JP Morgan Chase is heading towards a $13 billion fine, plus:
While the deal would put those civil cases to rest, it would not save JPMorgan from a parallel criminal inquiry from federal prosecutors in California, the people briefed on the talks said. Under the terms of the preliminary deal, the people said, the bank would also have to assist prosecutors with an investigation into former employees who helped create the mortgage investments.
JP Morgan has set aside $9.2 billion in legal fees for its various troubles, and has budgeted $23 billion for litigation and settlement costs overall.. I just turned on Meet the Republicans for a few minutes and Maria Bartiromo informed me that this kind of over-regulation is killing the economy. Looking at these numbers, it’s obviously that if JPM didn’t have to deal with pesky regulators and fines, they could do so much more good for our economy than they’ve already done in the last half-dozen or so years.
WereBear
Damn! I know it’s “too little, too late” for the firebaggers, but I relish this kind of retribution.
I have two different friends with small businesses that tanked because of what they did to the economy. Lifelong dreams left shattered. Retirements vanished. Families living on the edge of poverty.
Then there’s my mother, who walked away from her underwater home.
This is actually a fine that they might feel.
Napoleon
Did you actually turn on MTP and MB said that?
aimai
You know about the apocryphal tribe that doesn’t really have numbers, they just count 1,2,3…many? I get the feeling that to (too) many people in this country, especially on the right, that this is basically as high as they can count. Millions in government spending are overvalued, billions in corporate profits are undervalued. This is how we get to people becoming hysterical over a few million in social spending who don’t bat an eye at billions in profits.
dpm (dread pirate mistermix)
@Napoleon: Yes. It was something about over-regulation keeping business on the sidelines not investing in the economy, with JPM as the example.
Alex S.
Let me put on my conspiracy hat…. The Goldman Sachs people in the government want to punish their closest competitor. Otherwise I cannot explain how such a relatively massive blow against Big Finance came to happen.
Wag
OT, but has anyone else noticed that the same generation, the Baby Boomers, that blew up the Democratic party is the 1970’s and 1980’s, is the same generation blowing up the GOP today? What is it about the Baby Boomers that leads to their self defined purity, whether on the Left or on the Right?
BGinCHI
@dpm (dread pirate mistermix): What??
It’s not “regulation” at all. It’s criminal activity. Illegal.
They are lucky they aren’t doing time.
It’s too much to ask that those shows put on people who could talk about how much damage those fuckers have done to people across the country. I’m honestly amazed people haven’t been murdering those bank execs.
BGinCHI
@Wag: Worst. Generation. Ever.
Born on 3rd base and thought they hit a triple, etc.
JPL
@dpm (dread pirate mistermix): Did she complain about the others using food stamps cuz they are lazy.
Mino
@Wag: They were a damn sight smarter in their twenties than they are in their sixties.
c u n d gulag
@BGinCHI:
No.
They all think they hit a home run, and the umpire stopped them at third base.
Wag
@Mino:
I would have to disagree. Their destruction of the Democratic brand led directly to Reagan an all that has followed.
some guy
and the California criminal case against JPMorganChase continues. I won’t be happy until Dimon is behind bars.
aimai
@Wag: Oh for christ’s sake. When this generation is in power you will find exactly the same mix of crazy as in the baby boomers. There is nothing new under the sun.
magurakurin
@Wag:
being a member of Generation Jones, which is technically a Boomer same as Obama by the way, I have often through my life gotten a little miffed with my older brothers and sisters in the Boomer generation, but this comment is unfair.
The people on mobility scooters with “government hands off my Medicare,” are not Boomers, as the Boomers are just now hitting 65. They are members of the Silent Generation. And Ted Cruz was born in 1970 so he isn’t in our number…he is a Gen Xer.
seriously, not. baby. boomers.
dpm (dread pirate mistermix)
@JPL: I can only watch a few minutes of those shows every couple of months, so maybe she did after I turned it off.
some guy
@Wag:
never seen a “Both sides do it” put in quite those terms. bravo.
Mike in NC
The Villagers will never let go of the government “over-regulation” and the corollary about “business uncertainty” bullshit that they’ve been selling for the past 30 years. It’s all about greed.
BGinCHI
@aimai: True. But it makes the blame game less fun.
BGinCHI
@c u n d gulag: Win.
Napoleon
@dpm (dread pirate mistermix): She is such a dumb fuck piece of crap.
Alexandra
@magurakurin:
Boomers? Those of us born in 63-65, the supposed Generation Jones, don’t usually care about Boomer culture, politics movies and music. Our first memories are in the late 60s-early 70s. Speaking only for myself, feel closer to Gen X.
It was my parent’s generation, now in their early 80s that grew up during the war and reaped the benefit of broad-based post-war prosperity. I had just turned 17 when Reagan won in Nov ’80… and he (and Thatcher) didn’t mean a shit to me.
