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Never Put Money within Reach of Jamie Dimon

I actually don’t think Federal Reserve Bank of NY Board Member Jamie Dimon got his hands on the almost $3 billion of Iraqi money deposited in the FBRNY that has vanished.

An audit by [Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction Stuart] Bowen’s office published on Sunday investigated the roughly $3 billion the Iraqi government gave the Defense Department to pay bills for contracts the Coalition Provisional Authority awarded before it dissolved in 2004. Most of these funds were deposited into an account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.  Even though DOD was responsible for maintaining the proper documentation, it could only account for $1 billion of the money.

“It’s symptomatic of the poor record keeping that was rife throughout the early stages of the reconstruction effort,” Bowen, who has conducted three other major audits into the original pot of roughly $21 billion in Iraqi funds the U.S. managed in 2003 and 2004, said.

After all, that money dates to 2004 and Dimon’s service on the FBRNY Board didn’t begin until January 2007. (Though I will note that Jamie Dimon and Iraq’s money overlapped at the FBRNY for a year.) Moreover, it was DOD’s responsibility to keep track of the money, not the FBRNY or Jamie DImon.

Still, I can’t help but notice that the announcement that we’ve lost almost $3 billion of Iraqi’s money (on top of the more than $100 million in cash that managed to walk out of Saddam’s former palace) came within a day of the time some are declaring the missing MF Global $1.2 billion has “vaporized.”

Nearly three months after MF Global Holdings Ltd. collapsed, officials hunting for an estimated $1.2 billion in missing customer money increasingly believe that much of it might never be recovered, according to people familiar with the investigation.

As the sprawling probe that includes regulators, criminal and congressional investigators, and court-appointed trustees grinds on, the findings so far suggest that a “significant amount” of the money could have “vaporized” as a result of chaotic trading at MF Global during the week before the company’s Oct. 31 bankruptcy filing, said a person close to the investigation.

That money does seem to have been lost in the immediate vicinity of Dimon’s JP Morgan.

As the week progressed, MF Global executives came to believe that JPMorgan Chase & Co., one of MF Global’s primary bankers and a middleman moving that cash, was dragging its feet in forwarding the funds.

Corzine phoned Barry Zubrow, then JPMorgan’s chief risk officer, to question the slow payments. Corzine also called William Dudley, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, to update him on MF Global’s status and told him that payments were slow to arrive from JPMorgan and others.

[snip]

JPMorgan was able to slow the delivery of funds, worsening MF Global’s distress. As a result, they note, hundreds of millions of dollars of MF Global money may be still stuck in accounts at JPMorgan.

So while I’m not suggesting Jamie Dimon bears any personal liability for these missing billions (or those of Lehman or Bear Stearns), I will note that Dimon seems to have the 21st Century equivalent of the Midas Touch: Rather than turning things into gold when he touches them, when billions get within reach of Jamie Dimon, they seem to vaporize.

Poof!

Jamie Dimon, Toddler MOTU

Can you think of any major public figure–or even any ill-tempered toddler in your own life–that whines more than Jamie Dimon?

Chief Executive Jamie Dimon said President Barack Obama’s decision to expand investigations into home lending and sales of mortgage securities could stop settlement talks with the states over foreclosure practices.

“It has a pretty good chance of derailing it,” Dimon said in a televised interview with CNBC from Davos, Switzerland on Thursday.

Whining Dimon is effectively warning Obama that if any real investigation takes place, JP Morgan will walk away from Obama’s effort to make pension funds pay to bail Dimon’s company out. And–as Michael Whitney noted on Twitter–he’s doing so from the safe harbor of Davos, where presumably his fellow-MOTUs won’t throttle him for such arrogance.

It’s not enough, I guess, that Obama wants to excuse JPMC for its crimes. Dimon will only accept such help, he says, so long as Obama also refrains from even peeking at what crimes JPMC committed.

Obama’s Housing Campaign

Let’s connect a few data points.

Last Friday, Jame Dimon demanded that all the players (except the actual homeowners) get locked into a room until some leader solved the housing problem he and his buddies created.

On Sunday, the Administration promised, for what seems the bajillioninth time, to really do something about foreclosures.

