During a U.S. Senate Banking Committee meeting last Wednesday, Tea Party favorite Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) began the meeting by addressing the CEO of the world’ s largest bank, JP Morgan Chase (JPM), Jamie Dimon.
“I think we do need to recognize that you are a very big bank, the biggest in the world… we’ve seen, the laws and regulations are not necessarily improving things… I think a best practice — if we could do anything to encourage the industry to develop a lot of its own voluntary rules, that would guide us a lot better”.
Senator DeMint acknowledged that JPM lost $2 billion in the derivative market last year but dismissed this by stating, “It’s comforting to know that even with a $2 billion loss in a trade last year, your company still, I think, had a $19 billion profit.”
The $2 billion loss in derivatives is a drop in a bucket to JPM. Most American’s don’t understand derivatives, hedge-funding and other money-laundering enterprises which are practiced on a daily basis among the Wall Street elite, and since JPM isn’t disclosing details of the money-losing trading, we can comfort ourselves that they didn’t ask for another bail-out, right?
JPM has launched an internal investigation, regulators are swarming, and the Department of Justice has said it is pursuing a criminal probe. News of the $2 billion loss was announced in a brief press conference on May 14th. One would think that a U.S. Senate Committee Banking meeting held less than a month later would address this cataclysmic loss and the potential implications that such a loss might mean to a government who considers them “Too big to fail.” Instead, Senator DeMint seemed to poo-poo the loss by saying, “Periodically you’re going to have big losses and we need to look at that as part of doing business,” then the senator continued by asking Dimon for “Some ideas of what you think we need to do … to allow the industry to operate better.”
Apparently assigning the fox to be in charge of the henhouse is once again the strategy of our government when it comes to Wall Street Banksters. Sen.DeMint summed it up towards the end of the meeting: “So I guess if I could just leave you with any one thing, if you could come back this time next year and talk about how the industry has put together large-scale, best-practice committees, that would help us keep banking as a private enterprise rather than as a government institution.”
Yeah, come on back next year, and tell us how you all are going to regulate yourselves so that you don’t cause the American tax payers to have to bail you out again. Never mind that the bail-out was necessary because there had been a lack of bank regulation since the Glass-Steagall Act repeal in 1999. Never mind that reinstating the act would very likely have prevented the events leading to the need of the 2008 bailout of banks like it did in the interim after the Great Depression. Let’s not learn from history and do what we already know works. Our government has no idea how to regulate you and it’s obvious you guys are doing better than our lame government so let’s task a money-making machine under no one’s control, to self-regulate and do the right thing. It is crystal clear that Senator DeMint is on the side of the Wall Street money mongers. Where were the Democratic voices against the idea of bank self-regulation? What about the voices of regular Republicans? The Tea Party politicians are enabling the banksters to continue on without regulation playing their games of risk, and putting the American economy and people in jeopardy. I think it’s time for an old-fashioned fox hunt.
And here’s our new Bank President, Mr. Jesse James.