If anything ever happens, Jamie, you can always come back to Seattle.

Philip Francis Queeg: See the system works. Jamie Dimon allowed a horrible mistake and totally mismanaged the reaction to it and the system corrected itself by giving him a massive bonus and completely insulating him from any negative consequence from his failures. That's exactly what the current corporate governance system is designed to do: enrich the top executives under any and all circumstances, no matter how much incompetence is shown.

and in the public sector the failures keep getting re-elected back to congress and 0bama will get re-elected as did Bush.

the difference is they are failing with taxpayer money.

SlothB77: Stile4aly: It helps that they were handed Bear Stearns on a silver platter with a ton of governmental assistance and picked up Wamu for pennies.

would you rather they lost another $2B than make a shrewd investment in an undervalued firm?

And they were only in a position to buy Bear Stearns because they had been fiscally responsible and well-managed, unlike the former. They could have also driven themselves into the ground just like Bear and Lehman, but they didn't. That's how the market works.

That's why Dimon keeps his job.

I have no qualms with Dimon keeping his job, my point was simply that holding up Chase as the paragon of financial responsibility because they paid off their TARP funds isn't telling nearly the whole story.

So...if they lost 2 billion, who received the 2 billion. I'd like to buy stock in that bank!

Winston Smith '84: So...if they lost 2 billion, who received the 2 billion. I'd like to buy stock in that bank!

If you have to ask, you can't afford it. It was other hedge funds.

Dimon is taking a fall since he can't come out and say that CIO group, which is declared as (and Dimon himself has repeatedly described as) a JPM risk management group, was in fact acting as a proprietary trade desk, which is not kosher at all. Aside from the Volcker rule which says certain TBTF banks should not have prop desks in their firm; it's morally wrong to have your risk management group making huge speculative bets like this. They're supposed to be reducing risk, not take more on, regardless of whose money they're betting with.

The CIO group got caught with their pants down and Dimon had to directly intervene, and look like a fool by saying "nuh uh. this was solely risk management. no prop trades here. no sir, we'd never speculate within the risk management group."

Classic risk management and hedges should be run under a "lots of small bets to hedge against the proverbial 'black swan' rare big disaster which would wipe out the conventional markets" . Insurance, in other words, where a small investment could yield a large return when markets rapidly head south. Spread out, many such small losses are easily covered when the markets are stable.

Apparently CIO's bets were the opposite- large amounts in a few positions, which is pretty much the textbook way to speculate. So it was hardly risk management. But Dimon took the hit for the firm, and is currently being laughed at, but insulated himself/JPM in such a way that he can claim ignorance regarding CIO's prop trading.

The SEC will do their Keystone Kops impersonation, Dimon will have deniability, and he and JPM will sail on for another few years.