BankThink

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?

Receiving Wide Coverage ...The Punchin' Jamie Show: This weekend the news was all JPMorgan and Jamie Dimon fallout, all the time. We expect pretty much the same through Tuesday, when the bank's annual meeting is scheduled. Once again the only sane way we can think of to summarize the deluge of information, analysis and pontification is to break it down by theme. Take a deep breath, folks, here we go again...

Odds and ends from the Reporter's Notebook Remnants Bin.

A follow up to the April 9, 2012 article, "Post-Merger Issues Surface in Florida" about Space Coast Credit Union.

Shareholders, creditors, counterparties and regulators deserve to know more about the causes of that $2 billion trading loss.

Until now, there was no expectation that anyone at Tuesday's shareholder meeting would complain about the enormous booty Jamie Dimon earns. The $2 billion trading loss changes everything.

As a former banker, I watched in amazement and disgust as the country's largest banks morphed from trusted fiduciaries of customer financial assets to unrepentant predators of consumer financial assets in just a few decades.

I guess I'm tired of reading and hearing banks and their managements cursed, ridiculed and extolled for causing the financial meltdown and economic crisis. It seems that most everyone from Washington to the "Occupy" groups wants a piece of banking's hide for the pain of this recent experience.

Receiving Wide Coverage ...A Crack in the ‘Fortress’: By now, you’ve probably heard about JPMorgan Chase’s revelation of a $2 billion trading loss in the Chief Investment Office (home of the notorious “London Whale”) and CEO Jamie Dimon’s display of contrition in a hastily scheduled conference call. It probably occurred to you that this played right into the hands of a whole bunch of pundits out there who want to strengthen regulation, even before you read Dimon’s quote that it “plays right into the hands of a whole bunch of pundits out there." It may also have occurred to you before any journalist started typing that the “egregious” (Dimon’s oft-quoted descriptor) blunder undermines his image as the exceptional CEO of the exceptional large bank with the exceptional “fortress balance sheet,” and that the news is especially awkward for JPMorgan given that a month ago Dimon had dismissed all the news reports about the Whale’s risk-taking as “a tempest in a teapot.” Not to mention the CEO’s increasingly cocky public pronouncements about overreaching regulators and poor put-upon bankers. You may have even spent some time trying to piece together what exactly went wrong from the details that JPMorgan disclosed and the previous market chatter about CIO trader Bruno Iksil’s position on an index of corporate credit default swaps. To help you navigate the sea of media coverage, we’re going to break it down for you by theme. Here goes.

I've never been able to square bankers' constant demands for less regulation with their repeated requests for more government backing on loans, deposits and insurance.