Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, at today's congressional hearing:
Reflecting on the volatility that has rocked the markets, he recalled, “My daughter called me from school one day and said, ‘Dad, what’s a financial crisis?’ And, without trying to be funny, I said, ‘This type of thing happens every five to seven years.’ And she said, ‘Why is everyone so surprised?’ ”
I haven't seen this level of public arrogance since Jimmy Carter used his daughter to argue about "nookular proliferation" at one of the debates. Let's take a look at what
Asswipe Mr. Dimon says "happens every five to seven years," shall we?
From
Calculated Risk, this is a chart that shows the decrease in employment in every downturn since the end of the Second World War:
Note that the drop-off in employment is the worst since the Second World War, ie, the worst since the Depression. Note that the arc of unemployment is such that we cannot expect to return to pre-recession levels of employment for at least another two years, which will be four years since this recession got going.
Now, let's look at a graph that shows, since 1969, both the number of people unemployed for more than 26 weeks and as a percentage of the work force:
I do not think that I need to explain the details of what this graph shows, only that anyone who thinks that this happens "every five to seven years" needs to climb out of his Gulfstream-V and take a look at what is going on for several million Americans.
This recession is a bit more than something that happens "every five to seven years", but hey, if you're a CEO of one of the largest banks in the world, you might feel like fibbing to Congress about it, and not admitting that you and your cronies damn near drove the economy of the entire planet into another depression.
I doubt very much that if we aggregated the annual pay of all of the regular readers of this blog, that we'd come close to matching what one of those four men take home in a year. But that is not the point of this post.
The point of this post is that if one looks at the history of most revolutions over the last few hundred years, one may find that there are underlying causes to each that are unique to each one. But two causes are almost universal: First, the people in general come to conclude that their leaders are seriously out of touch with them. That's like kicking over a powderkeg or throwing gasoline around. But you still need a spark, and that spark is most often a wrenching economic crisis.
At that point, it is possible to enrage the people enough so that they take up arms and take to the streets. That is when the elites, the ones who have the "let them eat cake" mentality, find themselves dangling from lampposts.
Wwe came dangerously close to that point fifteen months ago, when the economic system was teetering on the brink of collapse. That it was on the brink of collapse was in no small measure due to the doings of the banks and investment houses whose CEOs testified to Congress today. That it didn't collapse was not due to anything they did, but to what our government did to save them.
And now, because we, through our government, bailed out their assess, those "masters of the universe" are patting each other on the back and handing out huge bonuses to themselves.
Let us learn from this crisis, even if they won't.
Break up the banks, not just because they are evil, but because this is a matter of our own survival as a free people. "Too big to fail" must be equated to "too big to be allowed to exist."
