Savvy Protection Racket

by digby

Here’s one for the shocker of the century file:

Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase and the industry’s regulation-basher in chief, has called for a sit-down next week between the heads of four of the nation’s biggest banks — JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley — and Federal Reserve Governor Daniel Tarullo, the Wall Street Journal is reporting.

The purpose of this friendly get-together will be to express the banks’ displeasure about financial regulation, particularly a Fed plan to limit the banks’ exposure to derivatives tied to the credit of foreign governments and other banks.

According to the WSJ:

bankers will tell regulators that the rule is based on “unrealistic” standards and could foster “potentially destabilizing” market shifts, according to two draft letters reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

In other words: Nice economy you’ve got there. Shame if anything should happen to it.

I guess we know who’s in charge here. And it isn’t the people of the United States.

We’ve been here before actually. And the government whiffed. Recall President Obama’s words back in 2009:

“It’s almost like they’ve got — they’ve got a bomb strapped to them and they’ve got their hand on the trigger,” President Obama said on Thursday of the banks he’s chosen to bail out. “You don’t want them to blow up. But you’ve got to kind of talk [to] them, ease that finger off the trigger.”

You can’t help but wonder how different things would be if President Obama had shown the same kind of “resolve” and “courage” everyone lauds him for showing in his order to assassinate Osama bin Laden, with the “savvy businessmen” on Wall Street. We’ll never know, unfortunately. They’re going to keep blackmailing the nation — the world — as long as they can get away with it.

Read the whole article to find out just how reckless these people are being. All over again.