Hate the Boomer bracket in the sense that it’s far too broad to be meaningful.
dr. luba
@Mino:
Same generation, different sub-group. Let us not forget that most Boomers weren’t Hippies and didn’t go to Woodstock. This is the revenge of Nixon’s “Silent Majority.”
dr. luba
@Alexandra:
Ditto. I’m from 1958, and missed out on the sixties (I was in grade school and junior high). Barely remember the Kennedy assassination, and by the time I was a teen, it was discos, polyester and conformity.
WereBear
Totally agree. Going through primary school in the fifties and teens in the sixties is a totally different animal than primary in the sixties and teens in the seventies.
Roger Moore
@BGinCHI:
But it’s only criminal because our overzealous regulatory state makes it a crime. If we just legalized fraud, we could end white collar crime at a stroke!
Mino
I guess the incrementalists would forgo these social movements.of the 70’s….In the 21st century historians have increasingly portrayed the decade as a “pivot of change” in world history focusing especially on the economic upheavals.[1] In the Western world, social progressive values that began in the 1960s, such as increasing political awareness and political and economic liberty of women, continued to grow. The hippie culture, which started in the latter half of the 1960s, waned by the early 1970s and faded towards the middle part of the decade, which involved opposition to the Vietnam War, opposition to nuclear weapons, the advocacy of world peace, and hostility to the authority of government and big business. The environmentalist movement began to increase dramatically in this period.
Tripod
</[email protected]c u n d gulag:
Look at this—an entire generation of Cinderellas, and there’s no glass slipper…..
dmbeaster
Traffic tickets nationwide are annually somewhere between 25 to 50 million in total (no one knows for sure), and represents estimated fines of between 3.75 to 7.5 billion (National Motorists Association). It is that kind of over-regulation that is killing the economy.
John O
Only jail will satisfy me with this organized crime syndicate.
Botsplainer
In related news, in an Austin Hill article in Clownhall, anybody who objects to retailers staying open all day Thanksgiving because they want to see retail-employed relatives is a dirty, filthy commie who wants the terrorists to win.
http://m.townhall.com/columnists/austinhill/2013/10/20/really-american-retailers-at-war-with-the-american-family-n1728096?utm_source=thdaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl
geg6
@dr. luba:
Hey, me too! ’58 was a very good year.
Though I remember quite clearly the Kennedy assassination. The funeral was on my birthday and I was in kindergarten. It was my first real awareness of a political event. But my parents were pretty politically aware and I had some much older siblings who probably had an effect on my seeing it as a political event. My mom was sure it was the Birchers and never really wavered from that. Oliver Stone would have loved her conspiracy theory.
ETA: And yes, I may technically be a Boomer, but my experiences were not at all like those of my older brothers and sisters.
WereBear
@Botsplainer: Yeah. Because heaven knows there aren’t enough shopping days in the year.
fuckwit
Someone who is religious (I’m an atheist, and proud to not have Invisible Sky Buddies to deal with) posted this elsewhere, and I thought, wow, how can you get any more clear liberal/progressive values than this?
Apparently, the above comes from one religion or another. Whodathunkit?
Suffern ACE
@magurakurin: yeah. The TEA party isn’t nearly as old as we’d like to think. What the TEA party sounds like is a bunch of guys around my age who were young republicans in college and listened to Too much Limbaugh. These are Reagan babies using the same Ollie North loving ethics they picked up in study hall.
amk
Wanna bet this would have happened under a mittbot regime?
Frankensteinbeck
Back to the OP, I was hoping but didn’t dare expect this. The process that caused the crash was completely legal, so that couldn’t be prosecuted. It was in the details that I hoped the government could nail them. The short-sighted, greedy gaming the system thinking they displayed can’t help itself. Even if their primary scheme has been rigged perfectly so it’s not a crime, they just have to, oh, do a little tax fraud on the side, or throw in some inside trading or ignore legal limits on what they can sell. They have to wring that extra 10% out of the score, until it gets them in trouble.
That’s what I hoped would be true, anyway. Seems like it was.
Kay
That’s Ruth Marcus but I think it’s weird and horrible when pundits all adopt the same word- “trims” (or, “trimming”). This is their new phrase, “trim entitlements”.
I know it’s to a certain extent a closed circle so maybe it’s inevitable they all use EXACTLY the same language but it still bothers me.
I guess I should be happy. They could have continued to drop the word “reform” in front of everything. Maybe “reform” is over as a pundit-word. Thank God.
MomSense
This “over-regulation is killing the economy” is one of those zombie economic assumptions (lies) that we just can’t seem to kill. You don’t even need to go back and look at the last 100 years of economic data to know that Bartiromo’s statement is demonstrably false. We are still trying to recover from the Great Recession which was caused by the lack of adequate regulation.
fuckwit
@Wag: It’s not.The insane bomb-throwing nihilistic morons belong to my generation, sorry to say. We are sadly responsible for giving the world hair metal, grunge, the dot-com boom, Rand Paul, Paul Ryan, Ted Cruz, Sarah Palin, etc. I have to guess that we are on balance one of the greediest, most glibertarian, most self-centered generations ever to have lived.
