President Obama on JP Morgan: ‘This Is Why We Passed Wall Street Reform’

A few hours after a top JPMorgan Chase executive was let go following a stunning $2 billion trading loss, President Obama told the hosts of ABC’s “The View” that the bank’s risky behavior demonstrated the need for Wall Street reform.

The President said:

“JP Morgan is one of the best managed banks there is. Jamie Dimon, the head of it, is one of the smartest bankers we got and they still lost $2 billion and counting. We don’t know all the details. It’s going to be investigated, but this is why we passed Wall Street reform.”

Interestingly Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan, continues to insist that his company and industry should be left to self-regulation. Talk about a very tone deaf executive, who had his company bailed out by the very same government he is trying to avoid being regulated by.

The Huffington Post writes;

Dimon did take a moment to combat his anti-regulation reputation, saying JPMorgan Chase backed “70 percent or so of Dodd-Frank,” while also reiterating his support for policies that would wind down failing big banks, rather than provide them with federal bailouts. JPMorgan Chase received $25 billion in TARP funds in the wake of the financial crisis.

Dimon conceded to NBC that the bank “hurt ourselves and our credibility” and expects to “pay the price for that.” Asked what the price should be, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., said that banks will lose their fight to weaken the rule.

Can Dimon guarantee this won’t happen again and that JP Morgan will never be back with a begging bowl? Of course not. The self-serving bank CEO making tens of millions of dollars just has a different, warped view of the world.

This time however, hopefully, his company’s millions of dollars of lobbying effort will have been wasted, due to his two billion dollar ‘accident’.