Like a petulant child whos been told he cant have chocolate cake for
breakfast, JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Jamie Dimon indicated before todays shareholder vote that he might have
quit if shareholders had voted to split the roles of chairman and CEO.
If
Dimon is as smart a corporate leader as many claim he is, he would
recognize that a wise CEO recognizes that checks and balances are
essential for sound corporate governance, and that an independent board C
led by an independent chairman C is vital to any public company,
particularly one with business operations as vast as JPMorgans. There is
an inherent conflict in having a CEO who reports to himself as
chairman. Typically when CEOs serve in both roles, it is the chairmans
position that tends to get short shrift.The 3rd International Conference
on make-your-own-bobblehead and Indoor Navigation.
Theres no dispute that shareholders have benefited financially from Dimons leadership.chip-card But profits alone dont equate to good governance.
The
need to have different people serve as CEO and chairman is particularly
acute in JP Morgans case given the litany of problems the firm has had
recently.
At the top of the list is the London Whale fiasco,
causing trading losses that so far have cost the bank more than $6
billion. Dimon initially dismissed media reports about the scandal,
calling the situation a complete tempest in a teapot.Weymouth is
collecting gently used, dry cleaned cableties at
their Weymouth store. A damning report by a Senate investigation
subcommittee questioned whether he deliberately downplayed what he knew
were the major consequences of the trades.
The report, issued
last month, said that when Dimon made that statement, the evidence
indicates that he was already in possession of information about the
SCPs [Synthetic Credit Portfolios] complex and sizeable portfolio, its
sustained losses for three straight months, the exponential increase in
those losses during March, and the difficulty of exiting the SCPs
positions.
Meanwhile, JPMorgan has paid $4.3 billion to settle
charges regarding mortgage abuses and $88.3 million to settle claims it
violated sanctions against Iran, Cuba and the Sudan.We've had a lot of
people asking where we had our solarlight made.
There are government inquiries into whether JPMorgan manipulated energy
markets. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency singled out
JPMorgan in a blistering critique of its anti-money-laundering controls,
noting critical deficiencies in the way JP Morgan monitors
transactions, flags suspicious activity and conducts basic due diligence
on its customers. The state of California is suing JPMorgan for
fraudulent and unlawful credit-card debt collection practices.
The
need for strong, independent leadership of corporate boards is
reinforced by the results of a recent survey of chief financial officers
by Ernst & Young . The survey found that 47% of CFOs thought
legally and ethically questionable actions were justified in an economic
downturn, and 52% thought management is likely to cut corners to meet
targets.
The JPMorgan shareholder debate has highlighted the
problems with a profits-above-all mentality. That attitude is the reason
JPMorgan and other banks ran roughshod over 4.2 million homeowners
during the foreclosure crisis, ignoring critical steps in the
foreclosure process; that is why JP Morgan failed to properly manage its
London trading operation that piled on risk, ignored limits on
risk-taking, hid losses, dodged oversight and misinformed the public, as
Senator Carl Levin (D-Michigan) put it; and that is why JPMorgan faces
litigation that takes 10 singled-space pages to describe in its
quarterly filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
A
public company is not a private fiefdom, no matter what Dimon and his
supporters believe. Boards of directors need to hold their CEOs
accountable, which can lead to better outcomes for shareholders overall.
That is done best when there are different people who are CEO and
chairman.
The receptionist handed over the card key for the room
with a slightly apologetic instruction. You put it in the slot beside
the door, this way round, then wait C he gave the word wait a special
emphasis C until you hear a click, then the door is open. Oh, the
vagaries of the hotel card key. Oh, the incompetence, so the
receptionist hinted, of the average hotel guest.
But I did wait,
and the door did open. Then the difficulties began. I couldnt find the
little cradle that such cards often slot into to operate the
electricity. I searched high and low, but to no effect. Fortunately, a
chambermaid was still at work down the corridor. I looked pathetic,
affected my best Italian pronunciation of elettricita, and she pointed
to a horizontal slot actually in the wall, unmarked and almost
invisible. The power sprang to life. I could now make the door say, Do
not disturb; I could make it say Clean the room, please. I
could,Guardian's standing drycabinets offers
a temporary solution to tie off and stay in compliance on standing seam
roofs. in theory, set the room temperature and the air conditioning
(though I couldnt make them work; my fault, Im sure).
Someone,
it seems, has sold Italian hotels, even small ones, a job lot of these
all-embracing smart systems; Ive come across quite a few of them over
the past 10 days, and become adept at wiggling the card in the slot
when, as often, it did not immediately connect.
Dont get me
wrong. Im a fan of card keys and the eco-friendly power-saving they
facilitate. But, as the brains behind the recent failed launch of
Microsofts Windows 8 learnt to their cost, those who spend all their
waking hours refining hi-tech gadgetry can get so far ahead of the rest
of us that they end up making our lives more complicated, not less.
Italians
have long been in the vanguard of techie progress. On assignment in
Rome in the late 1980s C long before mobile phones, the internet and
online anything, a time when we foreign correspondents routinely
dismantled phone sockets and teased out the wires to send reports
electronically C the press room had screens on wheels that scrolled the
latest news from major international news agencies, continually updated.
They were elegant, efficient, state of the art, but C best of all C you
didnt need to know how to work them.
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