Juggling Dynamite

JP Morgan has been touted by politicians, the Fed and egomaniac CEO Dimon himself as the best of the US banks. This gives us a sense of how low the bank standards and ethics really are. Graham Fisher’s Josh Rosner and Keefe Bruyette & Woods’ Fred Cannon discuss JPMorgan’s banking practices. Here is a direct link.

Bloomberg Television breaks down JPMorgan’s efforts to hide trading losses, outlined in a Senate report yesterday. Here is a direct link.

The findings of misconduct and abuse of risk management regulations and reporting requirements are so egregious and flagrant, that the only reasonable conclusion is to once and for all terminate taxpayer support for Morgan and the other too big to fail banks. These finance ego maniacs must live and die on their own sword, not the public coffers. It is the only way to restore some capitalism, self-governance and accountability to what have become government insured gambling houses. More regulation is not going to fix the issue.

Former and current JPMorgan Chase executives testify about the practices that led to the firm’s $6.2-billion “London Whale” trading losses during a hearing of the Senate Homeland Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

The hearing attempts to uncover how much top JPMorgan officials knew about the huge risks its traders were taking on complex derivative instruments. 

The subcommittee will also question representatives from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the bank’s primary regulator. Senate investigators have been looking into whether the OCC failed to press the bank for details about the London trades.

You can watch a clip of the hearing here.