On the News With Thom Hartmann: A Federal Judge Has Rejected the Mandatory Drug Testing of Welfare Recipients, and More. Why Aren't Big Bankers in Jail? (Photo: Daniel Arauz / Flickr)The man in charge of a bank that engaged in massive mortgage fraud chatted with a corporate media host (CNBC Squawk on the Street, 7/12/13) about the fact that virtually none of those who enriched themselves while eviscerating the life savings of many blameless people, derailing the US economy along the way, have faced criminal prosecution: Jim Cramer: Shouldn't they have indicted somebody who actually did bad things in banking? JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon: I think if someone did something wrong, they should go to jail.Cramer: Well, who did? Who went to jail? Dimon: One of the great things about America, failure is not illegal or wrong. You can't just say it failed. But I do think America looked at the crisis—and this is too bad—and there was no, anywhere, Old Testament justice.
What they saw is people got overpaid—and some of these people lost all their money, their reputation, all that. Wiser heads must prevail. SIDEBAR:An Unarrestable Class? Hundreds of thousands march against austerity in Portugal. Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets of Lisbon and other Portuguese cities Saturday to protest against the government's austerity measures aimed at rescuing the debt-hit eurozone nation. The rallies were organised by a non-political movement which claimed 500,000 marched in the country's capital and another 400,000 in the main northern city of Porto. There have been no official estimates of the crowds. But the mood of the crowd was clearly political, calling for new elections with banners declaring "Portugal to the polls! " and "If you fall asleep in a democracy, you wake up in a dictatorship". Another banner showed a picture of centre-right Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho with the caption: "Today I am in the street, tomorrow it will be you.
" Portugal was granted a financial rescue package worth 78 billion euros ($103 billion) in May 2011, in exchange for a pledge to straighten out its finances via austerity measures and economic reforms. bir/boc/jhb. Obama Signs Wall Street/Corporate Backed "Jobs Act": A “Recipe for Fraud” And Job Destruction. FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE April 5, 2012 Institute for Public Accuracy (IPA) “JOBS Act” a “Recipe for Fraud” Creating a “Race to the Bottom” WASHINGTON - April 5 - WILLIAM K. BLACK, blackw at umkc.edu Available for a limited number of interviews, Black is now an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri, Kansas City and the author of “The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One.”
He was the deputy staff director of the national commission that investigated the cause of the savings and loan debacle. Black recently wrote an open letter signed by several noted analysts: “The JOBS Act is so Criminogenic that it Guarantees Full-Time Jobs for Criminologists,”states: “As white-collar criminologists (and a former financial regulator and enforcement head) and experts in ferreting out sophisticated financial frauds, our careers and research focus on financial fraud by the world’s most elite private sector criminals and their political cronies. Read the full article at: Jamie Dimon Just Pulled The Ultimate Power Move On Ben Bernanke. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon To Defend Bank's Size. * Bank's shares have lagged stock market, smaller firms * Analyst questions value of being a big, global bank * Investors want evidence spending will deliver growth * Dimon to make his case at investor day on Tuesday By David Henry NEW YORK, Feb 27 (Reuters) - With the financial crisis in the rear-view mirror, investors and analysts are turning their attention to JPMorgan Chase & Co's languishing stock price, setting the stage for a tough investors meeting on Tuesday for Chief Executive Jamie Dimon and his team.
At least one widely followed Wall Street analyst has raised questions about whether it makes sense for the largest U.S. bank to be so big, pointing out that more narrowly focused financial institutions are fetching higher stock valuations for shareholders. Although JPMorgan's shares have done better than other global banks, its stock traded on Monday at just pennies more than in 2004, when Dimon joined the company after it took over Bank One Corp where he was previously CEO.
So Much for the Dimon-Obama Bromance. On Monday, Jamie Dimon, Chairman, President, and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, and therefore one of the most important bankers in the world, had some not so kind things to say about economic policies of recent years. Dimon, whose strong early support of Barack Obama was often termed a "bromance," recently had a private meeting with Mitt Romney, perhaps emblematic of Wall Street's sense of betrayal by a candidate they supported aggressively with votes and cash.
They should have known better, but at least they've learned their lesson: Barack Obama is what he is, and your cash doesn't change that. Dimon dodged the question of his not supporting Barack Obama in this election season. Dimon's comments make no partisan references and his frustration seems bipartisan, including with the "debt ceiling crisis" and with the lack of certainty around tax policy. Still, most of these issues are the fault and policy of Democrats and the Obama administration. It's Official, A Former Tim Geithner Aide Has Replaced Lucas Van Praag At Goldman.
» Obama Requests a $1.2 Trillion Debt Ceiling Increase - Big Government. The world according to Goldman Sachs. Wall Street Braces for Weak 4th-Quarter Earnings. Daniel Acker/Bloomberg NewsLloyd C. Blankfein, chief executive of Goldman Sachs, which had a drop in client trading revenue. For most Wall Street bankers, 2011 was a year they would rather forget. Investors will soon find out just how bad that year was for the country’s biggest financial institutions. In recent days, analysts have been lowering their fourth-quarter earnings estimates for Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup and Bank of America.
Analysts are also bracing for lower earnings from JPMorgan Chase, which on Friday will be the first of the Wall Street banks to report results. “It’s likely 2011 will be the worst year for revenue growth for the banks since 1938, and so far 2012 isn’t feeling much better,” said Michael Mayo, an analyst with Crédit Agricole Securities and the author of the recently published book “Exile on Wall Street: One Analyst’s Fight to Save the Big Banks from Themselves.”
With business sluggish, Wall Street banks have been chopping staff and expenses. Blog » Blog Archive » The Worst of the Worst — America’s Greediest. Lamar Wilkerson and his co-workers at U.S. Steel’s Fairfield Tubular Operations help to lead the battle for America’s energy security, producing the top-quality pipe that keeps oil, natural gas and other products flowing through vast distribution networks. But as workers at the Alabama plant labor to build out this critical infrastructure, they face an insidious threat. Foreign countries quietly dump cheap tubular goods in U.S. markets, putting their jobs and the nation’s safety at risk. Fortunately, workers can count on pro-union officials like U.S. Reps. Frank Mrvan of Indiana and Tim Ryan of Ohio to stand with them in the fight for fair trade. Just last week, the United Steelworkers (USW) and congressional allies won key protections for the Fairfield workers—and their counterparts at other pipe manufacturers across the country—with a U.S.
“We want to keep everything American made,” explained Wilkerson, president of USW Local 1013, which represents hundreds of workers at Fairfield.
Goldman Sachs switches allegiance to Mitt Romney—Charles Gasparino. Goldman Sachs may be the most hated firm on Wall Street, vilified by protesters and banking rivals alike, but one reason the firm has so many detractors is envy of its uncanny ability to bet on winners. This year, the firm appears to be betting on Mitt Romney. Keep in mind Goldman’s track record. Well before the financial crisis, it successfully bet against all that toxic subprime-mortgage debt, a move that spared it the worst ravages of the banking collapse in 2008. Around the same time, it also rolled the dice on a US senator from Illinois named Barack Obama winning the Democratic nomination and then the presidency. Which makes the firm’s bet this election cycle all the more interesting. “Goldman Sachs will not support Obama,” the firm’s CEO, Lloyd Blankfein, muttered at a recent dinner. It was a meeting with the CEO of Blackrock, Larry Fink, himself another of Wall Street’s top Obama boosters back in 2008.
Blankfein has apparently found his pick.