We have kind of a composite fuck-the-banks topic spread out over the 1% thread and the Occupy thread, but here is an official serious one.
I don't think we've mentioned JP Morgan's
$2 billion $3 billion derivatives loss of the exact type that the Volcker rule would prevent from fucking up national/global credit markets. Also, kind of exactly the same thing that happened three to five years ago, remember when that stuff happened before? Anyway, since then Morgan chief and 1% cat's-paw Jamie Dimon has spent a lot of time crowing about how stupid and awful the Volcker rule would be, and how it would cost poor JP Morgan
$400 million in compliance costs.
Is $400 million more money or less money than $3 billion? This must be one of those Wall Street things that you have to be an equities trader to understand. Fortunately,
no lessons will be learned again. There has been no need for lessons since Clinton handed the financial industry its prize with the repeal of Glass-Steagal in 1999, and damn, things have been great since then.
And then today
one of Goldman's lawyers fucked up and accidentally told the truth. It isn't really surprising or shocking anymore, but I'm enjoying the read so far. It's basically about how Goldman Sachs (surely an isolated incident of a couple of bad apples, and not at all indicative of any larger cultural problems on Wall Street, and definitely nothing that merits freedom-killing regulation) engaged in substantively fictional trades to artificially manipulate the value of certain stocks.