Andrew Kahr

If your bank is gung-ho to issue prepaid cards, think again. Focus on how to retain checking account customers, rather than emulating Green Dot and Chase and issuing fee-based "prepaid cards" as a new (already outdated) product.

Most customers want to spend less time on their finances, not more. They will flock where they are rewarded for transacting conveniently, rather than for counting their pennies through PFM.

Trader fraud occurs only because we do not require immediate trade confirmation posted infallibly to the institution's books. Instead, the trader is allowed to wave a magic wand to create false transactions or hide real ones.

Fanatical insistence on lending to risky borrowers to get them to buy more houses destroyed trillions of dollars. Now there's pressure to make even riskier, unsecured loans to these consumers. A freer, fairer market would do better.

"No financial institution's collapse could sink our economy"? Funny. "To accord nonbanks parity with banks, just regulate nonbanks more strictly"? Hilarious. But here's a real howler: "We have to go on subsidizing home building and financing."

Increasingly burdensome requirements, such as small business panels and cost-benefit analysis, inhibit writing of new regulations. But substituting enforcement actions that unevenly apply vague or unwritten rules betrays the regulatory mandate.

Qualified nonbanks should be able to issue credit cards. This has only rarely been possible up to now – a situation that has warped the industry's structure, giving banks undeserved dominance.

Money funds and non-deposit-taking consumer lenders should be chartered as limited purpose banks by the Fed and CFPB, respectively. This will reduce systemic risk, improve consistency and efficiency, and protect consumers.

A Congressional investigation found HSBC engaged in money laundering and sanctions busting for ten years, in multibillion-dollar amounts. Perhaps not coincidentally, the bank has been disinvesting from the U.S. Let's invite them to complete their departure—fast.

Why would a bank issue prepaid debit cards to its customers? It's an inferior product for consumers and banks alike. Issue prepaid credit cards instead, with four times the interchange.

Unreasonably high taxes generate less, not more revenue for governments. Likewise, banks might make more money with lower fees, and become more compliant and less hated.

Lending to American consumers, businesses and other entities is, as best practiced, far from a simple business. Going beyond this to dabble in opaque markets will inevitably degrade the competence with which banks' basic business is conducted.

Jamie Dimon never had it, actually. He assiduously avoided subprime consumer credit, leaving profitable business on the table, but JPMorgan's recent trading loss reveals lax management of much greater risks.

We finally have a regulator with no mandate to preserve banks' image. To protect consumers, the CFPB must assure that those who cheat them are punished. New rules won't help if we don't enforce the old ones.

When the going gets rough, you find out who your friends are. In Jamie Dimon's case, they're legion. He's recently been endorsed by, among others: Spencer Bachus (chairman of the House Committee on Financial Services), Richard Fisher (CEO of the Dallas Fed) and even Brian Moynihan (his competitor).

A significant reason JPMorgan Chase can't be regulated effectively is that its size, amplified by the CEO's voice, puts the bank above and beyond the reach of regulators, writes Andrew Kahr.

There are at least three ways to break a bank. Give him a little more time and Jamie Dimon may demonstrate all three of them.

Lots of ink has been spilled over the loss of at least $2 billion in JPMorgan Chase's Chief Investment Office in London. And nothing, so far, has been learned.

That $2 billion trading loss is just last week's headline. Is Chase so big and complicated that no CEO could apply, teach and enforce decency and the smell test?

In the aftermath of the crisis, Congress keeps piling on rules to enforce, without proportionately increasing the number or competence of examiners. Is it any wonder overstretched supervisors never asked, "What if home prices stop going up?"