On Monday, the Democrats confirmed that Obama will accept his nomination at Bank of America stadium. They did this to have more skyboxes they could sell to the 1%.

Then on Wednesday, Shawn Donovan rolled out the latest incarnation of the foreclosure settlement–one which still helps just a small fraction of families suffering because the housing bubble crashed.

And now the Administration has a meeting planned for January 23–what sounds like just the meeting DImon demanded–to iron out the last bits of such a minimally helpful settlement. There are two details of this meeting that are especially noteworthy.

First, only the Democratic Attorneys General appear to be invited.

Materials about the proposed deal are being sent to all states, and Democratic attorneys general have been asked to meet on Jan. 23 with Miller, Donovan and Associate Attorney General Thomas Perrelli, said Geoff Greenwood, a spokesman for Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller.

[snip]

Republican attorneys general will separately discuss the proposed settlement by phone the same day with their Republican counterparts on the negotiating committee in addition to Donovan and Perrelli, Greenwood said.

[my emphasis]

Even better? This meeting is in Chicago!

At the Jan. 23 meeting in Chicago, the federal and state officials will answer questions and discuss details of the potential deal in an effort to win support, Greenwood said.

None of the named principles of this discussion live in Chicago. Thomas Perelli is in DC. Shawn Donovan is in DC. Tom Miller is in IA. Even the banksters are from NY and Charlotte.

The one thing that’s in Chicago, of course, is Obama’s campaign headquarters. (Outgoing Chief of Staff and now campaign Co-Chair and former–future?–JP Morgan exec Bill Daley? He lives in Chicago!)

So to “solve” the foreclosure problem, we’re going to invite a bunch of people–but only the Democrats–to Obama’s campaign headquarter city to hammer out something that really only helps a fraction of those affected.

Yes we can.

Ubercapitalist Begs for Government Intervention

Fresh off the Friday news dump that its profits stalled in the last quarter (after it had to stop laundering money for Iran and inheriting the lost money of MF Global customers), fresh off the news that JPMorgan Chase might lose $5 billion in the Europe crisis, and, it should be said, fresh off the departure of a JPMC Exec from the White House Chief of Staff position, Jamie Dimon is calling for a real solution to the housing market.

“I would convene all the people involved in the business, I would close the door, I’d stay there until we resolved a bunch of these issues so we could have a more healthy mortgage market,” the 55-year-old chief executive officer of JPMorgan Chase & Co. said today.

The patchwork of U.S. and international regulatory policies governing the housing and mortgage markets are hampering recovery here and abroad, Dimon said on a conference call with analysts after the New York-based bank released fourth-quarter earnings. In the U.S., state foreclosure laws conflict with a variety of federal policies on refinancing or modifying loans to troubled borrowers, Dimon said.

Leadership is needed to overhaul the industry, including reviving the market for private-label residential mortgage bonds and reforming regulations governing mortgage repurchases and foreclosures, he said.

“You could fix all this if someone was in charge,” Dimon said, tapping on the table for emphasis. “No one is in charge.”

Which is pretty funny, since a bunch of Attorneys General just did show some leadership.

Attorneys general or representatives from nearly 15 states met in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday to discuss and share different enforcement options and strategies around various mortgage-related issues, according to sources familiar with the conversation.

The meeting was prompted by the slow pace at which a national foreclosure settlement led by the Obama administration is progressing, and is likely to be the first in a series, said these sources.

[snip]

“This past Tuesday, a group of like-minded Attorneys General met in D.C. to discuss ongoing and future investigations into the mortgage finance and foreclosure industries,” said Delaware Deputy Attorney General Ian McConnel.

“The talks weren’t just about investigations,” said a source with knowledge of the discussions. “They were also about the attorneys general offices feeling uninvolved in a process by which their federal colleagues have been negotiating on their behalf.” [my emphasis]

Or maybe it’s this show of leadership that’s got Dimon whining?

But what I find most amusing about this ubercapitalist begging for government intervention is this: Dimon says he’s gonna lock “all the people involved in the business” in a room until they come up with a solution. But note who he’s going to invite?

