May 11, 2012

Quote of the Day: Other Bankers are Even Dumber Than Jamie Dimon

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From JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, on whether his bank’s $2 billion trading loss suggests that bank trading ought to be more closely regulated:

Just because we’re stupid doesn’t mean everybody else was.

Dimon is digging himself an even deeper hole here. Here’s the thing: JPMorgan really does have a sterling reputation. So does Dimon. By consensus, he’s probably the best big bank CEO around. But even so he managed to lose $2 billion in a few weeks.

Luckily, no big harm was done. JPMorgan has a solid balance sheet, the banking system is on solid ground these days, and the loss means little more than a hit to earnings. But think about this: If even JPMorgan can lose a colossal amount of money on stupid trades. If even JPMorgan has lousy controls in place. If even Jamie Dimon allowed himself to be lulled to sleep by a star trader. If all that happened, what are the odds it’s not going to happen to a less well managed bank in the future, and happen at a time when it turns into another Lehman Brothers and shorts out the entire financial system? The odds are way too short for comfort, I’d say.

Would even Jamie Dimon take that bet?

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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