By Matt Taibbi
January 30, 12:55 PM ET
Jamie Dimon
If you make a big show of punishing someone, and when you're done they still don't think they have a behavior problem, you probably picked the wrong punishment. Every parent on earth knows this implicitly – but does the Obama White House finally get it, too, now, after Jamie Dimon's raise?
When the board of JP Morgan Chase gave its blowdried, tirelessly self-regarding CEO a whopping 74 percent raise – after a year in which the Justice Department blasted the bank with $20 billion in sanctions – it was one of those rare instances where Main Street and Wall Street were mostly in agreement.
Everyone from the Financial Times to Forbes.com to the Huffington Post decried the move. The Wall Street pundits mostly thought it was a dumb play by the Chase board from a self-interest perspective, one guaranteed to inspire further investigations by the government. Meanwhile, the non-financial press generally denounced the raise as a moral obscenity, yet another example of the serial coddling of Wall Street's habitually overcompensated executive class.
Both groups were right. But to me the biggest news was how brutal an indictment Jamie's raise was of the Obama/Holder Justice Department, which continues to profoundly misunderstand the mindset of the finance villains they claim to be regulating.
Chase's responses to Holder's record penalties have been hilarious. Their first move was to make sure people outside the penthouse boardroom took on all the pain, laying off 7,500 employees and freezing salaries for the non-CEO class of line employees.
Next, Chase's board members sat down, put their misshapen heads together, considered the impact of this disastrous year of settlements, and decided to respond by more than doubling the take-home pay of the executive in charge, giving Dimon about $20 million in salary and equity.
In the end, the fines left the decision-making class of the company not just uninjured but triumphant. Dimon's raise was symbolic of a company-wide boost in compensation following the mass layoffs, as average per-employee expenses rose four percent overall, to $122,653, despite the $20 billion burden imposed upon the firm by the state.
There were a variety of reasons for the board's decisions, but one of the big ones, according to various reports, was that bank honchos wanted to send a message to the government that it believed the company had been unfairly treated. This was a notion Dimon himself snootily trumpeted just before his raise was announced.
So Eric Holder and his lieutenants thought they were getting tough on Chase by dropping a monster settlement on the firm, but actually all they did was a) inspire the company to punish thousands of low-level innocent employees, while b) doubly- or triply-reinforcing the mass-narcissistic delusion gripping the company's management that the bank's serial ethical violations – which ranged from providing see-no-evil banking services, to Bernie Madoff, to rigging retail electricity prices, to covering up billions in losses in the "London Whale" episode – were the fault of someone else.
Apparently the bank's board believed the Justice Department was simply caving in to anti-bank sentiment when it targeted Chase, not punishing real offenses. They seem to have decided their only "problem" was that the Justice Department lacked the political will to ignore the public's irrational cries for action.
Again, if you punish a firm, and its executives come out of the episode convinced their only problem was an irrational PR issue, your enforcement strategy probably needs tweaking. It doesn't exactly send much of a message when, mere months after you've imposed record enforcement penalties, the CEO of your target company is being led down Wall Street on a donkey, board members showering him with cash.
In contrast, when the LIBOR scandal blew up in England, British authorities essentially removed Barclays CEO Bob Diamond from office right away, in addition to levying fines and other penalties. We never heard about Bob Diamond getting a raise after LIBOR because as far as the world is concerned, there is no more Bob Diamond. He could be on the moon for all we know. It's not jail, but it's still more of a punishment than Eric Holder dropped on Chase and Jamie Dimon.
Moreover, when the Royal Bank of Scotland got caught up in the same LIBOR scandal, British and European regulators basically set up a base camp in the bank's backside, forcing the company to disclose all of its dirty laundry via a merciless long-term cooperation agreement that has already led to the exposure of another major scandal, the foreign exchange manipulation case. Read more>