Jamie Dimon has a plan to fix the U.S. housing market: lock mortgage lenders and regulators behind closed doors until they figure it out. [my emphasis]

Because if you realized that homeowners, too, were a fundamental part of the housing business, you might lose your cred as a psychopath.

Shorter Jamie Dimon: “I am not a psychopath”

As business professor Clive Boddy describes it, banksters like Jamie Dimon succeed–and cause great catastrophe–because they are able to exploit the chaos of today’s business environment while ignoring the consequences of their ruthlessness.

Boddy says psychopaths take advantage of the “relative chaotic nature of the modern corporation,” including “rapid change, constant renewal” and high turnover of “key personnel.” Such circumstances allow them to ascend through a combination of “charm” and “charisma,” which makes “their behaviour invisible” and “makes them appear normal and even to be ideal leaders.”

[snip]

They “largely caused the crisis” because their “single- minded pursuit of their own self-enrichment and self- aggrandizement to the exclusion of all other considerations has led to an abandonment of the old-fashioned concept of noblesse oblige, equality, fairness, or of any real notion of corporate social responsibility.”

Boddy doesn’t name names, but the type of personality he describes is recognizable to all from the financial crisis.

He says the unnamed “they” seem “to be unaffected” by the corporate collapses they cause. These psychopaths “present themselves as glibly unbothered by the chaos around them, unconcerned about those who have lost their jobs, savings and investments, and as lacking any regrets about what they have done.

Meanwhile, a Reuters article offers a possible explanation for how millions of MF Global funds disappeared: because its clearing firm, JP Morgan Chase, dawdled while clearing hundreds of millions of dollars in securities MF Global sold to Goldman Sachs as an effort to stay afloat.

MF Global unloaded hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of securities to Goldman Sachs in the days leading up to its collapse, according to two former MF Global employees with direct knowledge of the transactions. But it did not immediately receive payment from its clearing firm and lender, JPMorgan Chase & Co , one of the sources said.

The sale of securities to Goldman occurred on October 27, just days before MF Global Holdings Ltd filed for bankruptcy on October 31, the ex-employees said. One of the employees said the transaction was cleared with JPMorgan Chase.

[snip]

JPMorgan has fought aggressively in bankruptcy court to protect its interests, and received a lien on some of MF Global’s assets in exchange for granting the firm $8 million to fund its bankruptcy costs. The lien puts JPMorgan’s interests ahead of MF Global customers who have not yet received an estimated $900 million worth of money from their accounts, which remain frozen as regulators search for missing funds.

As it turns out, a week before JPMC was stalling on clearing MF Global’s sales, Jamie Dimon sent out an email to JPMC employees boasting about the firm’s expansion at a time of strife for the industry.

“2011 was another year of challenges, both for JPMorgan Chase and for countries around the world,” Dimon wrote in a year-end e-mail to staff. “There is a lot of frustration out there and more than a little hostility toward our industry.”

[snip]

JPMorgan hired 16,000 people in the U.S. in 2011, Dimon said in the letter, expanding its total workforce to more than 260,000 in a year when financial companies announced more than 200,000 job cuts and protests against Wall Street firms spread worldwide. The New York-based lender is adding about 175 branches a year in the U.S., he said.

“In the face of challenges, JPMorgan Chase is doing its part,” Dimon wrote. “We have not shrunk back.”

I tell you, indefinite detention looks better and better for Jamie Dimon.

Fuck You To Jamie Dimon & His Plaintive Wail For The 1%

Pardon me for the Taibbi like insolence, but this is just fucking amazing. While most Americans are struggling to stay alive, employed, and their families fed and in their homes, much less celebrate a decent Christmas, the 1% Masters Of The Universe have gotten together for a group bitchfest of elitist assholes:

Jamie Dimon, the highest-paid chief executive officer among the heads of the six biggest U.S. banks, turned a question at an investors’ conference in New York this month into an occasion to defend wealth.

“Acting like everyone who’s been successful is bad and because you’re rich you’re bad, I don’t understand it,” the JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) CEO told an audience member who asked about hostility toward bankers. “Sometimes there’s a bad apple, yet we denigrate the whole.”

