Jamie Dimon Crying Platinum Tears That Banks Have To Pay Money For Breaking Laws

Between 2013 and 2014, JPMorgan Chase, a shadowy banking cabal, paid some $14 billion with a b in legal costs stemming from various criminal enterprises the company willfully engaged in to make money. So of course the bank's CEO, Jamie Dimon, took his lumps and was very humble and chastened, right? Wrong! 

"Banks are under assault," Dimon said on a conference call with reporters on Wednesday, responding to a question about the bank's legal costs.

"We have five or six regulators coming at us on every issue."

What do you call someone who breaks laws, then complains that they're "under assault" when held to account for their crimes? A whiny blowhard? A big old baby-person? A "Jamie Dimon," perhaps?

Jamie "Jamie Dimon" Dimon went on to say:

"Obviously companies make mistakes. We try to resolve it, we try to fix it, we admit it,"

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Sometimes a young company gets a little rowdy, sowing its wild oats in the foreign exchange markets. Who among us hasn't helmed a massive financial institution that manipulated the LIBOR rate in a rush of hormones and sweet cash, then denied having any knowledge of what happened? Mistakes were made. By the company of course, not the people running it. Heavens no. That's not how banking works, which you might not realize unless you're as knowledgeable as Jamie Richard Nixon Whiny Lying Persecution Complex Man-Child Dimon.

In all, this is another data point against the notion, ascendant on the left, that the Obama administration is "the same as Bush" on Wall Street regulation. No, Obama didn't nationalize the banks, and people who probably should have been charged with crimes after the 2008 crash weren't. But "five or six regulators coming at us on every issue" (if true) doesn't exactly sound like a picnic. Which banks paid billion-dollar fines under Bush? Which president signed Dodd-Frank, which is working even after some horse trading in the CRomnibus spending bill stripped out the push-out rule? Wall Street is again contributing to Republicans 2-to-1 after briefly giving equally to both parties. You think they're doing that "just because?"

[ Reuters / NYT / Marginal Revolution / HuffPo ]

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