Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, is upset at Washington. Dealbook reports:
"F.D.I.C. is going to cost us a lot of money. TARP cost us a lot of money. This bank tax, my first reaction was, 'That will cost us a lot of money,'" Mr. Dimon said Thursday at the bank's annual Investor Day conference in New York. "I think we are getting into the capricious, arbitrary and punitive behavior."
Is Mr. Dimon just whining like your typical entitled Wall Street fat cat utterly divorced from how the nation feels about what his industry did to the rest of us? Or is there something more serious going on? Dimon's language could be considered excessively legalistic. "Arbitrary and capricious" is a legal term of art, used to describe behavior, typically by a judge, that is so unreasonable that a higher court can overturn it.
Is Dimon making some kind of threat? Proposing to challenge in court future financial regulation, should he consider it too "punitive?" What's his problem, anyway? Every indication we've seen so far is that nothing is likely to come out of the Senate that hasn't already been pre-approved by the banking lobby.
Shares