Well the dog-and-pony show that was JP Morgan Chase shareholders meeting came and went.
If you blinked, you probably missed it.
Jamie Dimon’s heart-to-heart with his shareholders lasted a whopping 50 minutes on Tuesday. Apparently that was all the time he felt he needed to trot out the same apology speech he gave on Meet the Press, and then duck for cover.
And surprise surprise, nothing changed. Dimon held onto his dual roles as chairman and CEO, as I fully expected he would.
To the shareholders credit, they didn’t take this lying down. They challenged his role as a member of the New York Federal Reserve. They kept the heat on Dimon for Chase’s role in the mortgage servicing fiasco.
But Dimon’s responses were cursory at best, a brush off no different than the ones homeowners have gotten from Chase. They were hardly worth the price of admission.
Now I’m no conspiracy theorist, but clearly Chase held back this information about their $2 billion oops until after all the votes were in. That is clear.
Dimon may be saying the right things in public, but his actions clearly show that he is doing everything possible to downplay this loss. But if it goes unchecked, it could be a harbinger of even BIGGER losses.
Every consumer needs to a long hard look at the the way these banks do business and the interwoven relationship between these banks and our government. Not only are these banks too big to fail, but Dimon himself has become too big to fail in his own right.
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