Jamie Dimon Knows a Fraud When He Sees It – Outside of His Bank

Jamie Dimon became Chief Executive Officer of JPMorgan Chase on December 31, 2005. An inordinate amount of frauds have been perpetrated inside his bank since that time, none of which the eagle-eyed Dimon spotted. But Dimon says he knows a fraud when he sees one outside of his bank. Yesterday, he took on the cryptocurrency known as Bitcoin, calling it a fraud. At a banking conference on Tuesday, Dimon said that ‘Bitcoin will eventually blow up. It’s a fraud. It’s worse than tulip bulbs and won’t end well.’
We’re not saying Dimon is wrong about Bitcoin. In fact, more than three years ago Wall Street On Parade compared Bitcoin to the tulip bulb bubble and explained in crystal clear terms how it differs from a real currency, such as the U. S. dollar. But we are saying that Dimon’s super sleuth nose for fraud has the uncanny knack of serially failing him when it comes to Ponzi schemes and mortgage frauds and rogue derivative and commodity traders operating inside his own bank – a taxpayer subsidized institution that has richly rewarded Dimon despite the fact that his sniffer can only catch the scent of fraud outside the doors of JPMorgan Chase. (As of June 30, 2017, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, JPMorgan Chase held more than $1.5 trillion in deposits, the majority of which are insured by the Federal government and backstopped by the U. S. taxpayer.)
On March 22, 2016, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a reportthat noted that the U. S. Justice Department had earlier assigned a $1.7 billion forfeiture against JPMorgan Chase ‘for its failure to detect and report the suspicious activities of Bernard Madoff,’ the largest fraud ever perpetrated against the investing public. The GAO stunningly found that because the bank ‘failed to maintain an effective anti-money-laundering program and report suspicious transactions in 2008, it contributed to its own bank customers ‘losing about $5.4 billion in Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme.’

This post was published at Wall Street On Parade on September 13, 2017.