So it’s not the same PEOPLE, but it’s the same ATTITUDE: revolution, maaaaan! Except without the sense of social justice that distinguished the hippie geneneration.
Frankensteinbeck
@fuckwit:
For centuries, all over the Western world and in several languages, that kind of behavior was explicitly referred to as ‘the Christian thing to do’. They may not have lived up to it, but at least the religion was officially about kindness as the greatest virtue. The last three generations have nearly annihilated that, both in American fundamentalist protestantism and Roman Catholicism. They don’t even pay lip service to it anymore. I don’t know why, since it’s clearly broader than the racial tensions in America.
Frank J. Parnell
I transcribed the exchange from MTP:
David Gregory: I wanted to introduce something, Maria, we talk about the accomplishments in the administration, that second term agenda. Part of that agenda, we’re seeing played out real time with this big news people are waking up to about JP Morgan. A huge settlement, $13 billion with a “B” in a tentative deal with JP Morgan to settle a lot of the civil litigation that responds to whether they sold subprime loans into the marketplace to Fannie and Freddie. But this goes to a larger point, which is this reckoning for Wall St which is finally happening, that a lot of liberals have been cheering for.
Maria Bartiromo: Yeah, I think that reckoning continues. I think this is worse than people expected, a lot of people thought it was $11 billion, it ended up at thirteen. Also very important here is they did not do away with the possibility of criminality. This is a major issue.
Gregory: This is JP Morgan. This is Jamie Dimon as CEO, who was viewed, frankly, as one of the most responsible players in the whole subprime mess. Did not need federal bailout money, was a leader, did things the gov’t wanted him to do in buying Washington Mutual and Bear Stearns, and yet… they become a big target here.
Bartiromo: Well, this has been one of the repercussions of the financial crisis, and that is, uh, the pendulum swinging a little far in terms of.. regulation. And this is the cost of business, and this is one of the reasons businesses sits on cash and is not creating jobs, because they’re worried… what’s around the corner? As far as JP Morgan is concerned, this is going to be a big negative, I would say, because of that opening up to massive amounts of civil lawsuits and more lawsuits as a result of this potential for criminality. But certainly the regulation bite has become a lot bigger, and that has been a big issue for business and that has kept business in its place in terms of the ability to hire more people.
MattF
@magurakurin: Agree. Cruz, e.g., is certainly no boomer. Actual boomers are just now finding that the money in their 401(k) accounts generally will not support them for the next 30 years, and are the ones who are, right now, directly threatened by attempts to destabilize Social Security. People who always blame the boomers need a better concept of who their friends are.
fuckwit
@Kay: Ever gone in to a barber/hairdresser for a “trim”? You walk out looking like a sheep that’s just been through the spring shorn.
Citizen_X
@dr. luba:
That. In Nixonland, Perlstein points out that Nixon actually won the youth vote. Those people are the core of your Teabaggers.
Frankensteinbeck
As for the age debate, I just googled it. It looks like the very large plurality – 46% are 45-64, which makes them baby boomers. 12% are older than that. Only 20% are below 30.
I’m offering no analysis with those numbers, I just thought it would be helpful to look them up for the debate.
fuckwit
@MomSense: The Zombie in this case is one Ronald Wilson Reagan.
WereBear
What a shill.
As I explain to political newbies of any age, it is so difficult to get a law passed, and the entities involved are so resistant to responsibility, that every single rule should be looked at with the understanding that someone suffered horribly because it wasn’t there.
And because it is there now, many someones have not.
MomSense
@fuckwit:
One person’s zombie is another person’s saint.
The Pale Scot
@BGinCHI:
Luck’s got nothing to do with it, it’s called regulatory capture.
If corporations are people, then it should be possible to incarcerate them by defining who makes up the corporation. The logical choice is everyone whose title begins with “Vice” on up get’s some time plus a felony their record rendering them unable to be approved by the SEC for certain things. What should happen is that they get charged with economic terrorism and sent to Gitmo in a C-130 shackled and with a hood over their head. The TBTF banks are putting unsecured mortgages into tranches again etc. Another financial crisis will happen as a result of their failure to understand they can’t own ALL of the economy.
fuckwit
@John O: This is why I’m totally an Elizabeth Warren fan. You just know she wanted to say “why is too big to fail too big to jail?” but thought that was a bit too strong and presumptive (and disrespectful to due process), and toned it down to “I’m concerned that too big to fail has become too big to prosecute”. Doesn’t have quite the same zing to it. But I have a strong intuition that if she had the power to actually put the MOTU’s in jail, she’d do it.
Botsplainer
@Frank J. Parnell:
Under my model tax code, if you’re an investment bank and don’t dump at least 90% of your gains and dividends into a mix of 80% equities and 20% triple a bonds within 60 days of receipt, then they’re taxed at a 70% rate.
gelfling545
Aside from being a rather simplistic argument, here’s a really good way to alienate your allies: decide that it must be all their generation’s fault. Sadly we will be unable to see whom you can blame and what wonders you will bring about when we are gone.
