This hasn't been a very good week for the one percenters, has it? Anti-NATO protesters chanting outside their cozy dinners, bloggers releasing the details of ALEC's latest schemes, people showing up at Timothy Geithner's door to bitch, bitch, bitch! Don't they know who he is - and who his friends are? I guess the National People's Action and National Domestic Workers Alliance don't really care:

Yesterday, more than 1,000 clergy, homeowners, students, family farmers, unemployed workers and community leaders with National People’s Action and National Domestic Workers Alliance went to Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner’s home to demand he support a Robin Hood tax and a thorough investigation of the bankers who caused the mortgage crisis.

“We didn’t want to be at Geithner’s house,” Bobby Tolbert of VOCAL-NY, an affiliate of NPA and a leader at the action. “But we want a treasury secretary that stands with people over bankers. Geithner has consistently undermined proposals for a Robin Hood tax and stalled the mortgage fraud task force investigation.”

Barb Kalbach, a family farmer and member of Iowa CCI, an NPA affiliate, said community leaders have met with Geithner before but little progress has been made to ease the crushing impact of the mortgage and financial crisis on the American people.

Geithner must “quit protecting the big banks, write down the mortgages and keep us in our homes and stop the foreclosure crisis around the U.S.,” Kalbach said speaking into a microphone while standing on Geithner’s driveway. “Right now, today, he continues to impede the process of investigating the banks that crashed our economy. And he’s blocking a tiny tax of less than half of one percent. It’s small change for Wall Street, but big change for America.”

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Most observers are missing the point. When CEO Jamie Dimon announced that JPMorgan Chase had incurred at least $2 billion in losses from risky, unsecured, derivatives-types trading, it uncovered the scandal of our time once and for all.

The Chase disaster gives us a much-needed glimpse into our corrupt political system, its Wall Street paymasters, and the media voices that allow people like Dimon to escape scrutiny.

The JPMorgan Chase story is also the story behind the financial crisis that has thrown millions of people out of work. It's the story behind our ever-growing wealth inequity. It's the story behind Washington's inability to prosecute criminal bankers, regulate reckless ones, and propose the economic solutions the rest of us urgently need.

Predictably, the pundits who aid and abet people like Jamie Dimon are dismissing this story's importance, pointing out that $2 billion (it could become much more) pales against the $19 billion in profit Chase reported last year.

But it was potentially $2 billion earned through crime. And more importantly, this story isn't just about Chase's errors and crimes. It's much bigger than that.

Besides, $19 billion in a single year? That's a big part of the story, too.

The Case Against Chase, its CEO, and its accomplices is too big to cover all at once. Here are the aspects of this under-reported story we plan to address in the days and weeks to come.

The Firm

Depending on the day and the measurement used, JPMorgan Chase is now the largest or second-largest bank in the world. Its Japan operation alone has been cited by that nation's regulators as a systemic risk because of its size.

If Chase began to collapse because of risky betting, the government would be forced to step in again.

Jamie Dimon knows that. It's a lot easier to gamble when you know somebody else will be forced to bail you out if you lose too much.

Chase, like the other mega-banks, has systematically engaged in criminal activity for years. At the same time, it has used its vast wealth to corrupt our political and regulatory systems. And it has been aided and abetted by willing collaborators in the media, every step of the way. It gave up nearly three quarters of a billion dollars in settlements and surrendered fees to settle one case alone—that of bribery and corruption in Jefferson County, Alabama.

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It's unlikely that any of Wall Street's criminals will ever go to jail, but maybe if we kick up enough of a fuss, we can get Jamie Dimon kicked off the board of the NY Fed. Not that there's anything wrong with sitting on the board of the agency that's supposed to oversee you, of course! It's been this way for so long, they don't even understand why we'd be upset about it:

JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon’s position as a director on the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s board renewed concern that the central bank is too close to the institutions it oversees.

Dimon, who disclosed a $2 billion trading loss by his firm last week, is one of three bankers sitting on the New York Fed’s board, as mandated by Congress under the Federal Reserve Act. While directors have no role in bank supervision, Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat running for U.S. Senate, called for Dimon’s removal from the district bank board because the New York Fed regulates JPMorgan. Senator Bernard Sanders, a Vermont Independent, said he sees a conflict in Dimon’s two roles.