Dimon, 55, whose 2010 compensation was $23 million, joined billionaires including hedge-fund manager John Paulson and Home Depot Inc. (HD) co-founder Bernard Marcus in using speeches, open letters and television appearances to defend themselves and the richest 1 percent of the population targeted by Occupy Wall Street demonstrators.

Uh, fuck you Jamie Dimon and to the plaintive wail of the skimming, raping moneychangers.

Oh, and in case you had any question on what side of the 1%/99% divide Barack Obama and his Administration are on, yet another answer was given today with the announcement of their proposed selection for the critical “independent” seat on the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC):

The Obama administration is considering nominating Jeremiah Norton, an executive director for JPMorgan Chase’s investment bank, to sit on the FDIC’s board of directors.

Who is Jeremiah Norton? Well, as this quote states, he executive director of the investment banking shop and one of Obama’s buddy, Jamie Dimon’s, right hand men. Oh, and before that, Norton was former Goldman Sachs honcho Henry Paulson’s right hand man in the Bush Treasury Department and assisted Paulson in getting Goldman Sachs a backdoor bailout through AIG.

And, remember, if Barack Obama has to replace Turbo Tax Timmeh Geithner, Jamie Dimon is near the top of the list of replacements thought to be on the White House’s list.

So, while OWS is out protesting and the majority of citizens are falling deeper in despair and many losing their homes and hopes, and Barack Obama duplicitously coos about feeling the pain of the 99%, this is what is going on where the rubber meets the actual road.

PS: Digby has pounded Dimon on this as well if you want more searing criticism.

How to Indefinitely Detain Jamie Dimon

Kagro X and I were engaging in a little thought experiment on Twitter to show how easy it would be to solve our dangerous bankster problem by indefinitely detaining them.

It turned out to be pretty easy to do. Here’s how.

First, before you indefinitely detain a bankster, you need to show either that he is,

A person who was part of or substantially supported al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners, including any person who has committed a belligerent act or who has supported such hostilities in aid of such enemy forces.

Or, you need to show he has supported (using the Iraq AUMF that we’re keeping around to make sure the President’s authority isn’t limited to just al Qaeda),

another international terrorist group that the President has determined both (a) is in armed conflict with the United States and (b) poses a threat of hostile actions within the United States;

Now, making that case with Jamie Dimon is very easy to do, because his company, JP Morgan Chase, has materially helped Iran. We have several pieces of proof it has done so. First, there’s the Treasury Report showing that JPMC:

  • Gave a $2.9 million loan on December 22, 2009 to the Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines, which the Office of Foreign Assets Control has found to be involved in WMD proliferation
  • Advised and confirmed a $2,707,432 letter of credit on April 24, 2009, in which the underlying transaction involved a vessel identified by OFAC as blocked due to its affiliation with the same Iranian shipping line
  • Processed nine wire transfers between April 27, 2006 and November 28, 2008, which totaled $609,308, some of which involved sanctioned Iranian and terrorist entities
  • Transferred 32,000 ounces of gold bullion valued at approximately $20,560,000 to benefit a sanctioned Iranian bank on May 24, 2006

We need no further proof that JPMC has done these things. Not only has JPMC admitted to them, but as Janice Rogers Brown has made clear, we cannot question the Executive Branch’s intelligence reports, so all of OFAC’s claims must be accepted as true for the purposes of indefinite detention. And all of that illegal support for Iran happened while Jamie Dimon was President of JPMC.

But there may even be proof–enough, anyway, to satisfy Rogers Brown–that JPMC materially supported an attempt to deploy a WMD in a terrorist attack on American soil. As I have shown, the bank account to which Manssor Arbabsiar transferred almost $100,000 as downpayment for the alleged Quds Force plot to assassinate Saudi Ambassador Adel al-Jubeir was probably a Chase account. And that affidavit should be enough. The FBI, after all, is an intelligence agency. And Janice Rogers Brown does not find redactions–even much more extensive ones–to in any way impair the reliability of Administration claims to justify indefinite detention.

In other words, the Administration has provided sufficient proof that JPMC materially supported Iran to the tune of at least $23 million in illegal financial transactions.

