If you have any doubt about how gross and (dare I say) corrupt it has gotten in big banking, look no further than the latest news from Wall Street. Jamie Dimon, the wunderkind CEO of JP Morgan Chase, was forced to take a 50% pay cut because he presided over $$6,000,000,000 losses (it’s billion, I just wanted everyone to see how many zeros are involved) from risky derivative trades traced to a trader in the UK dubbed the “London Whale”.
https://www.latimes.com/
If you just read the headline without reading the story, you might feel as if corporate governance is getting serious and cracking down when banks play fast and loose with money they borrow from the government at nearly zero percent interest. Alas, that is hardly the case.
Jamie Dimon did take a pay cut: He will now have to get by on a meager $$11,500,000 ($$11.5 million) instead of the more reasonable $$23,000,000 he was being paid prior to the Board’s action. Poor baby; I wonder what sacrifices the Dimon household will need to make in the coming year to deal with the pay cut he has been forced to take at work.
This is the same bank that chases working Americans on credit card bills, expressing moral outrage that these people are somehow morally deficient because they struggle to pay 28% interest. Grotesque.