to settle charges that JP Morgan mishandled segregated customer funds at Lehman Brothers between November 2006 and September 2008? The CFTC also stated that after Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, JP Morgan improperly declined to release customer segregated funds linked to commodity accounts.
Is that your modus operandi, Mr. Dimon, when a customer of the bank seems headed for bankruptcy: to grab onto as much cash and collateral as possible, and then only release it after being sued or ordered to return it by regulators?
3. MF Global had many subsidiaries scattered throughout the world, but effectively operated as one company
under one management. Were you surprised by the fact that in bankruptcy, MF Global was treated as two entities, with the Holding Company allowed to continue operating under Chapter 11, led by the very same executives who had blown up the company? Did your attorneys (either in-house or outside counsel) ever meet with MF Global executives and/or attorneys to discuss or plan the structuring of the bankruptcy?
As a result of the Chapter 11, you were able to continue trading with MF Global, and were involved in a sizable transaction involving European
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Realist - Everybody in America is soft, and hates conflict. The cure for this, both in politics and social life, is the same -- hardihood. Give them raw truth.
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