Now, if Chase is indeed the bank that accepted the downpayment for the Scary Iran Plot, we need no further basis to indefinitely detain Jamie Dimon. After all, the government’s Amended Complaint (from the FBI, an intelligence agency whose reports we cannot question) asserts that Abdul Reza Shahlai was the mastermind behind the Scary Iran Plot, and at the time of the plot, he had already been sanctioned as a supporter of the insurgency in Iraq. That was based on a questionable intelligence report, admittedly, but Janice Rogers Brown says we cannot consider such problems. So if Chase did, indeed, play a role in the Scary Iran Plot, then that’s all we need to indefinitely detain Jamie Dimon as head of the entity that materially supported that terrorist attack.

But even if Chase wasn’t involved in the Scary Iran Plot, the Executive Branch can still indefinitely detain Jamie Dimon. After all, the Executive Branch has been claiming that Iran was harboring al Qaeda since 2003. In addition, an official Executive Branch report–a September 12, 2009 diplomatic cable–includes the following hearsay claim, made by Saudi Arabia’s then Minister of the Interior, now the Crown Prince, Nayif bin Abdulaziz:

Iran has hosted Saudis (all Sunnis) — including Osama bin Laden’s son Ibrahim — who had contacts with terrorists and worked against [Saudi Arabia]

And Janice Rogers Brown has said that so long as it appears in an official government document, any hearsay problem is overcome. And as recent reporting makes clear, there’s even some evidence that Iran was at least aware of, and in some ways facilitated, the 9/11 plot itself. That assertion is based on NSA reports which, as official government documents, would meet Rogers Brown’s standard for claims supporting indefinite detention.

All of which would seem to reach the bar of making Iran a force associated with al Qaeda. I don’t necessarily buy these reports, mind you, but again, it’s not for me to question these official government records. And helping such an associated force access $23 million of funding sure seems to qualify as “substantial support.”

Now let me be clear. I don’t advocate indefinitely detaining Jamie Dimon–or anyone else either, particularly not American citizens, no matter how loathsome or dangerous to the United States. But given that our country maintains it is more important to “incapacitate” terrorists and those who support them than to punish those who did trillions of dollars of damage to our economy, we may well have to treat Jamie Dimon as a material supporter of terrorism to get some justice.

And Jamie? If I were you I would report to an Embassy or some other official government office right away, as the government claims Anwar al-Awlaki should have. Because while Obama seems uninterested in indefinitely detaining American citizens, he has been known to kill those he claimed were particularly dangerous.

Jamie Dimon Owns Obama’s Testicles

Jamie Dimon owns Barack Obama’s testicles. That’s the only explanation I can think of for why, rather than firing his JP Morgan Exec Chief of Staff for being incompetent, Obama simply shifted him over to serve as the public face of his Administration.

Ten months into his tenure as chief of staff, [Bill] Daley’s core responsibilities are shifting, following White House missteps in the debt-ceiling fight and in its relations with Republicans and Democrats in Congress.

On Monday, Mr. Daley turned over day-to-day management of the West Wing to Pete Rouse, a veteran aide to President Obama, according to several people familiar with the matter. It is unusual for a White House chief of staff to relinquish part of the job.

[snip]

The new set-up effectively makes Mr. Rouse the president’s inside manager and Mr. Daley his ambassador, roles that appear to better suit both men’s talents.

As you recall, Daley was hired as a sop to the banks, who thought endless bailouts weren’t enough bounty from this and the prior Administration and successfully demanded having one of their own in the White House gatekeeper position. And so, after fucking up the debt ceiling, and fucking up the introduction of Obama’s jobs push (and overseeing the passage of three trade agreements that will send jobs overseas), Daley has been moved into a figurehead role.

Here’s a snapshot of the kind of people whom Daley is sucking up to as “Ambassador”: the architect of the housing bubble-and-crash, the embodiment of corruption in the GSEs, and a guy who helped pass a law that will help his wife’s insurance company, only to leave to work for the Chamber of Commerce and a private equity firm.

Lately, Mr. Daley has been trying out his new role, deploying his back-slapping persona in Washington social circles. He recently held a private reception at his Ritz Carlton residence for a small group of D.C. elites, including former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, former Fanne Mae Chief Executive Jim Johnson and Yousef Al Otaiba, the United Arab Emirates ambassador to the U.S.

