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Saturday, June 16, 2012

If JPMorgan is too big to manage, it is too big to fail?

As Congress prepares for the latest complete waste of time but made for TV news clip event with Jamie Dimon, Bloomberg has a great read on the world of Jamie Dimon and how his own actions are at the center of the problem. What jumps out is the hard reality that the JPMorgan empire is simply too big to manage.
We can debate whether or not Dimon was giving a free pass to the CIO who took extensive gambles and lost, but the problem is the enormous size of JPMorgan. We let the pressure slip on demanding that the mega banks be broken up but now is an ideal time to restart that demand.

There are new concerns about US banks being under funded for Basel III and we really don't yet know how much expose the US banks (including the Spanish banks that now operate in the US) have with the Europe crisis. All of this points to another round of concern about the banking system and whether it will need another intervention.

We are four years into this banking crisis yet we've made too little progress. This needs to change. More on the JPMorgan problems via Bloomberg:
Dimon’s actions contrast with his reputation as a risk- averse manager who demands regular and exhaustive reviews of every corner of the bank. While Dimon has said he didn’t know how dangerous bets inside the CIO had become, the loss on those trades calls into question whether anyone can manage a financial empire as vast as JPMorgan, which became the biggest U.S. lender last year and now has more than $2.3 trillion in assets, larger than the economies of Brazil or the U.K.

“These institutions are too big to manage because even the bank that was considered to be the best-managed turns out to have had a significant glitch,” said Gary Stern, a former president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis and co-author of the 2004 book “Too Big to Fail: The Hazards of Bank Bailouts.”
Shouldn't we also be questioning the sanity of anyone who promotes the "Jamie Dimon had a reputation for being risk averse" now that we see this? It makes about as much sense as "George Bush, the CEO president" who happened to drive every company he touched into the ground followed by the same for the US. Let's all admit that Jamie Dimon was great at PR spin to make people believe he was risk averse when in fact he really was just another Wall Street gambler.

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