"Banks are under assault," JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said yesterday on a conference call with reporters. "We have five or six regulators coming at us on every issue." Dimon seems to be missing the point. The reason regulators are coming at him and other big banks is they’re up to their old tricks, making risky bets with other peoples’ money on the way to another bank bailout. Meanwhile, Dimon has been spending time in Washington doing everything he can to roll back the Dodd-Frank Act, which was supposed to prevent big banks from going back to their old tricks. And Congress has been willing to do Dimon’s bidding. Over the last month, Wall Street has twice attached measures to unrelated bills that roll back banking regulations, and got them signed into law. (One of the last acts of the 113th congress was to block regulations requiring that the trading of exotic financial known as swaps be done with money not insured by the federal government.)
My message to reporters: Ask Dimon how much money he and JPMorgan has contributed to political campaigns over the last three election cycles, why neither he nor any other big bank executive has yet been prosecuted for criminal fraud.
To say that "God exists" is the greatest understatement ever made across space and time.
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