Jamie Dimon has all the best lines. In May 2009, he told JPMorgan Chase (JPM) shareholders that 2008 was probably “our finest year ever.” That was before he thought about profits for 2009.
And today he told to the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, “I want to be clear that I do not blame the regulators. The responsibility for a company’s actions rests with the company’s management” (p. 9).
This is true enough – and something to reflect on during bonus season. But at a deeper level, the crisis of 2008-09 and our continued dangerous financial system are very much the fault of our regulators.
Bank executives are supposed to make money; Jamie Dimon has a fiduciary responsibility to his shareholders. It is not his responsibility to prevent bankers from taking over the state or to ensure system stability. He pursues profits – and rent extraction from the government.
It is the government’s responsibility to prevent people like Jamie Dimon – who is very good at his job – from creating massive social costs. The failures here – and they were colossal – were on the part of the people who ran the Federal Reserve, the Treasury, and associated agencies over the past 20 or so years.
Hopefully, these people will soon appear before the Commission.
Diamond owns the regulators and Congress. Simon knows this. Why did Simon not mention this factor of the problem?