Kay
@fuckwit:
It just doesn’t inspire confidence that they’re all reaching these conclusions independently if they’re all using the exact same set of words. They ruined the word “reform” so I knew that was headed for the scrap heap. “Reform” means everything from “improve” to “completely destroy and replace”.
BruceFromOhio
@Alexandra: This is the most succinct expression of context I’ve seen of that age-generation category. It was 1984 before I realized we were getting sold a burning bag of dogshit with Reagan. MrsFromOhio and I both self-identify more with Gen X than anyone else.
@some guy: Word.
Napoleon
@Citizen_X: So did Reagan (I was 19 when he ran against Carter) and that cohort has remained Rep my entire life.
fuckwit
@Frankensteinbeck: Nah dude, those buckets are too coarse. The nihlist teabaggers are mostly my generation: 40-50. The boomers are the Bush/Clinton generation, which was 10-20 years before us. They’re not the ones doing the most damage right now.
Mr Stagger Lee
@Alexandra: But sadly among us there are a bunch those who never outgrew their Alex Keaton phase and still think that Reagan was their FDR never mind that our group is getting slammed the hardest between being too old to hire and a GOP/Ryan plan to slash benefits for retirement, and making it harder to get those benefits. The Teabag movement has at least 10-20 years left of true believers, I feel sadly.
fuckwit
@Mr Stagger Lee: Thanks, that’s exactly who Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Paul Ryan, and Sarah Palin remind me of: Alex Keaton. Suspender-wearing College Republicans worshipping Reagan and wanting to grow up to be Gordon Gecko.
WereBear
For example, Flammable Fabrics Act of 1967:
It started in the forties, when rayon started being used for cheap, trendy, kid’s clothes. Toddlers were blowing out their birthday candles in their new cowboy pajamas and being incinerated in front of the whole family.
SiubhanDuinne
@Botsplainer:
I learned from that article that one-third of the American people aren’t working at all, and that FDR was Hoover’s predecessor as President.
Also, what WereBear said.
handsmile
That the Justice Department is engaged in “political persecution” against JP Morgan has been bleated by Wall Street apologists and courtesans for some time. Earlier this week as well, the faithful servants of the editorial board of Amazon Prime Daily whined about it:
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/post-granny-bashers-are-whining-for-jp-morgan?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+beat_the_press+(Beat+the+Press)
As for Maria Bartiromo’s perspective on the matter, one need only review her now-viral performance against the heretical views of the profoundly UnSerious Alex Pareene on the virtues of Jamie Dimon. Here’s Felix Salmon on that exchange:
http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2013/09/29/the-jp-morgan-apologists-of-cnbc/
Bartiromo would be the ideal partner for Dancin’ Dave for this morning’s pas de deux on financial regulation.
BruceFromOhio
@WereBear: That’s the invisible hand of the free market at work. Best step back a little!
Crouchback
@Suffern ACE:
Not on average. There are young Tea party types, but studies and surveys back up Matt Taibbi’s observation – the Tea party skews older than average. See this (oldish) survey – http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/15/us/politics/15poll.html?_r=0. The most conservative part of the electorate is over 65 (Silent Generation). Next is Gen X, so you’ve got a point about the guys who grew up idolizing Reagan & Ollie North.
Baby Boomers lean toward the Democrats and get a bad rap in my opinion. They entered the job market just as income started to stagnate and because of their sheer numbers faced intense competition for positions in society. Starting in the early 1980s they had to pay more in entitlement taxes supposedly to keep the system going for them, but now Tom Friedman and his gang wants to screw them over because someone has to pay for the Iraq war. They missed out on pensions. And the economy tanked just as they approached retirement. The Silent Generation & Gen X are more obnoxious in my opinion. Yes they dominated popular culture for decades but as George R R Martin pointed out, that’s an inevitable consequence of their sheer numbers.
PsiFighter37
Maria Bartiromo can go pound sand. Easily one of the dumbest, shallowest airheads on a channel full of them at CNBC. No gravitas, loves to talk to people with money, loves the company. Has zero reason to be famous, except she was the first person (and first woman) to report from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. They did a ’20th Anniversary’ show for her on Friday that made me puke in my mouth a little, and then she thanked, most of all, the ‘millions of investors’ who watch her show. I doubt CNBC even cracks a million at any point in the day outside of the trading floors that always have the TVs turned on to the channel.
Of the people on CNBC, the only ones that annoy me more are Kudlow, Michelle Caruso-Cabrera, Joe Kernan, and Rick Santelli. Okay, so the whole channel basically sucks. Only John Harwood and Steve Liesman are tolerable for any stretch of time.
debbie
Maria, if your pals had proven themselves worthy of our trust, JPMorgan wouldn’t be where they are today with the DOJ.
mai naem
@Napoleon: Yes Maria Antoinette Baritromo did say that. And nobody on the panel including Ej Dionne and Mrs. Greenspan said a thing. If Maria Bartiromo was literally walking across Wall Street and got hit by a cab I am sure she would want nothing to happen to the cab driver because 1/the cab driver should not be regulated with driving regulations and 2/if the cab driver got stopped from driving it would affect his income. I’m reading Maria correctly right?
