Courtesy of Pam Martens.
Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase
The only entity less deserving of an Investor Relations award is the magazine that just gave one to JPMorgan’s Chairman and CEO, Jamie Dimon, last Thursday evening.
Six days before the awards event hosted by IR Magazine (that stands for Investor Relations Magazine but could also stand for Insane Rationale Magazine) which went unattended by Dimon (likely out of fear he might trip over the people rolling on the floor at his award) the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released a 307 page report and 98 exhibits proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that Dimon and his CFO at the time, Douglas Braunstein, either lied through their teeth to investors and investment analysts or were in the dark about what was going on within their own company when the Chief Investment Office churned $6.2 billion of bank deposits into pocket change.
At the related Senate hearing on March 15, Chairman Carl Levin summed up investor relations at JPMorgan as follows: “piled on risk, hid losses, disregarded risk limits, manipulated risk models, dodged oversight, and misinformed the public.”
Despite this assessment from the U.S. Senate, the unnamed researchers at IR Magazine, under the Wedgewood dome of Cipriani Wall Street, where the event was held on March 21, gave Dimon the award for Best Investment Relations by a CEO or Chairman of a Large Cap company and gave the firm (try to hold it together) an award for “Best Crisis Management.”
All the Cipriani Bellinis and Chocolate soufflé with Chantilly cream in Manhattan will not wash away the bitter taste from these awards. And the worst part is – they’re part of a pattern on Wall Street. But first, let’s look at the conflicts in how IR Magazine conducts its business.
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