Former Sen. Evan Bayh (D., Ind.) said an invitation to lunch with Mr. Daley in his West Wing office was the first time he had heard from him.

So at a time when Obama’s campaign wants to pretend he’s taking a tough line with the 1%, he’s refusing to fire 1%er Bill Daley when he proves to be incompetent. Does this mean the banksters will effectively retain their own personal gate-keeper?

And FWIW, I believe Pete Rouse was and will be the best of the three Chiefs of Staff Obama has had, so I approve of that move. Though I question the wisdom of making the move just in time for another government shutdown, which is due up in the next few weeks.

Does Treasury Believe Spreading Our Flawed Banking System Is a Solution to Terrorism?

Sheldon Whitehouse had a hearing on terrorist finance the other day. There was an interesting exchange that I think bears notice.

The hearing focused, in part, on hawalas, not least because DOJ recently prosecuted Mohammad Younis, the guy whose hawala Faisal Shahzad used to fund his terrorist attempt. Richard Blumenthal suggested (around 75:50 and following) that that funding may have come from Pakistani authorities (implicitly, the ISI). The FBI’s acting head of counterterrorism wouldn’t answer a question about that in public session.

A more interesting response came from Treasury’s Assistant Secretary for Terrorist Financing, Daniel Glaser. Sheldon Whitehouse asked him (at 92:50 and following) whether we were making progress on solving the problem hawalas create for counterterrorism efforts. Here’s my transcription of Glaser’s response:

Daniel Glaser: The reason hawala and other forms of informal remittances and informal money services exist is because there’s large communities around the world that don’t have access to formal financial services or affordable financial services. So the long-term quote-unquote solution to hawala is a generational one and it is about building an international financial system that everybody around the world has access to. Now, since that’s a long-term solution, we need to address the problem in a shorter term way as well.

[snip]

The way we try to approach it beyond the long term effort to make financial services available to everybody is regulatory prong, enforcement, international standards, and general economic development.

While Glaser described a four-pronged approach in his written testimony (and described in more detail in the parts of his response that I’ve snipped), he said the ultimate solution would come when international financial services were available to everyone.

So the way to solve terrorism, then, is to make sure everyone banks at Jamie Dimon’s bank?

That’s an exaggeration, of course. And unless and until bankers get squeamish about the way the US government is accessing SWIFT, integrating everyone into the formal finance system would give counterterrror investigators transparency into terror financing. But given the state of the banking system–given how much more damage the international financial system has done to the world in the last decade than terrorism (leaving aside the effect of couter-terrorism and false counter-terrorism, like the Iraq War) it troubles me that a high ranking Treasury Department official believes one solution to terrorism is modern banking.

Now Glaser strikes me as an incredibly intelligent and sincere guy–coming from him this “generational solution” sounded like a completely sincere idea. So while this comment made my spidey sense tingle, it didn’t in the way it would have if, say, TurboTax Timmeh Geithner had said it.

Nevertheless, here are some issues it raises.

Read more

After Trading with the Enemy, JP Morgan Chase Whines for Regulators to Fight “Anti-American” Regulations

Two and a half weeks ago, JP Morgan Chase signed an $88.3 million settlement with the government. JPMC traded with Iran, Sudan, Liberia, and Cuba, all in violation of Treasury’s various trade restrictions. When subpoenaed on the Sudan transfer, JPMC at first denied it had the documents in question. While I think many of these sanctions (particularly the Cuban ones) are silly, the settlement revealed that JPMC thought it was above rules designed to serve America’s self-interest.

Which is why I find MOTU Jamie Dimon’s wail for help fighting “anti-American” regulations so distasteful.

The United States should consider pulling out of the Basel group of global regulators, Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, said in an interview with the Financial Times.

[snip]

“I’m very close to thinking the U.S. shouldn’t be in Basel anymore. I would not have agreed to rules that are blatantly anti-American,” he said in the interview.

“Our regulators should go there and say: ‘If it’s not in the interests of the U.S., we’re not doing it’.”