SiubhanDuinne
@Kay:
Especially in light of Ari Shapiro’s little hissy fit at the WH press briefing the other day because Jay Carney was using a word (“ransom”) that didn’t “serve [the media’s] purposes.”
mai naem
@handsmile: Don’t forget Maria on MSNBC(on Dylan Ratigan?) with Anthony Weiner(!) during the ACA fight. Weiner’s talking about all the virtues of Medicare and Maria turns to him and says “Well, if it’s so great how come you’re not on it?” I’m telling you Maria colors her hair auburn because inside she’s all blonde bimbo.
Botsplainer
@SiubhanDuinne:
Only the highest editorial standards apply at Clownhall.
gene108
One of the weird things about this is a lot of the securities JP Morgan is getting dinged for are from the government pushing them to acquire Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual to prevent the financial industry from blowing up in March 2008.
JP Morgan had its own share of bad securities, but the scale would’ve been smaller without the Bear Sterans or WaMu deals, so the level of wrong doing would’ve been lower.
pcpablo
No Bartiromo, it’s criminal enterprises like JP Morgan that are ruining the country, and our weak (and growing, hopefully) regulations that are saving it!
Napoleon
@Crouchback:
I am the absolute poster person for this at 52. I graduated from school and started working right when that deal hit. I have for a long time earned in the neighberhood of the FICA tax cut off and the last few elections there has been a push by the Rep, Peter Peterson’s lackies and the Wa Po editorial page to take guaranteed benefits away from those under 55. My whole voting life the government as actively attempted to stick it to people like me both coming and going.
jefft452
@WereBear: “that every single rule should be looked at with the understanding that someone suffered horribly because it wasn’t there.”
+1
The Pale Scot
@BruceFromOhio: Hell man, I was 17 in 1980 and have always looked at it as this.
In the primary the Rep voters had a choice between an accomplished worldly man who had run the CIA, been an ambassador, versus a guy who spun economic fantasies he didn’t understand and even then was confusing reality with roles he played in movies, the actor won. Then the all the voters had a choice between that guy and the navel officer who commanded the reactor rooms in nuclear submarines ad was a Baptist minister. They choose the actor, and so our long national nightmare began.
The choice was between an astrology following Medicare hating Hollywood actor or a naval officer to lead the country. I never did make peace with that.
piratedan
have to remember that those CNBC types don’t look at the world in the same way that we do… the number one overriding concern is profit, did they make a profit and thereby benefit shareholders… everything else is a distant second. They don’t care about what the business does, the type of products, the quality of those products, how many are employed, who was laid off, who could be laid off or how any of that affects anything else. Did you make a profit, Y/N and if so, did you make ENOUGH profit Y/N that coincides with what CNBC thought you should make.
Kay
@SiubhanDuinne:
The Toledo Blade did a series of interview clips with voters in NW Ohio. Two reps voted against opening the government and raising the debt ceiling. The Toledo Blade has apparently just noticed the neither of these people are “moderates”. Latta hasn’t been a “moderate” since the day his (first) campaign as a moderate ended, but years later this is just coming clear to them.
I think ordinary people “got” the basic outlines of the fight. It broke down along the lines one would expect. Some (disgusted) liberals, Democrats and moderate Republicans and then a coupla Tea Partiers who were insisting this was a great idea. “Ransom” or no ransom, they got it.
Spin can only carry one so far :)
jefft452
@mai naem:
Best part of that
Wiener: “because I’m not 65”
MB: (rolls eyes) “Oh come on”
aimai
@Frank J. Parnell: I hate this “hiring new people” thing–the kinds of business we are talking about are not in the business of hiring a lot of new people. The profits that they make are not invested in hiring people at all. The profits go to the owners and the top shareholders, not to the employees lower down.
Kay
@SiubhanDuinne:
We have a candidate to challenge Latta as a result of the shutdown. That’s what inspired him to run. I don’t know if he’ll BE the candidate, but despite all the talk about The Fifty State Strategy it is really difficult to find Democrats to run against strong Republicans. It’s no fun running for Congress ten points behind. It’s hugely time-consuming and exhausting and the chances of getting elected are slim. Anyway, that’s one good thing that happened as a result of this.
MomSense
@Kay:
When I was in college I worked at the in that served as the press HQ for the HW Bush vacation. They are in a closed loop of gossip and covet access to the powerful. I used to fuck with them and start rumors just to see if I could figure out how the loop worked. One of my jobs was to make copies of the daily press briefing that the press secretary faxed over every morning. I used to read it and make a list of questions I would ask if given the chance. They never even picked up their copies of the darned thing.
Villago Delenda Est
Jamie Dimon needs to go to Federal pound-you-in-the-ass prison.
Forever.
