If only the TV series Mad Men wasn't true

My shortest blog to date.  Frank Rich wrote a great article in the New York Magazine on the perceived decline of America. Click on the link below to read it.

http://nymag.com/news/frank-rich/declining-america-2012-7/?mid=nymag_press

my take is that it was never as good as they would like us to believe.

I have been bothered for some time of this great fictional love affair people have with the good old days.  They may have been for a few select groups but for the majority of people life in America wasn't what it was purported to be.

I am not by any means claiming it was better somewhere else (it probably was if you were black or Jewish or a woman).  It just wasn't the idyllic world painted by Hollywood or Madison Avenue.
Read Upton Sinclair's book "The Jungle".  In the more recent past - how about the Martin Luther King led civil right marches of the mid-60's.  Smack dab in the middle of the 8 year run of the Andy Griffith show American citizens were being sprayed with fire hoses and had police dogs let loose on them.

But enough about what I have to say - Frank Rich's article is much better than mine.  His focus is on the perception and he doesn't even have to point out the obvious like I feel compelled to.

“Our CEO is sorry, is yours?”

The commercial begins with the male voice asking the audience.  

The voice is trustworthy, warm and worldly.  You have heard his voice in the past for companies like Bear Stearns, Countrywide, Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brother.  The voice can think for you.

My bad

The voice continues “If your CEO isn’t apologizing or manufacturing some dimly understood falsely embraced grieving yet somehow injured response maybe you’re not getting all you can from your bank.”

Chase’s CEO – he’s sorry.  JPMorgan Chase and Co, the US’ biggest bank, racked up losses that could total 5 billion dollars in risky trading.

“We made a terrible, egregious mistake and there’s almost no excuse for it,” Chase CEO Mr. Dimon said, adding that the bank was “sloppy” and “stupid.”

Sloppy and stupid yes
just don't rub my nose in it

Barclay’s CEO – he’s sorry too. Barclays Bank a British multinational banking and financial services company was fined a total of $450 million for attempting to manipulate the daily settings of key short-term interest rates.

Barclay’s CEO Robert Diamond has since apologized for the interest-rate manipulation scandal that has engulfed the U.K. bank.

Mr. Diamond, Barclays CEO said he was "sorry" and "I am disappointed because many of these behaviors happened on my watch. It is my responsibility to make sure that it cannot happen again.”

There you go – for 5 billion dollars you get a sorry.

Now are you getting that from your bank?

Commercial ends - Fade to Black

"Sorry, wrong finger"

 Chase’s Jamie Dimon told the Senate Banking Committee on Wednesday that he had been “dead wrong” to dismiss early news reports of his bank’s reckless trading and that he was “sorry” for the resulting losses, variously estimated at $2 billion to $5 billion, and counting. He even ventured that too-big-to-fail banks have “negatives,” including “you know, greed, arrogance, hubris, lack of attention to detail.”

You know……..

In another story Barclay's Dimon was admitting that the bank felt "terrible" for having lost some of its shareholders' money.

Barclay’s Diamond resigned soon afterwards and said he "loved" Barclays and had resigned to protect its reputation. "I'm sorry, disappointed and angry."

Phew….now we can add terrible, disappointed and angry to the list.

I am sorry, disappointed and angry but I am also unemployed and filthy  rich

  

All while in the same breath the injured CEO’s cry out they do not need any financial regulation.  Trust us!  We know what we are doing they say.

Jamie Dimon of Chase had the hubris to point out that the timing of the loss was a gift for advocates of more stringent regulation.  How can someone refer to a 5 billion dollar loss as a gift?

There are those who point out that only stockholders lost money or argue in a free-market system, banks are free to take risks, which result in successes or failures, profits or losses. 

Except for the fact that old bailout thing.  

Here’s a take from Paul Krugman of the NY Times

Here’s what the presumptive Republican presidential nominee said about JPMorgan’s $2 billion loss (which may actually have been $3 billion, or $5 billion, or more, but who’s counting?): “This was a loss to shareholders and owners of JPMorgan and that’s the way America works. Some people experienced a loss in this case because of a bad decision. By the way, there was someone who made a gain.”

What’s wrong with this statement? Well, suppose that someone — say, Jimmy Stewart in the movie “It’s a Wonderful Life” — runs a bank that takes in deposits and invests the money in various ways. And suppose that one of those investments is a risky bet on some complex financial instrument, with Mr. Potter, the evil plutocrat, on the other side.

If Jimmy Stewart’s bet pays off, we’re in Romneyworld: he’s made money, Mr. Potter has lost money, and that’s that. But suppose Jimmy Stewart loses his bet. If the bet was big enough, he no longer has enough assets to pay off his depositors. His bank collapses, probably in a chaotic bank run that takes down the whole town’s economy as collateral damage. Mr. Potter makes money on the deal, but so what?

The point is that it’s not O.K. for banks to take the kinds of risks that are acceptable for individuals, because when banks take on too much risk they put the whole economy in jeopardy — unless they can count on being bailed out. And the prospect of such bailouts, of course, only strengthens the case that banks shouldn’t be allowed to run wild, since they are in effect gambling with taxpayers’ money.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/21/opinion/dimons-deja-vu-debacle.html

In January of 2010 I cut a story out of the financial section of our daily paper and placed in a picture frame.  It hangs on my wall.

 The story headline was “Bankers say they are sorry”.

The bankers were from companies who collectively received more than $100 billion in taxpayer assistance to weather the crisis and they offered no regrets for executive pay that is now likely to increase as a result of their survival.

Like most of you in 2008 my retirement fund, which I had nurtured through a lot a crap in my life, lost half of its value

It has never really recovered but that is a story for another day and at least….

My CEO is sorry.

Steal a little and they throw you in jail

Steal a lot and they make you king – Bob Dylan