Matt Yglesias points us to today’s Financial Times’ report on Jamie Dimon’s latest predictions of doom for big finance:
Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, launched a broadside against financial regulation on Wednesday, warning that new capital rules could be “the nail in our coffin for big American banks”.
….Restrictions on debit card fees charged to retailers are also coming under attack in Congress….“It basically penalises us for having debit cards,” he said. “I think it was very unfairly done in the middle of the night with no facts and analysis whatsoever. This is not the way legislation should be done.”
Attacking another aspect of Dodd-Frank, Mr Dimon said rules requiring companies to put up collateral as they trade derivatives would “damage America”. Gesturing at the chief
executive of Caterpillar, Mr Dimon predicted the industrial company would take its derivatives business to Singapore.
So Dimon doesn’t like higher capital rules, doesn’t like derivatives regulation, doesn’t like debit card rules, and we already know what the entire industry thinks of the new Consumer Finance Protection Bureau. Long story short, he doesn’t really think the financial industry needs any new regulations at all, thankyouverymuch.
Well, if I were him I suppose I wouldn’t think so either. But guess what? It’s only been two years since the Great Collapse, and finance industry profits have already rebounded to their bubble-era levels. That’s a strong sign that finance industry leverage is also returning to its bubble-era levels, which in turn means the industry is about as dangerous as it’s ever been. And Dodd-Frank is a notably weak piece of regulation, about as weak as any bill could be and still be called regulatory reform in the first place. Wall Street got off easy, and Dimon knows it.
The FT suggests that the growing pushback against regulation is coming as “anger at the financial industry subsides.” Matt disagrees:
Personally, I see absolutely no reason to believe that anger at the financial industry has subsided. The Obama administration was softer on the financial industry than the public wanted, which played into the hands of the other political party. In an ideal world voters would have realized that the other political party wants to be even softer on the financial industry. But in the real world, that’s not how it worked. But I think most people are still pretty damn angry at the financial industry and don’t at all agree with Rep Bachus that the proper role of US public policy is to serve the bankers.
Unfortunately, I think the FT is right: the fact is that the public was never really all that angry at the financial industry in the first place. Tea party anger toward TARP has been mainly directed at the government, not at the financial industry. And the occasional protest against AIG bonuses aside, there’s simply never been any real, concerted attack on the financial industry from either left or right. On a scale of 1 to 10, with the healthcare fight rating a 9, I’d say that anger toward banks rates about a 3. That’s why Congress has been able to get away with doing so little about it.
Years ago I remember a lot of moderate liberals talking about how the Bush era radicalized them. For me, it was the economic collapse of 2008 that did it. The financial industry almost literally came within a hair’s breadth of destroying the world, but even so it took only a few short months for them to close ranks with Republicans and the rich to prevent anything serious being done to rein them in. Profits are back up, new regulations are barely more than window dressing, nothing was done to help underwater homeowners, bonuses are as obscene as ever, unemployment remains sky high, and the public has somehow been convinced that this was all their own fault — or perhaps the fault of big government, or big deficits, or something. But the finance industry has escaped almost entirely unscathed. It’s mind boggling. If this doesn’t change your view of who really runs the world, I don’t know what would.
