When my staff and I started working on compiling our list of Dirty Dozen banks, I realized there are many questions that the list does not answer.
The fact is all of us need to dig deeper, and educate ourselves to obtain a further understanding of the current culture of Wall Street if we are to do anything about fixing it.
I would like nothing better than for there not to be a need for a Dirty Dozen list, but I suspect we’ll be updating that list for years to come.
It was not always this way. Banks, and bankers, used to have their pulses directly linked to the communities they served.
But somewhere along the way, Wall Street became insulated from the rest of America. Their concerns are no longer ours.
Americans realize this, I realize this, and yet despite growing evidence mounting every single day, those in power on Wall Street fail to see the forest from the trees.
And therein lies perhaps the biggest problem with Wall Street. You have a systemic and endemic failure caused by poor moral leadership.
Forget trickle-down economics, Wall Street has a bad case of trickle-down ethics. Or more correctly, a lack thereof.
Dimon continues to push a narrative that he’s sorry, but not ultimately responsible for the problems that have befallen him.
And it is because he continues to push that narrative that I choose to make an example of him. His apologies still ring hollow, because he follows those apologies with some truly bizarre examples of self-deflection.
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