EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH JP MORGAN CHASE CEO JAIME DIMON by Derisive Duck senior business editor.
Derisive Duck: “Mr. Dimon, may I call you Jaime?”
Dimon: “No.”
DD: “Please explain to our readers, Mr. Dimon, how your bank could lose more than four billion dollars, almost overnight?”
Dimon: “I have my people working on that. But I can say, strictly off-the-record, that it has to do with ledges.”
DD: “Don’t you mean hedges?”
Dimon: “Yes, of course, hedges. These are very complex financial transactions which few people outside the banking community understand.”
DD: “Do you understand them?”
Dimon: (Excuses himself to go to the bathroom and returns)
DD: “Can you tell us just what kind of investment went so wrong that it cost your bank and stockholders four billion dollars and counting?”
Dimon: “Well, to put it in lay terms, we were hedging against losing money in the credit derivatives market.”
DD: “Isn’t that like betting against yourself?”
Dimon: “But what we didn’t know was that others were hedging against our hedge.”
DD: “A double hedge, so to speak?”
Dimon: “Exactly. What we should have done, in hindsight, was hedge against the hedgers who hedged against our hedge.”
DD: “That’s a lot of hedges. Whatever happened to just lending money to say a farmer who wants to buy a new tractor?”
Dimon: “Banks don’t do that anymore.”
DD: “To change the subject, there are some who say the big banks should be broken up.”
Dimon: “And there are some who say the moon is made of blue cheese.”
DD: “I believe it’s green cheese, sir.”
Dimon: “Blue cheese, green cheese, the point is that we are too big to flail.”
DD: “I think, sir, it’s too big to fail.”
Dimon: “I like that. We cannot fail because we are too big! Like a 300 pound Sumo wrestler hovering over a kindergarten class: if we fall, all the little people get crushed.”
DD: “Good metaphor, sir. But doesn’t this mean that no matter how asinine, hair-brained, ill-advised or risky an investment is, you can always rely on the American taxpayers to bail you out?”
Dimon: “Don’t you just love America?”
DD: “Not as much as before this interview, sir.”
Are you trying to suggest he doesn’t know what he’s doing? You sly dog!
I think he knows what he’s doing, it’s just so unbelievable because he still sleeps at night. Why can’t a bank just be a bank? Why does it have to be a gambling institution, and one that often bets against its own customers, or itself.