Obama and Holder Are Closet Republicans

[NoTeaPartyPleez]

Jamie Dimon's Raise Proves U.S. Regulatory Strategy is a Joke
By MATT TAIBBI
POSTED: January 30, 12:55 PM ET

""""If you make a big show of punishing someone, and when you're done they still don't think they have a behavior problem, you probably picked the wrong punishment. Every parent on earth knows this implicitly – but does the Obama White House finally get it, too, now, after Jamie Dimon's raise?

When the board of JP Morgan Chase gave its blowdried, tirelessly self-regarding CEO a whopping 74 percent raise – after a year in which the Justice Department blasted the bank with $20 billion in sanctions – it was one of those rare instances where Main Street and Wall Street were mostly in agreement.""""

Jamie Dimon's Raise Proves U.S. Regulatory Strategy is a Joke | Matt Taibbi | Rolling Stone

 

[Stephanie]

Yeah, and I'm the frikken queen of England

 

[HelenaHandbag]

Democrats have always loved them some big Wall Street banksters.

Obama White House ?Full of Wall Street Executives??

 

[OKTexas]

If that is what passes as journalism in the pop culture universe then I'm not surprised this country is going to hell.

Think back during the supposed banking melt down, the feds begged and incentivized Chase to absorb Washington Mutual. Then years later justice comes back on Chase for the misdeeds of WaMu. Now the pound of flesh the feds exacted seems to be inadequate because the bank is still successful.

You dip shits really need to get over your class envy and get a real life.

 

[RandomVariable]

To paraphase a bit from the article
Jamie Dimon's Raise Proves U.S. Regulatory Strategy is a Joke | Matt Taibbi | Rolling Stone

Chase's responses to Holder's record penalties have been hilarious. Their first move was to make sure people outside the penthouse boardroom took on all the pain, laying off 7,500 employees and freezing salaries for the non-CEO class of line employees.

Next, Chase's board members sat down, put their misshapen heads together, considered the impact of this disastrous year of settlements, and decided to respond by more than doubling the take-home pay of the executive in charge, giving Dimon about $20 million in salary and equity.

...

So Eric Holder and his lieutenants thought they were getting tough on Chase by dropping a monster settlement on the firm, but actually all they did was a) inspire the company to punish thousands of low-level innocent employees, while b) doubly- or triply-reinforcing the mass-narcissistic delusion gripping the company's management that the bank's serial ethical violations – which ranged from providing see-no-evil banking services, to Bernie Madoff, to rigging retail electricity prices, to covering up billions in losses in the "London Whale" episode – were the fault of someone else.

Apparently the bank's board believed the Justice Department was simply caving in to anti-bank sentiment when it targeted Chase, not punishing real offenses. They seem to have decided their only "problem" was that the Justice Department lacked the political will to ignore the public's irrational cries for action.

...

In contrast, when the LIBOR scandal blew up in England, British authorities essentially removed Barclays CEO Bob Diamond from office right away, in addition to levying fines and other penalties. We never heard about Bob Diamond getting a raise after LIBOR because as far as the world is concerned, there is no more Bob Diamond. He could be on the moon for all we know. It's not jail, but it's still more of a punishment than Eric Holder dropped on Chase and Jamie Dimon.

Moreover, when the Royal Bank of Scotland got caught up in the same LIBOR scandal, British and European regulators basically set up a base camp in the bank's backside, forcing the company to disclose all of its dirty laundry via a merciless long-term cooperation agreement that has already led to the exposure of another major scandal, the foreign exchange manipulation case.

Meanwhile, in the U.S., Eric Holder drops a bunch of fines on the Chase corporate entity from 20,000 feet and then watches as bank leaders give themselves raises, force low-level underlings to pay the tab, and publicly denounce the settlements as undeserved. And get away with doing it.

...

Yes, that's tortured logic. But the whole point of this entire era of finance-sector corruption is that the leaders of these companies have not been logical. They've not only been depraved and antisocial from a corporate citizenship perspective, they haven't even acted in their own commerical interest.

People like Holder still don't understand that the leaders of these rogue firms have no problem blowing up their own companies and/or imperiling the world economy, so long as they continue to personally get paid.

...

In fact, since the days of Alan Greenspan and his halcyon dreams of a future of pure self-regulation, the notion that corporate leaders will always act in the interest of their own firms – that they'll behave according to the principled corporate egoism that was an article of faith both for Ayn Rand and acolytes like Greenspan – has been a core basis for broad policies of regulatory restraint.

...

But as we all know by now, when business leaders can get paid tens or hundreds of millions upfront for deals that take years to pan out (or not), when personal compensation isn't tied to the long-term performance of the company, executives will tend to leverage their firms to the hilt in search of short-term profits, and they won't think twice about zooming past safety thresholds. This is irrational behavior from a corporate perspective, sure, but totally rational from a personal-greed perspective.

For instance, the men who ran Lehman Brothers, or the unit of AIG that sank that company, each walked away with hundreds of millions, rich forever. Angelo Mozilo pulled $132 million out of Countrywide in 2008 alone, even as all the rotten subprime loans he'd written over the years were collapsing and his company was losing $704 million that year.

Ultimately even Greenspan conceded that individual greed trumps corporate greed. "Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholder's equity," he told the House after the 2008 crash, "are in a state of shocked disbelief."

 

[LogikAndReazon]

Obama was bought and paid for by wall street...the only ones shocked are the ignorant. Holders just a worthless racist communist

 

[Stephanie]

Obama was bought and paid for by wall street...the only ones shocked are the ignorant. Holders just a worthless racist communist

Both of them got where they are by using this country then turns around and spits on it and us by wanting to transform it and us into poverty, dependents of their government..

most corrupted administration I have lived under..Hope and change

 

[TemplarKormac]

Guh.

Matt Taibbi again. He hates women, remember?

Obama and Holder are as far from Republican as I am from being Liberal.

 

[Stephanie]

Thank gawd the people were wise enough to give the Republicans the house or we would be worse off with even MORE GOVERNMENT to pay for, with over 7% unemployment for five years, trillions stolen from us and doled out to his cronies, etc etc...

Maybe there is hope

poor progressive shrill whining over it is getting high pitched so what do they resort too, CLASS WARFARE as usual

 

[CrusaderFrank]

The federal government needs to get of the banking business