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Until now, there was no expectation that anyone at Tuesday's shareholder meeting would complain about the enormous booty Jamie Dimon earns. The $2 billion trading loss changes everything.
May 13 -
Shareholders, creditors, counterparties and regulators deserve to know more about the causes of that $2 billion trading loss.
May 14 -
Robo-signed affidavits and sloppy legal work led the bank to halt court claims. The errors cast doubt on billions of dollars in judgments.
March 12 -
How a whistleblower's allegations about mishandled credit card debt and shoddy recordkeeping at JPMorgan Chase snowballed into the shutdown of a multi-billion dollar credit card litigation operation and an OCC review.
March 15
Just a few years ago, Jamie Dimon was hailed as "
Not much later, however, Jamie was asking, "Why does The New York Times
According to Jamie, that's unfair to the industry, because "not all bankers are the same." With grammatical athleticism worthy of Shakespeare, Jamie observes that "
Point well taken! I'm sure Cam Fine and the ICBA could identify hundreds of community bankers who are not only revered but beloved by their customers.
So, let's look for the bad apple.
Jamie's in the spotlight, with his remarkable gift for hogging the limelight as poster boy for banks, and even for all of "the successful." He's been touted as a prospective Obama Secretary of the Treasury—although (or because?) he suggests that Washington swallow its bailout losses and butt out of telling banks what to do. Nevertheless, guess who "coordinated" the recent meeting of Fed Governor Tarullo with bankers in New York?
Apart from the tireless showboating, what's he actually done at JPMorgan Chase, where he's been CEO since 2005, having led a predecessor since 2000?
Jamie's most recent headlines revealed a $2 billion loss in Chase's chief investment office—a loss which is likely to increase, maybe double, as Chase struggles to liquidate its market-dominant position. Jamie attributes the loss to sloppy management, inadequate supervision. Maybe his eyes left the ball as he tirelessly preached to Washington and the industry.
But that's just last week's headline. Under Jamie's leadership, Chase has been successfully accused of cheating and customers in remarkably numerous and diverse ways.
According to Harris Interactive, Chase has
Under the recent national mortgage
Separately, Chase admitted to
In San Antonio, Jamie's rogue "legal" operation fomented suits against debtors based on
Chase has also settled a suit for illegally making automatically dialed calls to cell phones of people
Chase's excessively aggressive efforts to make people pay go well beyond lending. Chase paid more than $100 million in a class action
Last year, Chase agreed to pay $154 million to settle SEC charges that the bank
Class actions, the courts and even regulators typically offer only very incomplete and dilatory relief to cheated consumers. For example, a recent settlement offers $30 ("
It doesn't have to be this way. A man worked for me as head of marketing for a bank and later successfully ran a major division of a megabank. He always insisted on knowing how customers were treated. He was guided by what he called "my smell test." If it didn't smell right to him, he wouldn't do it. And I upheld those decisions, even if the lawyers said we could do it.
If Chase is so big and complicated that no CEO can apply, teach and enforce decency and the smell test—then break Chase up.
If not, then replace Jamie with a CEO who focuses on doing right by customers, delivering value to them—rather than pumping himself up as Mr. Banking and making us all look like gamblers and thieves.
Andrew Kahr is a principal in Credit Builders LLC, a financial product development company, and was the founding chief executive of First Deposit, later known as Providian.