Simon Black – Yesterday Senator Elizabeth Warren used a Wall Street oversight hearing to whine about cryptocurrency.
At one point, almost as if a well-choreographed football play, she passed the ball to Jamie Dimon — CEO of JP Morgan Chase, the biggest bank in the world — to “explain why crypto is such an attractive financial tool for terrorists, drug traffickers, and rogue nations?”
It’s hard to imagine a more loaded question.
Mr. Dimon gleefully caught the pass and said: Continue reading
UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson is set to host a dinner with some of the worlds top business leaders, including Bill Gates and JPMorgan Chase & Co Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon
According to a report by the Telegraph, around 20 executives are expected to attend the dinner at 10 Downing Street on Oct. 18, as Johnson seeks to establish a “Global Britain” on the world economic stage.
They will be joined by Liz Truss, Foreign Secretary, with catering provided by three-star Michelin chef Clare Smyth. Continue reading
Not too many years ago, any news story about bonus money would’ve been about some 20-year-old baseball player — an up-and-coming superstar getting $100,000 or so on top of his salary as an extra incentive to join the Yankees, Giants, Red Sox or whatever team. Sportswriters dubbed them: “Bonus Babies.”
How quaint. These days, stories about bonus money don’t elicit cheers, for they feature some of society’s least admirable people: Wall Street bankers. Far from superstars, they can be subpar performers or even what amounts to crime syndicate bosses overseeing everything from simple fraud to laundering money for drug cartels. Yet, in the first part of each year, we witness this cluster of greedmeisters quaffing champagne, laughing uproariously and shouting, “It’s bonus time, baby!”
This year, even though the Wall Street bosses have presided over a 30 percent drop in their banks’ profits, they’ve extracted a 15 percent raise in overall bonus money, totaling a ridiculous $27 billion. That averages out to $165,000 in extra pay to each Wall Street banker. But averages deceive, for thousands of lower-level bankers are given a dab, while those up in the executive suites make off with the bulk of the bonus heist.
Michael Corbat, CEO of Citigroup, for example, didn’t just grab a 15 percent increase in bonus pay, but nearly three times that. His total haul was $16 million. Then there’s Jamie Dimon, boss of JPMorgan Chase. He had a really terrible year in 2013, forcing his shareholders to shell out some $22 billion in penalties for tallying up a long list of illegalities. But that didn’t stop Jamie from taking a 74 percent hike in bonus money this year — he pulled in a cool $18.5 million.
In a time when the 90 percent majority of Americans see their income falling, you’d think Wall Street might show a bit of modesty.
But, instead, they choose to show us just how much Wall Street crime really does pay.
Let’s review the rap sheet of Wall Street banks: Defrauding investors, cheating homeowners, forgery, rigging markets, tax evasion, credit card ripoffs … and so sickeningly much more.
Assume that you ran a business that was found guilty of bribery, forgery, perjury, defrauding homeowners, fleecing investors, swindling consumers, cheating credit card holders, violating U.S. trade laws and bilking American soldiers. Can you even imagine the kind of punishment you’d get?
How about zero? Nada. Nothing. Zilch. No jail time. Not even a fine. Plus, you still get to stay on as boss, you get to keep all the loot you gained from the crime spree, and you even get an $8.5 million pay raise!
Of course, you and I would never get such outrageous, absurd, kid-glove pampering by legal authorities. But, then, we’re not the capo of JPMorgan Chase, America’s biggest bank and a crime syndicate that apparently is too big to jail.
Jamie Dimon is the slick, vainglorious, silver-haired boss of the JPMorgan house of banksters. This CEO has fostered a culture of thievery during his years as a top executive at JPMorgan, leading to a shameful litany of crime. Yet, federal prosecutors have bowed to the politically connected Wall Streeter, refusing to ruffle his feathers with even a single criminal charge.
Meanwhile, one of the scams that Dimon directly supervised produced a $6 billion loss for shareholders in 2012. And his reign of mismanagement and illegalities cost the bank’s shareholders another $20 billion in federal fines last year, resulting in a 16 percent drop in profits. You might think the bank’s board of directors would at least slap Jamie’s wrist for the loss of those billions of dollars, but no — in January, they rewarded him, raising his pay by some 70 percent to a sweet $20 million!
In the past we have discussed the allegedly illegal and fraudulent practices of the Big Banks that helped bring the economy into Recession, but until now, we have not seen such a blatant example of how it pays for Big Banks to break the rules and get ahead at the same time. As you may recall, JP Morgan Chase Bank recently agreed to a $13 Billion dollar settlement with the Justice Department for allegedly defrauding customers. That sounds like a big number, but that was only part of the total fines and penalties JP Morgan Chase was liable to pay in 2013 due to its less than honorable business practices.
It may surprise you that after agreeing to the $13 Billion settlement and having to pay other large fines, the CEO of Chase is getting a big raise. An $8.5 Million dollar raise!
“Jamie Dimon, chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, will be paid $20 million for his work in 2013, restoring most of the $11.5 million cut directors imposed a year earlier following the company’s embarrassing derivatives loss. The sum includes a base salary of $1.5 million, plus $18.5 million of restricted stock, the company said in a public filing on Friday. Dimon was paid $11.5 million for 2012, half of his $23 million compensation in each of the prior two years, according to company filings. The raise, decided by the board of directors, comes after JPMorgan annual profits fell 16 percent in 2013 as the company agreed to pay out some $20 billion to settle legal claims from government agencies and private investors.” CNBC
I guess I am just naïve to think that if the bank I was in charge of was on the verge of civil and criminal charges and I had brokered the deal to “limit” the costs to the bank to $13 Billion in the one case, that maybe the Board of Directors might ask for my resignation, if not firing me on the spot. After all, as the CNBC article quoted above states, the profits of the bank fell 16 percent!