Fed governance came under scrutiny after taxpayer-funded bailouts during the 2008 financial crisis sparked a political backlash. The Dodd-Frank Act overhauling bank supervision required a Government Accountability Office audit of the central bank, which was completed last year and found the Fed needs to strengthen policies governing conflicts of interest and improve transparency.

Having bankers on the boards of regional Fed banks “is a problem, period,” said Sheila Bair, senior adviser at Pew Charitable Trusts and a former chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. “Why the regional banks have members of the industry that they regulate on their boards is beyond me.”

It's funny, isn't it, how the women are the ones with the loudest voices on this issue?

Warren, a Democrat, has served in the Office of the President and as chairwoman of the Congressional Oversight Panel for the Troubled Asset Relief Program. She helped establish the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

“After the biggest financial crisis in generations, the American people are frustrated that Wall Street has still not been held accountable and does not appear to consider itself responsible,” she said. “Dimon should resign from his post at the New York Fed to send a signal to the American people that Wall Street bankers get it and to show that they understand the need for responsibility and accountability.”

Business Insider CEO, Henry Blodget, says what we now know is the truth: Wall Street is just a bunch of kids playing with dynamite. And where does the buck stop? Not with CEO Jamie Dimon! It stops somewhere over there, with some other people—who will no doubt collect a golden parachute and get a better job at a hedge fund:

Wall Street can't be trusted to manage—or even correctly assess—its own risks.This is in part because, time and again, Wall Street has demonstrated that it doesn't even KNOW what risks it is taking. In short, Wall Street bankers are just a bunch of kids playing with dynamite.

There are two reasons for this, neither of which boil down to the "stupidity" that most people generally assume is involved. The bankers who place these bets are anything but stupid.

• The first reason is that the gambling instruments the banks now use are mind-bogglingly complicated. Warren Buffett once described derivatives as "weapons of mass destruction." And those weapons have gotten a lot more complex in the past few years.

• The second reason is that Wall Street's incentive structure is fundamentally flawed: Bankers get all of the upside for winning bets, and someone else—the government or shareholders—covers the downside.

The second reason is particularly insidious. The worst thing that can happen to a trader who blows a huge bet and demolishes his firm—literally the worst thing—is that he will get fired. Then he will immediately go get a job at a hedge fund and make more than he was making before he blew up the firm. Meanwhile, if the trader's bet works—and the bigger the better—he'll look like a hero and collect an absolutely massive bonus. If you had those incentives, you would do exactly the same thing that Wall Street traders do: Bet the company, day after day. (It's not your company, after all, so who the heck cares?)

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Matt Taibbi with a good explanation of why we should be upset about JPMorgan Chase and their $2 billion in gambling losses (remember, Jamie Dimon's saying at least $2 billion):

If you’re wondering why you should care if some idiot trader (who apparently has been making $100 million a year at Chase, a company that has been the recipient of at least $390 billion in emergency Fed loans) loses $2 billion for Jamie Dimon, here’s why: because J.P. Morgan Chase is a federally-insured depository institution that has been and will continue to be the recipient of massive amounts of public assistance. If the bank fails, someone will reach into your pocket to pay for the cleanup. So when they gamble like drunken sailors, it’s everyone’s problem.

Activity like this is exactly what the Volcker rule, which effectively banned risky proprietary trading by federally insured institutions, was designed to prevent. It will be argued that this trade was a technically a hedge, and therefore exempt from the Volcker rule. Not only does that explanation sound fishy to me (as Salmon notes, for Iksil’s trade to be a hedge, this would mean Chase had an equally giant and insane short bet on against corporate debt, which seems unlikely), but it's sort of immaterial anyway: whether or not this bet technically violated the Volcker rule, it definitely violated the spirit of the law. Hedge or no hedge, we don’t want big, federally-insured, too-big-to-fail banks making giant nuclear-powered derivatives bets.

This incident is certain to reignite the debate about Dodd-Frank and may undermine the broad effort to roll back the bill, which we wrote about in the latest issue of the magazine. Staffers on the Hill started mobilizing the instant the Chase news hit the airwaves yesterday, and you can bet we'll hear more debate in the next few months about not only the Volcker Rule but the Lincoln Rule, which was designed to wall off risky swaps from the federally-insured side of these banks.

