Courtesy of New Deal 2.0 (link to that blog on the side), I came across this particular story. Now, Jamie Dimon is on the record for saying some pretty stupid stuff when it comes to high pay.
But this really takes the cake and then some - "Worse than that, you don’t even make any money!” Dimon said, directing his comments to those in the media covering the company’s investor day and drawing laughter from his audience. “We pay 35 percent. We make a lot of money.” JPMorgan posted $19 billion in profit last year.
I mean. Can Jamie Dimon explains to me, to anyone how his bank and any bank in the whole wide world would have survived if the Central Banks and governments across the planet were not pouring money on them?
When I can borrow at 1%, lend at 5-7% more or less guaranteed (well, as guaranteed as a western government can make it these days) and leverage that spread anywhere between 20 and 50 times, it would take a very special kind of ineptitude to NOT make a killing. An idiot child would manage.
Now. I am not against bailing out the banks. That was necessary. I am not even against allowing them to rebuild their balance sheet strength at our expense (although that's entirely un-capitalist and I think it'd be simpler and fairer to either temporarily nationalise said banks or make equity injections and exercise our shareholding rights aggressively).
To then have Jamie Dimon parading like the most arrogant peacock of them all makes this reasoned calculus really really painful. It almost make me wish we'd let the banks collapse, just to see his bloody face when he'd lose everything.
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