WereBear
@aimai: Now listen, a lot of well-paid people worked somewhat hard to craft a seemingly-sensible argument for brainless shills to remember and regurgitate!
:)
MomSense
@fuckwit:
I thought that they looked at the demographics of the tea party and found that 60-65% were receiving Medicare and Social Security. That was also my observation when I went to view some of their rallies.
Villago Delenda Est
@Wag:
It’s in the name…”BOOM”!
Thank you. I’ll be here off and on all day. Try the veal!
gene108
@Citizen_X:
So did Reagan.
Bill E Pilgrim
Good grief. So the story is about JP Morgan being criminals and being fined for it, and so far here people are using the news to bash anyone over 45, “firebaggers”, and… after that I lost track.
Some people are actually blaming JP Morgan and their spokesperson embed defender at CNBC.
mai naem
@gene108: Jamie Dimon wanted WaMu for all the bank branches they would get. WaMu was most certainly not forced on JPM by the feds.
Anoniminous
@handsmile:
Have an easier time convincing the American Jewish Orthodox Convention of the virtues of bacon cheeseburgers than pounding economic reality into the talking heads at CNBC.
Villago Delenda Est
@Mike in NC:
Thus my nym.
Wipe them out. All of them.
LosGatosCA
Jackass in a skirt.
Comrade Jake
Every once in awhile I’ll catch Maria and her cohorts on CNBC. The channel is worse than Fox, IMO. Everyone knows Fox is a Republican PR wing. But CNBC? Far more subtle with the bias.
Someone was on the network making the argument that Jamie Dimon really should be fired, and the rest of the panel was looking at him like he had three heads. I mean, just look at JP Morgan’s stock price!!!
Ruckus
@WereBear:
We don’t really know each other but you can add me to that list. So that’s three that you know.
Having owned a small business that went under due to the recession I can tell you that I saw many others do the same. At one point my business was the only occupant in my building and it stayed that way for a year. Everyone else left one by one over about 5 months. One moved into her home after shedding all but one employee and one downsized by over half. But the others just closed. And that was one small building and that was repeated over and over.
Villago Delenda Est
@Botsplainer:
Well, the problem with “work” is it applies now to a great deal of wanking. The advertising industry, for example, isn’t really an industry at all. It’s a full scale wankfest.
The necessary work to actually keep most of the country alive is rather small, with automation and high productivity. So the rest of us have to “make work” in order to “earn a living”.
The whole thing is utterly ridiculous…a treadmill to keep people occupied who could not otherwise figure out what to do. And for others to of course exploit.
fuckwit
@BruceFromOhio: The invisible hand is what pimp-slaps you when you don’t bring it money.
Mike G
@Anoniminous:
CNBC doesn’t have journalists, it has salespeople. They aren’t there to discern truth, they are there specifically to sell a financial product, a corporatist-flattering fairytale, an ideology.
It’s a performance to get you to buy what they’re selling, and has no more relationship to truth than the spiel of a car salesman.
Fair Economist
Boomers aren’t the core of the Tea Party, Silents are. Generations roughly alternate in their political alignments: Greatest leaned Democratic, Silents Republican, Boomers Democratic, Gen X Republican, and Millenials Democratic. Of course there are a lot of Boomer Tea Partiers because the Silents were a much smaller generation, a fair number of them are now dead, and no generation is monolithic. I think it’s telling that the Tea Party leadership seems to be mostly Gen X, though.
Personally I’m Generation Jones (65) and I can’t really identify with any generation. For pop culture, I like Gen X; politically I’m closest to Millenials; for high culture I’m a pre-video throwback.
Anya
@Frank J. Parnell:What about the people and the lives they’ve destroyed you sociopathic twit. Bartiromo’s whole career is based on cheer leading for Wall St, distorting facts, and defending the rich and powerful, despite the clear evidence against them. I bet you she didn’t even bother to read anything relating to this case. She doesn’t need facts, the fact that they’re rich, powerful and greedy as fuck is enough for her.
handsmile
@Comrade Jake:
That “someone” was Salon’s Alex Pareene several weeks ago (see my comment #62 above). If interested, take a moment to read Pareene’s self-critique of his CNBC appearance/joust:
http://www.salon.com/2013/09/30/how_i_botched_it_on_cnbc/
As an account holder with Chase Bank, I expect to find prophetic the penultimate sentence of Pareene’s column.
Anoniminous
@Mike G:
Roger that.
The major difference is a car salesman is actually selling something real: a car. The spokesidiots at CNBC are selling balderdash and horses–t.
dr. luba
@Fair Economist: I’ve always considered us (Jones generation) as the punk generation. Boomers were rock, peace, love; we were punk and disillusionment. Well, some of us. The rest were disco.
ruemara
You have no idea how many people are complaining that it’s not enough and Jamie Dimon should be destitute, heading off to jail. The problem of personal criminal liability is not understood. I’m pretty surprised we got this much.
priscianus jr
“… Maria Bartiromo informed me that this kind of over-regulation is killing the economy.”
Depends what you call “the economy”.
