One of the people I have zero sympathy for — and the general public should have outright antipathy towards — is Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase. If the guy isn’t in jail, he should at least be unemployed — like the millions of people he helped put out of work courtesy of his financial shenanigans. Maybe he will actually end up on the short end, though I’m still skeptical even with the raft of investigations aimed at JP Morgan Chase.
The list is long:
As the nation’s strongest bank, JP Morgan Chase used to be known for carrying special sway with regulators. Now it increasingly finds itself in the cross hairs of federal authorities.
At least two board members are worried about the mounting problems, and some top executives fear that the bank’s relationships in Washington have frayed as JPMorgan becomes a focus of federal investigations.
In a previously undisclosed case, prosecutors are examining whether JPMorgan failed to fully alert authorities to suspicions about Bernard L. Madoff, according to several people with direct knowledge of the matter. And nearly a year after reporting a multibillion-dollar trading loss, JPMorgan is facing a criminal inquiry over whether it lied to investors and regulators about the risky wagers, a case that could accelerate when the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other authorities interview top JPMorgan executives in coming weeks.
All told, at least eight federal agencies are investigating the bank, including the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Commodity futures Trading Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission. Federal prosecutors and the F.B.I. in New York are also examining potential wrongdoing at JPMorgan.
A recent misstep points to the growing friction between JPMorgan and regulators as well as to the concerns within the bank. JPMorgan misstated how the bank may have harmed more than 5,000 homeowners in foreclosure, according to several people briefed on the matter. The bank’s primary regulator, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, is expected to collect a cash payment from the bank to remedy the flawed review of loans, these people say.
The conclusion one draws from the myriad agencies digging into JP Morgan is either Dimon is a crook, running a vast corporate criminal operation or he is thoroughly incompetent. Either way, you have to wonder: why doesn’t the board of directors just dump the guy? The answer is usually pretty clear: the board is stacked with a CEO’s cronies and/or the CEO buys off the board with nice big directors’ fees for basically doing very little worker…like oversight.
BUT…tick, tock, tick, tock…there is a limit. Is there any other corporation in the country that is under such investigation? Unlikely.
