Working Life

It seems like…just a week ago that I wrote about a proposed slap-on-the-wristfor Standard & Poor’s. Ah, and it’s the gift that keeps on giving. But, this one may give a new twist to the absurd world in which these guys in the executive suites of Wall Street and the financial world commit crimes, never pay for those crimes, keep their jobs, continue to get huge pay and benefits, sock the shareholders/customers with the cost of paying miniscule fines…and never admit to the crimes.

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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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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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What else needs to happen before Jamie Dimon loses his job as CEO of JP Morgan Chase? Forget putting him in jail — I’ve given that up. But, when does the litany of lawsuit and criminal investigations add up to enough reasons to boot the guy? And so here is a new reason.

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It would be a great day if just once — just once — the bankers who caused financial mayhem ended up in jail. That’s not going to happen in the latest charges leveled against Bank of America because the charges are civil, not criminal. But, for now, we can feel a smidgen of glee.

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   Many of us have been troubled that bankers and financiers have gotten off and paid no price for the financial crisis that obliterated millions of jobs and trillions of dollars in wealth–and, indeed, the CEOs and Wall Street folks are reaping huge pay packages again. The slaps on the wrist for Goldman Sachs and […]

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    This past week, I made the point that the conviction of Raj Rajaratnam was a tale of a relatively little fish getting nabbed, while the big fish who caused the biggest disaster and heartache for most Americans get away. Or cover-up what they have done. Bank of America, Citigroup, G.M.A.C., JPMorgan Chase and Wells […]

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Yes, to begin, let’s posit that a president with the lowest approval rating in the history of polling has no credibility about any subject of importance–and, in fact, most of the country would like, as David Letterman joked, to let Barack Obama start his new job right away. But, the current president’s pronouncements that the […]

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   Egads…sound familiar…American taxpayers are now on the hook for billions of dollars…this time to bail out Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae and try to keep the economy from entering into a deeper tailspin. You can read about this virtually everywhere and there is a palpable fear here–that it may not be enough…    But, […]

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    Just to take a break from my focus on trade, there has been a lot of discussion about how to handle the crisis facing homeowners. I know this will shock everyone but many of the proposals floating around will provide a huge bailout for banks, and not do much for homeowners. So say my […]

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