This morning, New York Times columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin put his finger on the disconnect between average everyday folk and the Wall Street establishment with his assertion that, when it comes to criticizing JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, some people “matter” and others don’t. The “pundit class,” as he put it, seems to want Dimon to resign in the face of multiple regulatory and criminal investigations that have prompted the bank to set aside $23 billion for potential legal costs. The bank reported its first quarterly loss under Dimon, and its first since 2004, last Friday. Dimon told analysts on the earnings call: “This is very painful for the company.”
Sorkin writes:
“When I called Dennis Kelleher, president of BetterMarkets, a nonprofit Wall Street watchdog, he put it this way: ‘By any objective measure, Jamie Dimon should be fired. The compliance failures are egregious and systemic.’ Yet there is an almost bizarre disconnect between the headlines and what the people who matter—the investors, analysts, board members and, yes, even regulators—are seeking. None of them want him fired.”
It might be the first time that someone has admitted, quite so openly, what those who aren’t among the chalkstriped class have long suspected: that Wall Street could care less about how everyone else views what they’re doing. A similar sentiment emerged on CNBC a couple of weeks ago during an interview with a Dimon critic that generated a huge amount of attention: “The company continues to churn out tens of billions of dollars in earnings and hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue,” CNBC anchor Maria Bartiromo said, as if that would obviously insulate him from scrutiny. “How do you criticize that?”
Whether or not one believes that Dimon is the greatest manager of all time or a troubled chief executive who should move on, it’s good to have the Wall Street-real world disconnect completely out in the open, so that future discussions can be framed honestly in those terms. Even some in the financial world don’t agree with them.
“All you need to know about Sorkin’s article on Dimon is revealed in the 4th paragraph: the ‘people who matter,’” wrote Epicurean Dealmaker on Twitter this morning. “I stopped reading there.”
