The giant $2 billion trading loss at JPMorgan Chase highlights a
central problem in President Barack Obama’s case for a second term: Four
years after the financial crisis nearly brought the nation to its
knees, very little appears to have changed.
No high-profile bank
executives are in jail. Special multi-agency task forces to go after
financial fraud and mortgage market abuses appeared in State of the
Union addresses, only to issue a few news releases and mostly vanish
from public view.
And now one of the largest banks in the United States,
headed by a Democrat and operating with government guarantees, has
turned in the kind of headline-grabbing, casino-style style loss that
drives voters crazy and that Obama’s financial reform bill was supposed
to stop. It’s now led to the immediate retirement of Ina Drew, the
bank’s chief investment officer, along with a statement from Dimon
pressing that the JPMorgan Chase remains “strong.”
