Queen Elizabeth Crushes Wall Street

Jamie Dimon Says Banks Are Under Assault As He Announces $4.9 Billion Profit
Posted: 01/14/2015 12:29 pm EST Updated: 01/14/2015 12:59 pm EST
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We should all do so well while under assault.

JPMorgan Chase earned $4.9 billion in the fourth quarter of 2014, the company announced on Wednesday, down from a year ago, but capping what CEO Jamie Dimon called a record year for the biggest U.S. bank by assets.

Despite this success, Dimon warned that "banks are under assault," from government regulators.

"In the old days," Dimon said, "you dealt with one regulator when you had an issue, maybe two. “Now it’s five or six. It makes it very difficult and very complicated.

"You all should ask the question about how American that is. And how fair that is," he added. "And how complex that is for companies."

The biggest U.S. bank by assets has had its fair share of trouble with regulators in recent years. In the fourth quarter, JPMorgan paid $1.1 billion to settle charges by U.S. and foreign regulators that its traders had manipulated currency markets. In those settlements, J.P. Morgan did not admit nor deny any wrongdoing.

"Obviously, companies make mistakes," Dimon said on Wednesday. "We try to resolve it, we try to fix it, we admit it."

In the past two years, JPMorgan has paid out $14 billion in settlements and fines related to the London Whale trading losses, manipulating the key interest rate benchmark Libor, and issuing bad mortgages that helped lead to the financial crisis.

The bank earned $39.7 billion in net income over those same two years.

Despite his complaints, Wall Street lobbyists, and Dimon himself, are orchestrating a "continuing assault" on the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial-reform law that "has achieved remarkable success," as the New York Times put it on Tuesday.

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Maybe if they stopped rigging and manipulating every market in existence, they wouldn't get into so many problems.
 
When your customers are broke, but you need to make sales, you gotta extend them credit and take your chances with default. : )

For some reason, the whole "throwing good money after bad" expression comes to mind.
 
I'd like to see Warren employ David Stockman to form a commission to wage a full jihad against the financial industry. The crony capitalism must be dismantled piece by piece, whatever the cost, if we are to save the nation. Wall Street must be taken apart and reconstructed to once again serve the economy rather than destroy it for profit. Taking billions from the many to enrich the few only benefits the few.
 
When your customers are broke, but you need to make sales, you gotta extend them credit and take your chances with default. : )
default was not considered a risk, since the collateral, real estate always goes up.
and to this day, this is what pisses me off about the bailout. Why bailout the lender? Shouldn't if we were going to bailout anybody for the sake of life as we know it, bailed out the borrower? Just tell the banks, "Don't worry, we will pay off all those loans." As it was and is now, the banks got bailed out and still ended up with all the collateral.
 
Do you believe that if Glass Steagull was still in effect the commercial banks across the U.S. would have been feeding investment banks mortgages to bundle up into to CDOs? Do you believe that the commercials banks would have made more suitable and less risky loans if they were holding the mortgages on their books? Or would they have still gone hog wild and given $500,000 mortgages to people who made $14,000 per year on no-income check / no doc loans with no down-payment?


You seem to have the idea that Glass-Steagle prevented banks from selling mortgages, which I do not believe to be accurate. FNM and FRE were created precisely to do that and they predated the repeal of G-S. The crux of the financial crisis was unwise lending coupled with excessive leverage by bond dealers.

Most of the blame should go to the Fed, which could have stepped up and reined in mortgage lending. The Fed made matters worse by foolishly raising rates too quickly long after it was clear that the housing and mortgage markets were in a bubble. You let the air out of a bubble very slowly unless you want to hear an explosion. Bernanke was a total disaster, an academic with little market feel or understanding.

Part of the blame should also go on the rating firms, which have somehow escaped any real accountability. I guess it helps to have Buffett as an owner when democrats are running things.

I don't have a problem with G-S or some form of it. Banks should not be using government insured deposits for risky activities. But making mortgage loans and selling them is a core banking function. In any future bailouts, I agree with Barry Ritzholtz that an essential step has to be to fire all the top managers who got the bank into that position. Obama let them give themselves huge bonuses instead, courtesy of taxpayers.
 
I'd like to see Warren employ David Stockman to form a commission to wage a full jihad against the financial industry. The crony capitalism must be dismantled piece by piece, whatever the cost, if we are to save the nation. Wall Street must be taken apart and reconstructed to once again serve the economy rather than destroy it for profit. Taking billions from the many to enrich the few only benefits the few.
and that could easily be done by simply eliminating corporate taxes. No jihad necessary.
 
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