Ruckus
@dr. luba:
I would argue that disco was disillusionment.
Bruce S
@WereBear:
“Damn! I know it’s “too little, too late” for the firebaggers…”
Uh…sounds more like it’s too little, too late for your mother. That would seem the more important issue.
Bruce S
“Maria Bartiromo”
Having nothing to do with her gender and everything to do with her career choices, she would be a good candidate to have her picture placed next to the word “whore” in Websters.
fuckwit
@MomSense: Right, that’s the base, angry old white christian people who receive government benefits but hate the government. But that’s not the nihilist bomb-throwers who are doing the damage. The nihilists who are so intent on destroying the country are mostly my age: Cruz, Ryan, Palin, Paul.
Bruce S
@handsmile:
The entire business strategy of banks these days regarding account holders is making money off of fees – it has nothing to do with the original model of taking savings, paying interest and using that money to make a bit higher interest from lending. That’s a joke in the world of megabanks. Now they effectively charge you to handle your money – interest on actual savings accounts is miniscule – I made more money from my bank account when I was a little kid in the 1950s than I have in recent decades. Imagine how much money banks have saved in the last thirty years in tellers pay and processing checks with the advent of ATMs and how much they’ve earned in fees. Best of course is credit cards! This consumer stuff is just the tip of the iceberg of course. But they truly are bloodsuckers who create little to no value and it’s almost impossible for them to not make money – even when they screw up very badly, commit crimes, fraud, etc. etc. No other corporations I’m aware of could survive after so much fail.
Original Lee
@Alexandra: Agree with the Boomer Bracket nonsense. I wish I could find the article, but have been too lazy to dig it up: Science had a piece about the scientist education pipeline, I believe in 1984 or 1985, projecting how many American-born scientists there would be about now. I remember very distinctly that there were several paragraphs devoted to changing the demographic definition of the Boomers, primarily because I was born in 1962 and therefore had a personal interest. The idea is that, prior to the advent of certain antibiotics and vaccinations and consumer safety rules, the mortality rate for the infant-18 group was a particular number, so using a birth year range was a good rule of thumb for predicting adult populations. But for people born in the early 1960s, the mortality rate was different, so even though fewer babies were born, more were living to adulthood, meaning the Boomer bulge of adults continued to swell until (I think) 1964.
I think they should just put everybody in the 1960-1970 range into Generation Jones.
Linnaeus
I tend to mistrust most generational analysis. Not because I don’t think anything can be gleaned from it, but because of 1) its arbitrariness in establishing categories (to an extent, this can never be avoided in any social analysis, but generational categorization seems to be more capricious) and 2) the tendency to use generational analysis to tell a preferred narrative of heroes and villains, depending on one’s perspective.
SiubhanDuinne
@Kay: That’s good news. If indeed he becomes the candidate, let us know if we can toss a little coin his way.
Living in red Georgia, I know first-hand what you mean about how daunting it is to fight from 10+ points behind, and usually with a much smaller war chest than the Rethug candidates, most of whom also enjoy the advantages of incumbency. I’m hoping that GOP crazy will have harmed the party so much that we might stand a better chance in 2014, and that those “advantages” get turned upside-down and inside-out.
liberal
@Roger Moore: IIRC some sentencing commission is learning towards increasing leniency for white collar crime.
mai naem
@Ruckus: I was using this route going six miles down a major street in metro Phx in 2011. There was not a single commercial building that did not have a For Lease sign. High traffic street that has a mall, a hospital and a community college on the part I traveled on. A few strip centers that looked they were completely empty. It was such a sign of the times.
burnspbesq
@The Pale Scot:
Oh, bullshit. Nobody has ever “captured” DOJ, and under Mary Jo White the SEC Is in the wind.
Things change. Your nonsensical view of the world needs to catch up.
Cain
@fuckwit:
I agree. GenX’ers grow up on a steady dose of Reaganism. Look at all the action movies back in the 80’s? We’ve been given a steady diet of movies that frame government as incompetent and some lone crusader can do it better without the shackles of government. Let me give you an example “Cobra”. It’s full of right wing derangement ideas. Those movies were everywhere.
I fucking hated Reagane with his swarmy smile. I knew he was up to something and that was when I was 16 years old. My instincts said that there was something wrong with this guy. 1980 when Reagan won was the turning point where the cultural changed completely to anti-government that has affected two generations of Americans. The people in his administration has done countless damage to GenXers who now propagate this crap.
It will take another generation to weed this behaviour out completely.
burnspbesq
@Villago Delenda Est:
Check your calendar. It’s not 1845 any more.
fuckwit
@aimai: Nobody makes money by hiring people. You make money by ripping people off and charging them a lot of money for something that costs you next to nothing. And stealing from the commons is THE BEST way to get something for nothing that you can make a huge profit on.
fuckwit
@Linnaeus: Yeah, it’s idle talk really, but most sociology is too. It’s so arbitrary, and arbitrary things do tend to be easily pressed into service to bolster narratives. There’s very little hard in the soft sciences. It’s fun for laypeople to waste time blathering on blogs about though.
