Working Life

Just to close the loop on a farce I’ve written about a couple of times recently (here and here), please try not to be too impressed by the optics of the publicly announced $1.37 billion fine agreed to by Standard & Poor’s to settle charges of inflating mortgage ratings. It’s rubbish. And it means the day is coming soon when the new financial industry scandal/scam will unfold and screw millions of hard-working people.

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Well, this is just more of the same. Shareholders and customers pay the tab for greed and incompetence–and the Administration goes along. A new deal–but no one held responsible.

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Well, it gets a bit repetitive to write about this but it’s that or spacecrafts following comets(come to think of it, the comet stuff is much more fun). But, here we go again: bankers rip us off and all they need to do is sock it to the shareholders and customers and, presto, Eric Holder and his boss go home happy campers. The Treasury might get a little richer but nothing much will have changed.

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No one is going to be surprised by this news. It was pretty evident by the facts on the ground: The Justice Department has not been telling the truth about its mortgage fraud investigations and prosecutions. This pretty serious allegation has considerable weight given that it comes not from some blogger or analyst but directly from the Department’s own Inspector General.

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For the price of a measly $20 billion, the government left JP Morgan Chase walk away from the responsibility of helping fuel the wreckage that became the global financial crisis–and, to boot, it paved the way, incomprehensibly, for Jamie Dimon to get a big fat pay raise(long live the American free market!!!). Now, an important suit by Better Markets has been filed to potentially undo the deal, or, at least, force a more honest, open discussion about what the government’s cheap stay-out-of-jail, sock-it-to-the-customers actually says.

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If you were Jamie Dimon, or a sleazy banker of the same stripe, and you got the following deal, would you take it: make billions of dollars for your bank, which, in turn, rewards you personally making you a very, very wealthy man BUT, in the process, because of combination of incompetence, criminality and greed, you help destroy an entire economy and put millions of people out of work, for which your bank pays billions of dollars in fines BUT you get to keep your job and, despite all the crimes, you don’t spend a single night in jail nor do you take out a single dime from your own pocket because the system will protect you and instead hand the bill to essentially the very people you hurt, and you are dealing with a government with no spine or inclination to punish the responsible people at the top so don’t worry for a second…well, would you take that deal?

Of course you would.

And that, in a nutshell, is the upshot of the $13 billion sham fine Jamie Dimon cut with the Obama Administration.

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