I’ve heard from all sides today, with some thinking the Chase trade was Dodd-Frank compliant, and others saying it probably violated both the Volcker and the Lincoln rules.

Either way, the incident underscored the basic problem. If J.P. Morgan Chase wants to act like a crazed cowboy hedge fund and make wild exacta bets on the derivatives market, they should be welcome to do so. But they shouldn’t get to do it with cheap cash from the Fed’s discount window, and they shouldn’t get to do it with money from the federally-insured bank accounts of teachers, firemen and other such real people. It’s a simple concept: you either get to be a bank, or you get to be a casino. But you can’t be both. If we don’t have rules to enforce that concept, we ought to get some.

In the meantime, JPMorgan shares tanked with the news:

JPMorgan Chase & Co lost $15 billion in market value and a notch in its credit ratings on Friday while a chorus of regulators and politicians reacted to its surprise $2 billion trading loss by demanding stiffer oversight for the banking industry.

The loss by one of Wall Street's most respected banks embarrassed chief executive Jamie Dimon, a leader lauded for steering his bank through the fallout from the 2008 financial crisis without reporting a loss.

"We know we were sloppy. We know we were stupid. We know there was bad judgment," Dimon said in an interview with NBC television to be broadcast on "Meet the Press" on Sunday.

More here.

Remember last month, when I wrote about JPMorgan Chase gambling heavily on high-risk credit derivatives, and Jamie Dimon said it was a "tempest in a teapot"?

Oops.

JPMorgan Chase disclosed on Thursday that a trading group had suffered “significant” losses in a portfolio of credit investments, with the chief executive, Jamie Dimon, estimating losses at $2 billion in a conference call.

“These were egregious mistakes,” Mr. Dimon said on the call. “They were self-inflicted and this is not how we want to run a business.”

And yet, apparently this is exactly how you run a business, Jamie! (Remember, this is the man who, not so long ago, was considered a shoo-in to replace Tim Geithner.) Ironic that JPMorgan Chase is considered the prudent bank, relatively speaking.

The troubles at the unit, the so-called Chief Investment Office, which makes trades to balance the bank’s assets and liabilities, are expected to weigh on the bank’s broader earnings.

For example, the corporate group, which includes the Chief Investment Office, is now expected to lose $800 million in the second quarter, the company said in a filing. Previously, JPMorgan had estimated that the group would report net income of roughly $200 million.

Ultimately, JPMorgan said, the final tally will depend on the markets and other actions by the bank. Mr. Dimon added that it could “easily get worse.”

Shares of JPMorgan were down 5.5 percent in after-hours trading, dragging down other bank stocks.

The trading group has been a focus in recent weeks as questions surfaced about big bets the JPMorgan unit was reportedly making in credit default swaps. Reports emerged in April about a JPMorgan trader in London whose positions were so big that they were distorting the market.

Mr. Dimon played down the significance. In a conference call on April 13, he called the matter “a complete tempest in a teapot.”

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Remember, this is the same guy who was widely rumored to be next in line after Tim Geithner leaves Treasury. Boy, they really do live in a bubble, don't they? I think we all know how badly they want to get their manicured little fingers on our Social Security:

Jamie Dimon did his thing, and people liked it. The chairman and CEO of what many consider to be the best bank in the U.S. came out guns blazing and touched on every issue related to regulation and banking.

Dimon was speaking his mind Thursday at a a conference put on by the Simon School at the University of Rochester, where he received the “Executive Of The Year” award. The head of JPMorgan Chase expressed support for the Simpson-Bowles bipartisan budget plan, echoing earlier remarks at the event on the latter point made by General Electric chief Jeff Immelt. Dimon also called the persecution of oil price speculators “ridiculous,” asking the Obama Administration, Republicans, and everybody to unite and “get [things] done.”

After acknowledging the severity of the European sovereign debt crisis, and the only temporary effect of the ECB’s LTRO liquidity programs, Dimon said “the U.S. is the opposite of Europe, we know the way, it’s called Bowles-Simpson.”

“Our problem is that we don’t have the will,” explained Dimon. The problem in the U.S. is political, he explained, as Democrats and Republicans have pushed each other so far apart that they’ve created unnecessary problems, such as the debt ceiling crisis, that aren’t structural but political in nature.