Yatsuno
@Original Lee: Liz said it best: make banking boring again.
thefax
@PsiFighter37: who was the CNBC anchor on Bill Maher’s show two weeks ago who was a default truther (i.e., ‘we have enough cash to cover debt service so not raising the debt ceiling is fine’) and who seemed to believe that no nation in a modern economy should carry any debt? She was literally the dumbest person I’ve ever seen on TV who was supposed to be an expert on the economy.
MomSense
@fuckwit:
I’m the same age and the “kids” I grew up with who were Alex Keaton types then are now FUX watching right wingers.
Golfina
This fine punishes the wrong people. It punishes the shareholders, not the people who perpetuated the frauds. I think there are a lot of people who knowingly and intentionally committed fraud. They should go to jail and pay fines equal to their net worths. Instead, those people keep their freedom and fortunes and people who did nothing wrong are punished. Sending the wrong doers to jail and taking their fortunes likely will prevent more similar acts in the future that will punishing the shareholders.
Golfina
This fine punishes the wrong people. It punishes the shareholders, not the people who perpetuated the frauds. I think there are a lot of people who knowingly and intentionally committed fraud. They should go to jail and pay fines equal to their net worths. Instead, those people keep their freedom and fortunes and people who did nothing wrong are punished. Sending the wrong doers to jail and taking their fortunes likely will prevent more similar acts in the future that will punishing the shareholders.
nastybrutishntall
@some guy: nailed it. nice.
Ruckus
@mai naem:
In my area there wasn’t a muti-use commercial building that didn’t have a for lease sign on it. And most of the single use buildings in the 50K sq ft and above range were empty as well. Only one business grew and that was in specialty pharmaceuticals. They grew 2 1/2 times from 2008 to 2011.
Ruckus
@burnspbesq:
You really don’t get the difference between what people know and what they’d like to see do you?
dmbeaster
@mai naem:
Exactly. Chase had been courting WaMu for years prior to its failure in order to have instance access to the West Coast. It ended up buying it for a pittance of what it had been offering earlier. And WaMu was not a major originator of the bad mortgage backed securities — it was a major originator of the bad mortgages that then got stuffed into the securities. But they were doing it because the underwriters were paying them handsomely for any mortgages, underwriting standards be damned. The real fraud was in the bundling of those mortgages for resale with knowledge about how much crap was going into them.
Chase was a major originator of those fraudulent mortgage backed securities.
PIGL
@BGinCHI: you what, the both of you and Wag should only go play in traffic. Fuck you very much.
Ruckus
@PIGL:
I think, it may be possible, I’m not real sure, but it is just possible that BGinCHI was snarking. Wag I’m not giving as much leeway.
Bruce S
@Wag:
Go fuck yourself, punk. That’ not “analysis” it’s pulling crap from your butt.
Bruce S
@some guy:
And as accurate as Thomas Friedman’s crap.
Bruce S
@Wag:
Sorry – but the “destruction” of the Democratic Brand was triggered by LBJ, when he escalated the Vietnam War knowing it was ill-fated, effectively “resigned” in disgrace and gave an opening to Nixon that he would have never had without that disastrous – and frankly quite monstrous – set of decisions. If you want to blame the people who protested mainstream “Democratic” politics – like Martin Luther King, among many others – you are truly a mindless little fuck. There was a split in the Party over the war that was as necessary as the one over civil rights. You might as well blame the civil rights movement as at fault for Democratic electoral problems in the 70s and 80s because it triggered the loss of the white South for a couple of generations. We still have that problem with us. But, again, I don’t blame Martin Luther King. In both cases you also had radicals who alienated traditional constituencies – but that is a perennial fact of protest movements. It was as true of the labor movement in it’s heyday. You’re quite ignorant in your smug disdain of stuff about which you are clearly clueless and morally obtuse.
Bruce S
@c u n d gulag:
“They all think…(insert meaningless bullshit.)”
You actually think about entire generations – or in this case what is actually a couple of generations – in such mindless terms? You should be embarrassed. But I promise I’ll try not to draw any conclusions about your demographic cohort based on the particulars of your individual stupidity.
nastybrutishntall
@dmbeaster: The cost of investigating, preventing, and criminalizing child pornography costs this country millions of dollars in government waste and the destruction of small business commerce. These kinds of big-government regulations are crushing our economy. /CNBC.
nastybrutishntall
@fuckwit: So, grunge is in there between Hair Metal and the Teatards? On behalf of Nirvana, Mudhoney, and a million great 90’s bands, I say, Good Day, Sir.
Lex
As of this writing, JPM is up 15 cents, from 54.30 to 54.45. That’s not a lot, but the fact that the stock price is up at all suggests that $13 billion isn’t NEARLY a big enough price for that continuing criminal enterprise to pay.
The company recently reported its first quarterly loss in 10 years. Why? Because it had to set aside billions (with a “B”) in one quarter alone for legal defense.