Courtesy of Pam Martens.
Barron’s should have published its gushing cover story on Jamie Dimon’s stewardship of JPMorgan today – as an April Fool’s joke.
The nation’s largest bank is operating under a deferred prosecution agreement until at least next January for two felony counts it received in the Madoff swindle, the largest Ponzi scheme in history. It’s under a current criminal investigation over potential rigging of the foreign exchange markets with the New York Times reporting on February 10 that federal prosecutors had informed JPMorgan and three other banks “that they must enter guilty pleas to settle the cases.” Barron’s sister publication, the Wall Street Journal, reported on February 24 that JPMorgan is one of the 10 banks being investigated by the U.S. Justice Department for potential rigging of gold and other precious metals.
Against that backdrop, Barron’s comes up with this: JPMorgan is “Back on Top.” Back on top of what – its serial crime spree? The article, by Associate Editor Andrew Bary, goes downhill from there. Here’s a few howlers.
Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan, who has kept his job through a rising tide of scandals at the bank, says in the article: “We were tried, tested, and true during the worst of times.” Compare that assessment to the findings of former Senator Carl Levin in 2013 after his Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released a 306-page report on how JPMorgan had gambled with bank deposits in the infamous London Whale scandal at the bank and eventually lost at least $6.2 billion of those deposits. Levin said at the time that JPMorgan “piled on risk, hid losses, disregarded risk limits, manipulated risk models, dodged oversight, and misinformed the public.”
Bary quotes Dimon from a January call with analysts as stating that banks are “‘under assault’” from regulators, with Dimon adding that “ ‘We have five or six regulators or people coming after us on every different issue. It’s a hard thing to deal with.’ ” Shouldn’t the debate be why, after a nonstop 5-year crime spree, the nation’s largest bank still is being chased by regulators?
Another howler is Dimon telling the Barron’s reporter that the bank doesn’t take big trading positions and thus it is unfair for some investors to view JPMorgan as a black box, too complex to understand.
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