Is Jamie Dimon a Mother?
Today Jamie Dimon, the CEO of Chase announced his bank lost almost two billion dollars due to credit default swaps, or Legal Gambling with Our Money. Dang! How does a bank lose two billion dollars in six weeks? And if Chase has that kind of money to play with why, not use the funds to help homeowners who would like to keep their homes, instead of betting at the International Credit Default Swap Casino? His response: “I’m bad!” But the quote read “It was stupid” and he used “bad strategy.”
These weapons of mass economic destruction were invented by quants or physicists employed by Chase in the early 2000’s after the repeal of the Glass-Steagal Act in 1999. Less than ten years after its repeal, these economic weapons led the global economic meltdown, spiraling our country into a different kind of recession. By the way, Glass-Steagal was passed in 1933, during the great depression, outlawing banks to gamble with depositor’s money.
Gretchen Morgenson wrote in the NY Times on April 1st that financial weapons should have approval from an agency, much like the FDA before allowing new concepts to roll over the free markets. (Footnote: Free to the big banks, not you and me) These sophisticated, tangled derivates are not mother’s little helper, nor will they cure ED. But they have caused long term damage to countries’ economies (Greece) and the lives of over four million American foreclosed borrowers and over 30 million underwater homeowners. The effects are far reaching: from bankruptcies filed with long time established companies and cities, to the unemployment rate.
With Mother’s Day this weekend (I know, Jamie Dimon and the word mother in the same article, although I doubt if it is a first), we should take the time to think about our great country.
Have our leaders contracted dementia so severe that would allow history to repeat itself only four short years from continue to enable Wall Street’s immediate cash-fix addiction?
Maybe Sheriff Joe should consider a career change of enforcing the banks and Wall Street to play nice. They could all wear pink underwear and live together in a tent. And give them monopoly money to play with, not ours.