Dimon is complaining because Basel’s rules require more reserves from the very largest banks–including JPMC–to hold 9.5% of reserves, as opposed to the 7% required from smaller banks. Just three of the eight banks with higher reserve requirements are from the US. The Basel rules also treat “covered bonds”–a European product–differently from mortgage backed securities with a GSE guarantee.

I’m particularly amused with the way Dimon describes “global financial firms” to be in the best interest of the US.

“I think any American president, secretary of Treasury, regulator or other leader would want strong, healthy global financial firms and not think that somehow we should give up that position in the world and that would be good for your country.”

Bank of America’s global status right now risks putting the US at great risk, because the bank is insolvent but regulators have a tough time unwinding it because of that global reach. We know that because a bunch of global financial firms crashed the economy just a few years ago.

There’s one more ugly irony about Dimon’s wail. His concern, he says, is that because of these rules, Asian banks will pick up market share in the US.

He’s saying this, of course, at a time when Obama is about to push through a trade deal with Korea–one that will ultimately cause American manufacturers to lose market share in the US–in significant part so JPMC and Goldman Sachs can spread their toxic finance to Korea. That is, he’s whining about competing on an uneven playing field with Asian banks at the same time as the government is helping his company get preferential access to Korea’s finance market.

Jamie Dimon wants to pretend he is both a free market capitalist and a good American. But his whining and the actions his bank have taken suggest he’s neither of those things.

Update: In the longer account of this interview, Dimon whines even more about how poor American banks won’t be able to compete against Asian and European banks.

In his office, looking relaxed in white shirt with two buttons undone, Mr Dimon is still exercised about what he sees as a “miscarriage of justice”. US policymakers, he says, have sold their banks down the river – the Yangtze river. “There are plenty of countries out there that are happy with the changes being implemented in the US. They realise that they can be huge beneficiaries of this. I’m talking about China, India, Singapore, Japan. I wouldn’t want to see, 20 years from now, the US asking, ‘what happened? How come the winners in the marketplace are all outside the US?’”

[snip]

Derivatives dealt off exchanges will need to use clearing houses – which Mr Dimon supports – and will be subject to margin rules governing how much collateral they have to supply.

These he does not like, particularly if, as currently framed, they apply to JPMorgan’s overseas businesses too. He fears British, French and German competitors might not be subject to the same standards and will gain market share.

Update: Yves Smith debunks Dimon’s jingoism.

Dimon manages to play yet another jingoistic card, acting as if Basel III singles out US banks when a majority of the financial firms subject to the most stringent rules are outside the US. And he raises the truly bizarre specter of “Asian” hordes invading the US. Huh? Does he mean HSBC? I presume not, that’s a UK bank. The only Asian bank in the top 10 is Mitsubishi UFJ, and the Japanese are not likely to be in aggressive expansion mode (they’ve never gotten the knack institutionally of hiring and managing good top level foreigners; I know of a very few Japanese executives who have figured it out and did a good job when they were posted in the US, but as soon as they were rotated back to Japan, their successors made a hash of what they had put in place).

The Chinese are even less likely to move in near term (long term is a completely different matter). First, the Chinese were apparently interested in investing in US players in the crisis and were rebuffed. But having worked repeatedly with foreign banks in the US, building a denovo operation (or using small acquisitions as a platform) is a completely different kettle of fish. And going from the Chinese market of heavy state control and limited product scope to the US is like saying a drayage company can operate a supersonic plane because both are in the transportation business. I’ve seen what a hard time foreign banks have had in the US with a vastly lesser skill gap (one they closed over a period of decades). The Chinese are too far behind skill-wise to constitute a threat in the US until they can acquire the skills via a major acquisition (and that was not the scenario Dimon was hinting at).

And it goes without saying that Dimon made clear that he believe that what is good for banks is good for the US, when that has been demonstrably false for at least the last decade.

What’s striking about Dimon’s comments is how brazen they are. He’s not making clever, narrowly accurate but substantively misleading comments. Much of what he says and implies is unadulterated bunk. The fact that he peddles this tripe shows how confident he is that his message will go unchallenged. And that in turn reveals that he is secure in his belief that the banks have won the war; all he is caviling about is the speed of the mop-up operation.