Published in CommPRO.biz 2013.09.24

The Beat Goes On & On & ON

Remember the scene in a Pirates of the Caribbean movie where Captain Jack is gazing from a crow’s nest soon disclosed to be on the mast of a sinking vessel as it approaches a dock where the never-say-die pirate leader steps off and heads off into another hilarious adventure? That must be how Jamie Dimon, the captain at JP Morgan Chase, is feeling these days. Problem is, there is no dock in sight for this buccaneer; he’s up to his neck in trouble and nobody is laughing.

Dimon just can’t seem to catch a break, or more appropriately dodge a bullet. The slowly unraveling London Whale loss of billions involves at least three Chase minions, two of whom are facing criminal charges. The third has to be bothering the folks in carpetland back at Chase headquarters in New York City. Bruno Iksil has not been charged, apparently because he is supplying information on the two guys who have been charged. Bruno is a Chase Vice President. Nonetheless, since Chase has tens-of-thousands of VPs, Bruno is still a grunt. You know your bank is too big when you count the VPs by the tens-of-thousands.

We all know what’s going to happen when one guy starts pointing fingers, it won’t be long until others join in. That fact, along with reports that all these guys kept pointing up the line when this disaster started to unfurl, has to be unsettling. It played out in London, but the players there pointed to headquarters in New York City time and again when the losses were skyrocketing; at last report well north of six billion dollars. The finger pointing is going to spread up the food chain. The London traders claim they acted on guidance from headquarters. That could get very ugly for all the players right up to Jamie Dimon.

As if all that wasn’t enough, The New York Times broke a story about Chase bank hiring practices in China. The bottom line is that Chase seems to have a history of giving jobs to the off-spring of high ranking individuals in the Communist Party who head state owned businesses. Often businesses that have no relationships with Chase, at least not until they hire somebody’s kid. Reports say the Feds have a spreadsheet showing how hires connect to deals Chase was chasing.

Any one of these could be dismissed –as Chase is depicting them– as the acts of lower level rogue employees. Taken together it seems clear that the employees at JP Morgan Chase are under pressure to maximize profit by any means necessary by a management that knows that the taxpayers are on the hook to bail them out again. A management that reflects its leader’s ethics, Jamie Dimon’s ethics.