There's plenty more where that came from.
It's going to be interesting to see what comes of the SEC investigation into the London Whale now that this evidence has become public -- and now that Mary Jo White, Obama's nominee to head the SEC, has skated through her confirmation hearing. (She said she'd avoid her former Wall Street clients "for a year." A year? Then what happens?)
The End ... or the Beginning?
I don't mean to suggest I was the only Dimon skeptic out there. Yves Smith, who observes that the "Senate report reveals JPM was a lying, scheming rogue trader," was all over the bank. I agree with her, however, when she says that "the failings described in the report are even worse than we imagined." Michael Crimmins did invaluable work on the bank's record, and did so fearlessly. (One entry from last July was entitled "Why the Cops Should Be Knocking On Jamie Dimon's Door Soon.")
"This fiasco is beginning to look a lot like accounting control fraud," Crimmins wroteback then. (We've noted that major accounting firms who work with big banks -- and my former employer, AIG -- should be investigated for a variety of professional and criminal violations.)
I'll have to check with other Dimon-bashers to see if they feel the same way I do, but I have to say I feel like Kevin McCarthy when the military finally believes him in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. What a horror story this has been -- and like any horror show, we could still see one of those endings with a twist. That movie's original ending had McCarthy escaping his town only to find the entire nation contaminated by aliens. The original ending to Hitchcock's The Birds had the survivors reaching San Francisco only to find the entire city devastated by avian attacks.
But those endings did poorly with focus groups. They would have been nearly as disastrous for those films as a trick ending to this saga would be for the American economy.
Well-connected hucksters like Dimon have a way of slipping away at the last second. The ending to this story is still unwritten, and Dimon's still likely to come out on top -- or, at the very least, to avoid legal scrutiny -- as long as the current team stays in charge at the Justice Department and other agencies. The best way to change that is with relentless public pressure -- on the White House, on our state Attorneys General, and on our elected representatives in the House and Senate.
We'll keep reviewing the reports and testimony from today's hearing. But we can already say that this is the brightest day for justice and economic common sense that we've seen in a long time.
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