CEO Jamie Dimon’s faux-apologetic defense of JPMorgan Chase’s recent trading loss, now estimated at $3 billion and rising, prompts a variation of an old joke: How do you know when an investment bank’s CEO is lying? It is when his…
Loss to JPMorgan relatively small, but risk to the system is great
JPMorgan Chase’s multi billion-dollar trading debacle may be small relative to the bank’s capital and profits. But this is not a simple private business transaction that the public should ignore. JPMorgan is not Joe’s Hardware. The big bank enjoys a…
Labor stats are conflicting, confusing because they’re complex
On May 4, when the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics released figures for April, the news was widely interpreted as bad. The total number of people employed had risen by only 115,000, less than in preceding months. And the unemployment…
When austerity does more harm than good
The recent elections in Greece and France were dominated by reaction to “austerity measures” — combinations of tax increases and spending cuts designed to reduce government budget deficits. Although we have not adopted such measures in our country for at…