“Why the hell are we so depressed,” he said, adding “we have the best military in the planet, the best universities and the best businesses incredible innovation, from Steve Jobs to the factory floor.”

Sure, as long as you're a gazillionaire who can afford all those things! God, what a piece of work.

There was a moment to talk about Occupy Wall Street as well, only a few days after massive protests in the contexts of May Day. OWS has targeted Dimon in the past, but the banker still said he agreed with some of their points. “The average American [can] look at the institutions of America and [say] they’ve let me down: these are Washington and Wall Street,” said Dimon. “A lot of people made a lot of money [going into the crisis], [then] their company blew up, and they [still] walked out with a lot of money,” he explained, acknowledging he didn’t like that either.

The banker, though, said the Occupy movement has put every banker, every CEO and one-percenter in the same bag. “That’s ridiculous, it’s another form of discrimination,” he said. At one point, Dimon did what many in the crowd equated to criticizing President Obama, saying “when things go wrong, finance gets blamed, just like this ridiculous stuff of blaming speculators for oil prices.” Dimon noted that markets are a very powerful force, allocating capital whether regulators want it or not. The secret, he explained, is getting “good” regulation.

What on earth could possibly go wrong with one of the world's largest banks betting heavily on high-risk derivatives? Originally, that was supposed to be banned under Dodd Frank with the Volcker Rule. But lobbyists made sure it was just a hollow joke.

I don't know about you, but I don't want to pay for another round of bailouts for these jerks:

JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon has transformed the bank’s chief investment office in the past five years, increasing the size and risk of its speculative bets, according to five former executives with direct knowledge of the changes.

Achilles Macris, hired in 2006 as the CIO’s top executive in London, led an expansion into corporate and mortgage-debt investments with a mandate to generate profits for the New York-0based bank, three of the former employees said. Dimon, 56, closely supervised the shift from the CIO’s previous focus on protecting JPMorgan from risks inherent in its banking business, such as interest-rate and currency movements, they said.

Some of Macris’s bets are now so large that JPMorgan probably can’t unwind them without losing money or roiling financial markets, the former executives said, based on knowledge gleaned from people inside the bank and dealers at other firms. Bruno Iksil, a London-based trader in Macris’s group, gained attention last week after moving markets with his trades, drawing a comparison to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke’s power in the government-bond market.

“What Bernanke is to the Treasury market, Iksil is to the derivatives market,” Bonnie Baha, head of the global developed credit group at DoubleLine Capital LP in Los Angeles, where she helps oversee $32 billion, said in a telephone interview.

Macris’s team amassed a portfolio of as much as $200 billion, booking a profit of $5 billion in 2010 alone -- equal to more than a quarter of JPMorgan’s net income that year, one former senior executive said.

The shifting role of the CIO group at JPMorgan, which reported record firmwide profit for 2011, underscores how blurry the line can be between “proprietary trading” and hedging, and it highlights the challenge U.S. regulators face in curbing speculative bets by federally backed lenders under the so-called Volcker rule. JPMorgan, whose $2.27 trillion of assets at year- end made it the biggest U.S. bank, says the CIO manages the firm’s risks, with trades like Iksil’s forming a part of that effort.

“It’s a complete tempest in a teapot,” Dimon said on a conference call with investors today after the bank announced first-quarter earnings. “Every bank has a major portfolio and in those portfolios you make investments that you think are wise.”

Shorter Jamie Dimon: Trust me!

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Via New York Magazine, a tale of woe and regret, tinged with more than a little bitterness:

To comply with the looming regulations, banks have begun stripping themselves of the pistons that powered their profits: leverage and proprietary trading. In the wake of the crash, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs converted to bank holding companies to tap the “discount window,” the Fed’s pipeline of cheap funds that gave the banks an emergency source of liquidity. That move seemed smart then, but the stricter standards required of banks have now left them boxed in.

With all the major banks unable to wager their own funds on big bets, there’s a growing sense that the money that was being made during the Bush boom won’t be back. “The government has strangled the financial system,” banking analyst Dick Bove told me recently. “We’ve basically castrated these companies. They can’t borrow as much as they used to borrow.”

Dawwww. Poor babies. Do you have the sense that they still aren't living in reality? You'd be right. They're not.

