Weekend Economists Escape to Cuba March 15-17, 2013

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13. JP Morgan's Jamie Dimon showed too much hubris and too little humility

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/mar/15/jp-morgan-jamie-dimon-heidi-moore

You could tell the exact moment when Ina Drew decided she had nothing left to lose.

Drew, who ran JP Morgan's $350bn investment office, testified in front of the Senate today about the infamous London Whale trading debacle that racked up $6.2bn in losses for JP Morgan last year. She began her testimony by recounting her decades at JP Morgan "through seven mergers," talked about managing her job and her kids in a search for work-life balance, and gave credit to the "great CEOs" she had worked under, including current chief executive Jamie Dimon.

But Drew did not step up to take responsibility herself. She talked of trusting her deputies. She insisted that JP Morgan had provided its regulators with a daily account of the profits and losses in the bank's investment office – despite Senate documentation to the contrary and the testimony of a regulator who later directly said she was wrong, and that the bank only provided the daily account after the whole debacle blew up in May. When Drew was asked if she knew one key and obvious fact – whether JP Morgan had skipped a crucial yearly check on its trading limits – she demurred that she couldn't recall.

Drew, however, was one of the villains in the bank's own account of what went wrong, and you could see the pressure building up in her mind as she declined to answer, paused, or claimed lack of recall. She ran the office that racked up the losses, and according to the Senate report, she applauded traders for risky bets on American Airlines.