Dimon a Winner? Please
He was wrong when he walked into the hearing, and he was wrong when he left.
Did Jamie Dimon do well, or did he do badly in front of Congress?
Frankly, I don't care. I care about how well or badly he's doing running JPMorgan (JPM), and I'm still steamed about the trading loss that his company racked up in London.
First, not all banking losses are created equal. A company can make a loan to a client that blows up. That's the cost of doing banking business. A company can make a wrong bet on the direction of a market, something I don't care for, but the bank has a right to do it and do it all the time. I particularly don't like it if the company's directional bet is out of sync with what the company is recommending to its own clients. JPMorgan has been the most prescient in the world when it comes to Europe, with the most consistent view possible during this whole crisis, which is to stay away from everything -- stocks, bonds, you name it.
So why the heck was the chief investment office for the bank doing the opposite of what the company was telling clients to do? Did the chief investment office believe it was saying the wrong thing to clients? Maybe. Well, they were just stupid to do that, stupid enough that someone should lose his or her job over it anyway. Shame on that internal investment management team to bet against the best advice any firm was giving to any clients. If Jamie Dimon paid attention to his own company's advice, he should have shut down this trade ages ago. Why isn't anyone mentioning that?
But the big thing people seem not to understand, because they never worked at one of these institutions, is that a loss that's a rogue loss, meaning a loss that's a mistake or against the company's rules, is not a loss that can be condoned. When you made a mistake at Goldman Sachs (GS), you made good for the losses. It was that simple. You cost the company money, you made good on it. I had my paid docked $27,000 for a mistake I made. Who should pay for it? The shareholders? Did they do anything wrong? Did they make the mistake? No, I did. It was an honest mistake, unlike what this might have been, but it was a mistake nonetheless, a buy of 50,000 shares instead of 5,000 that immediately went against me. The fault wasn't with the shareholders or the partners, it was with me.
Which brings me to the biggest outrage, why I don't care whether you think Jamie Dimon won or lost Wednesday. Somebody or somebodies cost the shareholders billions upon billions of dollars with this rogue order. They may not have enough money to make good on the error, and they certainly don't have enough money to make good on the shareholder losses.
But everyone involved has made immense amounts of money working at this bank, taking huge bonuses, including the CEO. I was thrilled to hear that Dimon said there might be clawbacks, whereby money is returned to the bank out of the pockets of the people who made and checked off on the mistake.
But the idea that Dimon came out a winner Wednesday? Oh, please. Whom are we kidding? You go in front of Congress because you did something wrong, you don't leave having done something right. You were wrong when you walked into the hearing, and you're still wrong when you leave. It really is that simple.

Jim Cramer is a co-founder of TheStreet and contributes daily
market commentary to the financial news network's sites. Follow his trades for Action Alerts PLUS, which Cramer co-manages as a charitable trust and is long JPM.
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All our leaders suck.
I mean, this is all pathetic. No one has concern for actually doing the right thing. Plain and simple.
CEOs are too worried about lining pockets with shareholders money (let alone everyone else who works for them), Politicians are too concerned about getting re-elected, and people are too concerned with just getting theirs when and where no matter who or how.
To build anything, you build from the foundation up. You want to be on the top, you have to have strong support under you. Which means making sure families are successful. Not just that you're successful. What I see is a system unconcerned with trying to provide the most opportunities possible to its citizens for success so that they can have strong families, that produce strong futures.
Jamie Dimon, the guy that is in charge that "takes responsibility" wants to claw back the compenstion from the people who made the trades and Ina Drew the late CIO....funny the government was not to claw back any compensation from any of the banks CEOs or others due to employment contracts even though the government bailed them out and kept them from goin bankrupt or the stock and bond holders from taking a major hit.....yeah funny how it works that way!
Say what u want about Cramer, I love it when anybody posts about Wall street pigs taking heat. I hope they burn in hell....
The Volker rule notwithstanding, this underlines the problem of excessive government regulation and the inability of economically illiterate congressmen to separate proprietary trading from normal hedging transactions.
This was ill advised for sure and a big hit on JPM's $17.5B annual profit. I bet they don't try this again. But JPM is a corporation. No US taxpayer dollars were lost. With a $130B market cap a $2B loss isn't going to sink JPM or plunge the US into a massive recession. The main purpose of this show was politicians grandstanding to cover up their pathetic inability to revive our economy.
Cramer,
I think you are very wrong if you assume that because you are before Congress you have done somthing wrong. Congressional hearings are not about the guilty vs. the innocent. Congressional hearings are about pompous Congressmen who do not hear a word said other than what comes from their own lips. The very purpose of these hearings is to create a forum for Congressmen to point fingers.
I'm on the side of Dimon on this one.
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