Jamie Dimon: Yes, there is no justice

A 74% raise

By Andrew S Ross

It feels like howling at the moon.

No matter how egregious and systematic the malfeasance, not matter how many lives have been ruined, no matter how loud the calls for accountability, the big chiefs remain untouched.

Just to recap,the board of directors of JPMorgan Chase this morning gave the bank’s chairman and CEO a 74% raise. Compensation for 2013: $20 million. Now true, that’s a mere fraction of the $23 billion in fines the bank incurred in the same year for a variety of criminal and civil offenses. The cost of doing business one supposes.

And as far as his board of directors are concerned, Dimon, has been conducting business just fine. Didn’t he play the leading role in negotiating the settlements? Without his sure hand and charismatic personality, the fines could have been even bigger. He actually saved the company money, not to mention presiding over another boffo year of profits. And he only gets half of the $49.9 million he got in 2007, just before the entire financial system went down the tubes.

Forgotten, it seems, is the list of JP Morgan’s crimes and misdemeanors on Dimon’s watch — mortgage fraud, insurance fraud, illegal billing, kickbacks, manipulating California’s energy market, rigging the Libor benchmark interest rate, turning a blind eye to Bernie Madoff’s ponzi scheme; and who could forget the London Whale? Shouldn’t there be another price to pay?

As Financial Times columnist Philip Stephens wondered last month, “No one in authority was vulgar enough to suggest Mr Dimon, once a poster boy for play-it-straight banking, might consider his position.”

Of course, it wasn’t the first time the suggestion had been raised. But we’ve since grown weary, our outrage spent — “dulled by familiarity,” in Stephens’ words — as the numbre of revealed crimes at JPMorgan and other too-big-to-fail financial institutions grows, and no one has yet been called to account. A “palpable surrender to the divine right of bankers,” in Stephens’ words.

Too big to jail, presumably. Besides, isn’t it time to get over it? “Teeing Up a Happier New at J.P.Morgan,” runs a headline in the print edition of morning’s Wall Street Journal, before news of Dimon’s raise broke (though the New York Times got wind of it last night). Stock’s up. JP Morgan Morgan “may be the most attractive big bank ahead of the expected turn in the interest-rate cycle,” says the Heard on the Street column, taking note of the bank’s “resilience during trying times.”

There is still the occasional bleep of outrage at it all. “It is truly extraordinary that the reign of the bankers has carried on uninterrupted,” writes Stephens. “Their power and riches are largely untouched.”

And we’re left howling at the moon.