Jamie Dimon

"It’s not right to say we’re worse off... If you go back 20 years ago, cars were worse, the air was worse. People didn’t have iPhones." That’s what you get when you ask a billionaire executive from a taxpayer bailed out, unaccountable industry for his thoughts on income inequality.

"The one thing I do worry a little bit about, by the way, is Treasuries. So I wouldn’t be shocked to see 10-year Treasuries, when rates are going up, people change their mind, they change direction, that they will be violently volatile and go up much faster than people think."

"In theory, investors can exit an open-ended mutual fund or an ETF at will. But the growing popularity of these funds forces them to invest in an ever larger share of less liquid bonds. If everyone wants to exit at once, prices could fall very far, very fast. A lucky few may get out in time. Others will probably get trampled."

The eventual outcome to all this is captured brilliantly in this quote by Ludwig Von Mises, the Austrian economist: "There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved." The credit expansion happened between 1980 and 2008, there was a warning shot which was soundly ignored by ignorant central bankers, and now we have more, not less, debt with which to contend.

When things that are supposed to happen once every 3 billion years (statistically speaking) start happening once every three months, or every three weeks, then something is definitively broken.

"Mr. Martin-Artajo is in Spain, where a court has refused to extradite him, and Mr. Grout is in France, which typically does not extradite its own citizens. Although the investigation in the United States officially remains open, it appears no one, in all likelihood, will be held legally accountable. 'When risky behavior is repeatedly tolerated or concealed, you have to wonder if higher-ranking people should have been targeted.'" 

Just a little over a month after we learned that Jamie Dimon recently became a billionaire, Bloomberg reports that yet another TBTF CEO has joined the billionaire banker club and frankly, we’re surprised it took this long because after all, when you’re the CEO of the blood-sucking cephalopod that holds the political and financial fate of the world in its tentacles, it seems only right that you would have been a billionaire long before any other banker on the Street.

If yesterday's JPM results were largely a story of contracting trading revenues offset by a decline in expenses, then in many ways today's Bank of America results mimicked what Jamie Dimon did in the second quarter. Moments ago BofA reported that in a quarter in which it repurchased $775 million in stock, it generated $5.3 billion in net income, or $0.45 per share, above the $0.36 declining consensus estimate as a result of a $1.9 billion drop in non-interest expenses, even as FICC trading revenue tumbled just as it did for JPM and Jefferies, sliding 9% Y/Y, offset by a rise in equity trading courtesy of China.

Bruno Iksil — better known as “The London Whale” or “Voldemort” or “He Who Must Not Be Named” — carved out his place in the annals of CDX trading history when a tail hedge gone wrong effectively forced him to sell massive amounts of protection on IG.9 back in Q1 of 2012. Even though the bet hedge cost JP Morgan more than $6 billion, the UK's financial "watchdog" has determined that the case against Iksil isn't strong enough to proceed. 

What JPMorgan is doing to the "Other" commodities space, Citigroup has just done to the "Precious Metals" derivative market.

“Systemic risk is in the system [and] we are in uncharted territory. Think about holding other assets. That could mean precious metals, it could mean physical currencies.”

Elizabeth Warren may or may not understand the "global banking system" as Jamie Dimon alleges, but the JPM CEO certainly does as the following 14 "reasons" clearly confirm...

Mark Carney: "Real markets are essential to guarantee prosperity. Not markets that collapse when there is a shock from abroad. Not markets where transactions occur in chat rooms. Not markets where no one appears accountable for anything."  So... not markets which are artificially rigged by $22 trillion in central bank liquidity and which collapse every time the "threat" that any of this preciously liquidity may be taken away?

"Central bank distortions have forced investors into positions they would not have held otherwise, and forced them to be the ‘same way round’ to a much greater extent than previously... unless fundamentals move so as to justify current valuations, when central banks move towards the exit, investors will too.... The way out may not prove so easy; indeed, we are not sure there is any way out at all."