Courtesy of Pam Martens.
Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, Testifying Before Congress on the London Whale Trading Losses at His Bank
Someone really needs to send the good folks at Fortune Magazine a heads up that naming a bank that has admitted to three criminal felony counts in 2014-15 and lost more than $6 billion gambling with its depositors’ money does not have the makings for a most-admired anything, unless possibly most-admired for dodging jail time.
JPMorgan Chase has decided to spin the award as follows on its website:
“JPMorgan Chase was given the top industry ranking the second year in a row on Fortune magazine’s list of ‘The World’s Most Admired Companies of 2018.’ Fortune also ranked the firm as the tenth most-admired company in the world.”
One might suspect from the above that the industry in which JPMorgan Chase was ranked was the overall financial services industry or overall banking industry. But it wasn’t. JPMorgan Chase achieved its top award by being evaluated among its peers in the “megabank” category. Let’s face it, that’s not exactly an industry that has distinguished itself since crashing the U.S. economy in 2008 and leaving a trail of crimes around the globe ever since.
In addition, it wasn’t the general public that was casting a vote for the companies it most admires, as one would normally assume from the title of the award. It was a pack of industry insiders. This is the methodology Fortune says it used to cull out the most admired companies. First, Fortune narrowed its list based on revenues, effectively giving only the biggest companies a shot at the award. (Big is decidedly not better when it comes to banking, as the banking collapses of 2008 and JPMorgan’s three felony counts confirm.) Fortune writes:
…
