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.
I guess the one thing that was a bit heartening was that Jamie Dimon himself called out these bad tranches of loans, and said they were bad business and something they shouldn't be doing. I had expected that he was in on all of the nefariousness, if not an architect of it. On my "How Human Is He?" scale, he has moved up from Sub-Human, to the equivalent "humanity" level of the left little toe of a small pond frog.
Jon Ronson does a great job about talking about the "inhumans" in The Psychopath Test. As it turns out, CEOs are much more likely to be sociopathic than run-of-the-mill humans. Bear in mind that there's nothing in Jamie Dimon's job description that requires him to be human. If corporations are predators, than Jamie Dimon is the frontal lobe of a predator. More than that, shareholders don't reward humanity. He ain't sayin' "we shouldn't be doing this business because it's destroying lives" he's sayin' "we shouldn't be doing this business because it will be expensive."
And that's the purpose of regulation or socialization. Internalizing the externalities; hoisting on balance sheets the cost of psychopathy so it's a little less sexy. Too bad that, at the highest levels, that sort of regulation can only be retrospective and so requires enormous bad behavior to be spotted after the damage is done. And at the highest level, the damage is systemic :("we shouldn't be doing this business because it will be expensive."
My reading over the summer has led me to conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that the core value of the Republican party is feudalism, and that it is only through the diligent and sacrificial efforts of Democrats that we haven't slid into de jure oligarchy. de facto oligarchy? Yeah, we're there.
True, true. But if polluting companies were forced to pay for carbon offsets, and pay their employees a $15 minimum wage, and barred from doing business with dictatorships and countries who do not commit to the Paris Accord, and, and, and... And basically, if companies were forced to pay the ACTUAL price of production for their goods, then the incentives to jack the system and offload the costs onto the consumer (or unsuspecting bond buyers), then Jamie Dimon would do what was RIGHT as well as what was GOOD for the business. It's because businesses are rewarded for being shitty loophole-seekers, that people like Jamie Dimon leverage these loopholes. I wonder, if a sociopath were running a business with the right incentives in the right places, I wonder what we'd get? Tesla? (j/k... I know you hate Tesla with the fury of a thousand suns...) "Bear in mind that there's nothing in Jamie Dimon's job description that requires him to be human..."