NP - Jamie Dimon and the Gambling Away of All of Us

[David Morris]

http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox.html

The issue is that Dimon is still in the process of wrangling over the
final version of the "Volcker Rule" concept. The idea of the Volcker
Rule is to make it such that a firm like JP Morgan can't try to earn
huge trading profits. The rationale is that when you try to make huge
trading profits you expose yourself to risks of giant losses, and yet
since other aspects of JP Morgan's operations are backed by taxpayers
this doesn't just exposure Morgan to risks it exposes the whole
country. At the same time, regulators are supposed to allow banks to
engage in hedging and market making. So a key question in writing and
enforcing the rules is how broadly to read those exemptions. Having
lost the legislative fight over the Volcker Rule, what banks now want
to do is get those exemptions so broadly written as to allow them to
keep humming along with risky trading operations. But key to the
strategy of getting the exemption written sufficiently broadly so as
to allow risky trading operations is that you can't say that's your
objective.