Midas Cometh

Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase bank, walked into the Senate Banking Committee hearing room the other day as if he owned the place.

And in a very real sense, Dimon and his brethren in the financial services industry do in fact own the Senate, not to mention the House, a slew of governors, a few judges and dozens of state legislators.

Vito Corleone never had it this good.

Before sitting down to testify, Dimon posed for photographers, his bearing regal, his expression imperious, certain he was the star of this middling formality. The Senate didn’t really care how or why JPMorgan Chase lost nearly $3 billion on trades that went sour, but it had a responsibility to the charade of American politics to pretend it did, so raise the curtain and let the drama begin!

Not wanting to upset their Golden Goose, most of the senators lobbed softball questions from the dais. Jim DeMint of South Carolina openly fawned, like a teenage girl within arms reach of Justin Bieber. DeMint remarked that the Federal government loses “$2 billion every day,” though he didn’t say how or explain why this silly statement was relevant to this hearing. Comparing the Federal government to a commercial bank is like comparing an apple to an armadillo, but what the hell -- this is only the US Senate -- which still fancies itself the greatest deliberative body in the world.

How far the bar has fallen.

The thrust of Dimon’s testimony was that despite the huge losses, JPMorgan remained a kick-ass, money-making machine able and willing to regulate itself. Rest easy, Dimon seemed to say, I’m on the case and in command. As long as the ranks of bank regulators are stacked with alumni from JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs, and as long as our offices are overflowing with ex-legislators cashing in on their political connections, the golden pig trough will never run dry. We get obscene profits, you get campaign contributions, voila, everybody wins!

Corruption this slick and sanctified is a beautiful thing.

The hearing’s funniest moment comes when Dimon asserts that Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, and then chief of the New York Fed Tim Geithner, forced JPMorgan to take TARP bailout money at the height of the banking crisis in 2008. We didn’t want or need a federal bailout, said Dimon with a straight face, but Ben and Tim are very persuasive guys, and in fact they wouldn’t let me go to the men’s room until I agreed. It was late at night and we were drinking gallons of Starbuck’s and my bladder was screaming in agony. The same goes for the low interest federal loans that were forced on us; JPMorgan didn’t need loans because we were solid as granite -- it was all in the name of taking one for the Industry. Senators, please, faced with the choice of peeing your pants or taking millions of dollars in no-strings-attached money, what would you have done?

All in all the hearing was a spectacular farce.

Just a routine day on Capitol Hill.