By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 12, 2024 ~
When the next megabank blows up from its derivative exposure, you can add the names Jamie Dimon and Patick McHenry to former Republican Congressmen Randy Hultgren and Kevin Yoder as four of the men who greased the skids for another derivatives banking crisis. (For our report on the role played by Hultgren and Yoder, see our 2021 report here.)
Dimon and McHenry are the latest lead players in the disastrous history of derivative regulation in the U.S.
Dimon is the Chair and CEO of the riskiest and largest bank in the United States, JPMorgan Chase. After his bank lost $6.2 billion gambling in derivatives in London in 2012 – using deposits from his federally-insured bank – Dimon would, to rational minds, seem like the least qualified candidate to be giving advice to his banking regulators on how much capital megabanks need to hold to offset their gargantuan trading and derivatives risks. (See All the Devils from 2008 Are Back at the Megabanks: Leverage, Off-Balance-Sheet Debt, Over $192 Trillion in Derivatives, Shaky Capital Levels.)
Unfortunately, rational thought holds no weight in a kleptocracy. (If it did, America would not have a 34-count indicted felon as the Republican candidate for the Presidency and safekeeper of the nuclear codes.) For the same reason that Dimon’s Board of Directors gave him a $50 million bonus after he settled his bank’s fourth and fifth criminal felony counts, Dimon is still able to throw his weight around and intimidate federal banking regulators into becoming his lapdogs.
A little background on Dimon’s battle with his banking regulators on the issue of adequate capital is in order:
On July 27 of last year, the Federal Reserve, FDIC and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) released a proposal to require higher capital levels at banks with $100 billion or more in assets. Many of these banks had demonstrated quite clearly in the spring of 2023, via bank runs on deposits, that they could spread systemic contagion throughout the U.S. banking system.
The three federal bank regulators provided a very generous public comment period of 120 days on the proposal. The megabanks had to only begin transitioning to the new rules on July 1, 2025, with full compliance not due for a preposterously long five years – on July 1, 2028.
On September 12, 2023 the megabank cartel made its anger and intention to push back known in a 7-page letter that assaulted the proposal. The cartel demanded that the three federal agencies turn over all “evidence and analyses the agencies relied on” in making the proposal.
One of the signatories to the letter was the Bank Policy Institute (BPI), whose Board of Directors consists of the CEOs of the megabanks on Wall Street. BPI is Chaired by none other than Jamie Dimon.
BPI then launched an ad campaign that grossly distorted what the increase in capital would do, claiming that it would harm working families. (These are the same megabanks that blew up the U.S. economy in 2008, put millions of Americans out of work, left millions of working families in foreclosure and got a secret $29 trillion bailout from the Fed – because they had inadequate capital. These megabanks then formed their own coalition to battle in court against the Fed releasing the details of the trillions of dollars in revolving loans these banks had received from December 2007 to the middle of 2010. They lost that battle.)
The Bank Policy Institute then hired Eugene Scalia, a law partner at Big Law firm Gibson, Dunn, to weigh options for potentially suing the Federal Reserve and the other bank regulators over the proposed higher capital rules. Scalia was expected to argue, if the case went to court, that the banking regulators did not do a proper cost benefit analysis prior to proposing the capital rule.
Scalia is the son of the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who didn’t see anything wrong with accepting lots of free vacations from private interests while he sat on the high court. Eugene Scalia is also the lawyer who previously wielded a hatchet to gut key elements of the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation of 2010.
The very suggestion that the Fed could end up in an embarrassing, headline-grabbing court battle with the very banks it regulates – with appeals dragging the case out for years – had the intended effect of intimidation.
Fed Chair Jerome Powell appeared before the Senate Banking Committee on March 7 of this year for his regularly scheduled Semiannual Monetary Policy Report. After Republicans on the Committee gushed over Powell’s willingness to rethink, redraft or repropose the capital rules, it came time for Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) to question Powell.
Warren was incensed that after Powell had promised in 2023 to support the Fed’s Vice Chair for Supervision, Michael Barr, in making capital reforms to prevent more bank runs and systemic contagion, Powell was now caving to pressure from the banking industry.
Senator Warren said the 37 largest banks that would be impacted by the higher capital rules have “spent tens of millions of dollars running ads during Sunday night football and millions more for an army of lobbyists to try to twist arms here in Congress.”
Warren told Powell this: “Despite all you said last year when the banks failed about supporting Vice Chair Barr’s recommendations to strengthen rules for big banks, public reporting now says that you are driving efforts inside the Fed to weaken the capital rule. You even told the House Financial Services Committee representatives yesterday that you think it’s ‘very plausible’ that you withdraw the rule.”
Warren concluded with this:
“You are the leader of the Fed and when the heat was on last year, you talked a lot about getting tougher on the banks. But now the giant banks are unhappy about that and you’ve gone weak-kneed on this. The American people need a leader at the Fed who has the courage to stand up to these banks and protect our financial system.”
Dimon received assistance in his effort to bully and intimidate federal banking regulators to back off the capital proposals by Patrick McHenry, the Republican Chair of the House Financial Services Committee.
According to a report in the Financial Times on Tuesday, McHenry threatened that if the Fed didn’t overhaul its capital proposal, Congress would invoke the Congressional Review Act, which gives Congress the ability to reverse federal agency rules.
The long and short of this bullying and intimidation campaign is that Michael Barr, the Fed’s Vice Chair for Supervision, addressed an audience at the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy at the Brookings Institution on Tuesday and formally capitulated on the proposed capital reforms. The capital increase for the megabanks is now being proposed by the Fed at a 9 percent increase, down by more than half from the original proposal submitted for public comment in July 2023.
As for those dodgy trillions of dollars in derivatives, it appears that the Fed intends to let the megabanks continue to use their own internal models to assess that risk.
The bank regulators will now need to resubmit their new capital proposal for public comment; negotiate for months or years to issue a final rule; and then offer a multi-year phase-in period – meaning this can is being indefinitely kicked down the road.
At present, it’s not clear if the FDIC and the OCC are going along with the Fed’s capitulation to the demands of the Wall Street megabanks. We will report more on that as we obtain clarifying information.
