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kleinbl00  ·  2393 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: $13B fine to hide wrong-doing, turns out to be a deal

What's the phrase? It's better to be wrong together than right alone? The thing I love about the 2008 crash is that anybody just learning about it is all "no one predicted" and "unforeseen" and "black swan" (FUCK YOU TALEB) when large swaths of the real estate media was screeching about knife-catching and ridiculous mortgages and equity withdrawals on epic scales. The problem is that so long as you report to shareholders, your job is to squeeze every last dime out of every last holding until the very last minute.

And if you choose to reef back one second too early, you're going to be fired for underperforming the industry.

And if you choose to follow the rest of the buffalo herd off the cliff, you're not an outlier. You're performing right in line with industry expectations.

So the mavericks? The ones that made a killing shorting subprime? They were the private equity firms that got to hedge. They're the ones who aren't paying fines to the SEC for ignoring their better instincts in service of shareholder value.

I can truly see how Jamie Dimon thinks he did nothing wrong... because he was only doing the exact same fucking thing all his colleagues were doing. And this is why Occupy Wall Street was so catchy but so useless - it will take nothing less than a reimagining of the capital system to effect change and that is a task so far beyond marching and demanding redress that the only thing that will bring it about is total and absolute failure.