Loud mouth Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JP Morgan Chase has become an out and out tea bagger. In this interview with the Financial Times , Dimon claims that the new banking rules under Basel III requiring banks to have more capital to avoid another financial crisis are just anti-American. "I'm very close to thinking the United States shouldn't be in Basel any more,'' Dimon said. "I would not have agreed to rules that are blatantly anti-American," he said. "Our regulators should go there and say: 'If it's not in the interests of the United States, we're not doing it'."
What's he's saying is that banks should dictate to regulators. It's a case of banking uber alles. And what exactly are the "interests of the US", Mr Dimon? Bailing out the American banks that nearly destroyed the global financial system? The problem with his argument is that the world now is so interconnected that whatever is good for the banks globally is good for American banks.
But then, as Felix Salmon says at Reuters, Dimon is working to a different agenda. It's not the banks he's trying to protect but investors. "He wants to go back to the casino model, with himself sitting in the role of the house which always wins. (Except when it loses, and is bailed out by the government.)"
Dimon has form on this. He has long been attacking regulators for trying to rein in the excesses of American banks. As Jay Hancock says in the Baltimore Sun, clueless arrogance, thy name is Dimon.
Dimon's rant is working against the interests of US banks. He is the one who is anti-American.
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