By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: August 27, 2024 ~
The P.R. genius at JPMorgan Chase that thought it would be a good idea to have Jamie Dimon lecture the next president of the United States on how to run the country in an OpEd (paywall) at the Washington Post will likely be seeking a career change soon.
Dimon is the Chairman and CEO of the largest and riskiest bank in the United States. Under Dimon’s tenure, the bank has racked up five felony counts which showcase Dimon as the worst possible source of sound leadership advice. In 2014, the bank was charged with laundering money for decades for the biggest Ponzi artist in U.S. history – Bernie Madoff. In 2015, the bank was charged with being part of a bank cartel that rigged foreign currency markets. And in 2020, the bank was charged with two more felony counts for engaging in “tens of thousands of instances of unlawful trading in gold, silver, platinum, and palladium…as well as thousands of instances of unlawful trading in U.S. Treasury futures contracts and in U.S. Treasury notes and bonds…”
Not to put too fine a point on it, but U.S. Treasury notes and bonds are how our government pays its debts. Apparently, nothing is sacred at Dimon’s bank.
The bank admitted to all five felony counts and paid large fines in order to get off easy with deferred prosecution agreements from the U.S. Department of Justice.
Last year, Dimon’s bank spent the better part of the year fending off two lawsuits that charged it in federal court in Manhattan with facilitating Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking of underage girls for more than a decade. One lawsuit was filed by the Attorney General of the U.S. Virgin Islands where Epstein maintained a private island compound; the other lawsuit was initiated by Epstein’s victims.
The U.S. Virgin Islands Attorney General wrote in one filing:
“Even if participation requires active engagement…there is no genuine dispute that JPMorgan actively participated in Epstein’s sex-trafficking venture from 2006 until 2019. The Court found allegations that the Bank allowed Epstein to use its accounts to send dozens of payments to then-known co-conspirators [redacted] provided excessive and unusual amounts of cash to Epstein; and structured cash withdrawals so that those withdrawals would not appear suspicious ‘went well beyond merely providing their usual [banking] services to Jeffrey Epstein and his affiliated entities’ and were sufficient to allege active engagement.”
As is typical, JPMorgan Chase paid $290 million to settle the case brought by victims and $75 million to settle the U.S. Virgins Islands case.
Why the bank has not been criminally charged by the U.S. Department of Justice with laundering money for a sex trafficker of children is something that the Washington Post’s Editorial Board might want to address in an editorial rather than providing an opinion platform for a serial crime boss. (See a broader look at JPMorgan Chase’s rap sheet here.)
Rick Newman, a Senior Columnist at Yahoo Finance, had some choice words for Dimon’s views in the OpEd. (Click on the video at the top of the related article here.) Newman says this in the video:
“I think the Washington Post got the headline wrong on this story. I think the headline should be ‘Bromides from a Billionaire.’ I think this is Jamie Dimon’s weakest take in memory. It’s like the JPMorgan P.R. department got their weakest writer and said, hey, string together some platitudes — Jamie Dimon needs another byline.”
Below the video is an article describing how JPMorgan Chase, with Dimon at the helm, has decided it’s no longer going to sit back willingly and be regulated by federal banking regulators. If it doesn’t like the regulations, it’s going to sue its federal regulators in court. (Seriously – you can’t make this stuff up.) See our January report: Jamie Dimon Hires Dodd-Frank Hatchet Man to Weigh Suing the Fed Over Proposed Capital Rules.
Below the article, as of this morning, are 921 comments – a significant portion of which are skewering the Wall Street megabanks.
A commenter using the name “Dave” writes this:
“The banking and securities industries need more oversight not less. They don’t want to adhere to laws and regulations? Pull their FDIC backing and see how quickly the bank collapses.”
“PK” writes:
“When banks testify on their behalf, they have zero concern for the consumer. Their concern is how regulation will adversely impact the stock price, which is their sole measurement for performance and income. They sit there together – basically a collaborative monopoly – to protect their incomes.”
“Cat on the Wall” offers this:
“Because they know the Supreme Court is in their pocket. But make no mistake, Jamie Dimon will be the first in line with his hands out to the government if his TBTF bank crashes in the next recession.”
For how Jamie Dimon’s bailouts work in the real world, see: Nomura, JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs Received a Cumulative $8 Trillion from the Fed’s Emergency Repo Loans in Fourth Quarter of 2019; and this: Despite Its Five Felony Counts, the Federal Reserve Has Entrusted $2 Trillion in Bonds to JPMorgan Chase.
One of the craziest things that Dimon writes in that Washington Post OpEd is this:
“The private sector has huge wells of expertise and produces 85 percent of our nation’s jobs. It should have a seat at the table.”
Is it possible that Dimon has been so consumed with defending his bank against criminal charges that he doesn’t realize that every Executive Branch cabinet post that has anything to do with money has gone largely to a particular “private sector” representative – Wall Street.
For just how preposterous Dimon’s assertion is that the private sector is not getting a seat at the table in government, see our 2020 article: Goldman Sachs: The Vampire Squid’s Alum Control Two Fed Banks, the U.S. Treasury, the European Central Bank and the Bank of England.
The head of the Federal Reserve is Jerome Powell. He got rich at the Carlyle Group, a vulture fund with a shady history.
Donald Trump, as President, came directly from the real estate private sector and proceeded to pack his federal agencies with private sector guys from the very industry that the agency regulated. American Prospect has put up an interactive graph of the unprecedented corruption that followed.
For just how much control Wall Street has had of the U.S. Treasury, there is the famous video in Michael Moore’s movie, “Capitalism: A Love Story,” where Treasury Secretary Donald Regan whispers in President Ronald Reagan’s ear while he is delivering a speech and barks at him to “speed it up” — like President Reagan is merely an actor on the payroll of the real money men in charge. Notice that President Reagan doesn’t seem surprised or annoyed but acts as if he is accustomed to taking orders from this man.
Donald Regan had been the Chairman and CEO of Merrill Lynch, the largest Wall Street brokerage firm in terms of stockbroker headcount throughout much of the last century.
Industrialist and banking titan, Andrew Mellon, had such a grip on the cabinet post of U.S. Treasury Secretary that he sat in the chair from 1921 to 1932, under three Republican Presidents – Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover. Mellon was at the helm during the Wall Street boom years of the 1920s and the devastating bust that came in 1929 to 1932, ushering in the Great Depression.
Andrew Mellon’s grandson, Timothy Mellon, heir to the family’s banking fortune, has pumped $125 million in this election cycle into the Super PAC supporting Donald Trump, Make America Great Again, Inc.