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Federal Reserve Headquarters (Eccles Building), Washington DC

It took the journalists at Bloomberg News two years - and presumably lots of legal fees - to pry information out of the Federal Reserve that should have been made public long ago. We now know that the Fed's secret $7.7 trillion lending program wasn't just the most massive bank bailout ever seen, and it wasn't just free money for mega-bankers - though it was certainly both of those things. It was also the greatest hoax in stock market history.

No, scratch that. It was the greatest hoax in the history of money. And it was built on lies. How many? Let us count the ways.

Here's the first one: The banks paid back all the money back that they were given. No, they didn't. They paid back the principal on these loans. But by obtaining loans at rates far below market value, we now know they received the equivalent of $13 billion in cash giveaways.

Here's another lie: Fed economists support a free-market economy.

Ben Bernanke is a conservative economist who claims to support a free-market system. But we now know that the Federal Reserve lent astonishing sums to US banks in secret, and Bernanke fought with all the resources at his disposal to ensure that this information didn't become public. He didn't just want it to be held back to avoid a panic during the crisis. He wanted it kept secret forever.

I don't know what you call somebody like that, but I know what you don't call him: A capitalist. Free markets need transparency, so that investors and customers can make informed decisions and 'the wisdom of the market' can prevail. Nobody wanted the market to do its job. When it came to banks, they wanted it to be blind, deaf, and dumb, unable to make sound judgments about their financial soundness.

They still want it that way. They don't want investors to know how badly Wall Street executives failed at their jobs. They don't want the free market to do what it does best - thin the herd so it's free of incompetent managers like the executives who still run our largest banks.

You can believe in the free market, ur you can believe in today's Wall Street. But you can't do both.

Here's another lie, one that's spread by Dimon and others: Giant banks are more efficient. Size brings efficiency in other kinds of business, but these banks needed massive help. America's six largest banks accounted on any given day for an average of 63 percent of the debt on these loans. The only thing they're more efficient at is wringing free money out of government-created institutions.

And, wow. Jamie Dimon sure is a hypocrite. As Bloomberg noted:

JPMorgan Chase & Co. CEO Jamie Dimon told shareholders in a March 26, 2010, letter that his bank used the Fed's Term Auction Facility "at the request of the Federal Reserve to help motivate others to use the system." He didn't say that the New York-based bank's total TAF borrowings were almost twice its cash holdings or that its peak borrowing of $48 billion on Feb. 26, 2009, came more than a year after the program's creation.

He also didn't mention that these favorable loans gave his bank nearly half a billion dollars in cash it otherwise wouldn't have had. Know what's convenient about that? It helps make up for the three-quarters of a billion Dimon's bank gave up to settle charges of bribery and corruption in Jefferson County, Alabama.

Chase borrowed massive sums of money, either because it was in bigger trouble than it has admitted or because it was bleeding an emergency public program out of greed. Either way, they weren't doing anybody a favor except themselves. How big a favor? Chase netted $457.9 million.

Citigroup's an even more extreme example. Once our largest bank (until continued mismanagement led to ongoing shrinkage). It only exists because Robert Rubin and other officials in the Clinton Administration,cleared the way for the largest merger in history with the enthusiastic support of the Republicans. That merger combined a bank with an insurance company, a harbinger of bad things to come in the risk area.

Citigroup's got the equivalent of a $1.8 billion gift, courtesy of Uncle Sam.

Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan sneers at his critics, especially those who think you shouldn't foreclose on families without obtaining proof that you own their mortgage. "Oh, sure," he said in response to government demands, "we'll do our homework."

Bank of America's gift came to $1.5 billion.

Goldman Sachs shouldn't have been eligible for any Fed giveaways because it wasn't a commercial bank. But a special "waiver" allowed Goldman allowed to become commercial bank so it could be rescued from actions it took before it was a commercial bank. Before that it was an investment bank. Yet, strangely, it seems to have kept operating as an investment bank even after the transition, too, even though commercial banks aren't allowed to do that.

Understand that? Don't take it personally if you don't. You're not supposed to.

Goldman Sachs's take? Just under $1 billion.

Washington's always telling us that bankers may have done naughty things, but they weren't illegal things. That gets us to our next lie: There's no evidence that bank executives have committed crimes. Thanks to Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley, we may be about to discover whether that's true regarding foreclosures and mortgage filings. But when it comes to stock fraud, the evidence is already piling up.

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