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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsHow will JPMorgan "wash" its $2B trading loss?
Will it be considered a cost of doing business and thereby shifted onto depositors at banks, perhaps in various forms such as fees?
Consider the following example:
"The electric company sells electricity at a published rate of usage. If honest customers are being charged for the losses the company experiences because of thieves, the company isn't losing any money. Why are they complaining? What's happening is that the company is charging honest people for the actions of the dishonest. That's neat for the company but it's hardly just. If a person's home is burglarized, the person can't get back the loss from those honest people who had nothing to do with the burglary. What companies are allow to do is steal back what they have lost from honest people. If that were made into a general legal principle, it would read something like, you may steal from the innocent what others have stolen from you. Of course, the judicial system contains no such principle, but it acts as if it does when a business is involved.
To protect ourselves from theft, ordinary people must buy theft insurance. Why aren't companies required to buy it or else tolerate the losses? Is it because the system exists to protect the property of businesses but not the property of ordinary people? How many people seeking office who flat out told their constituents that do you believe would be elected?
But it's even worse. Remember, the electric company has built the expected losses into its current rate. What do you believe happens when the expected losses fail to materialize? Does the electric company rebate its customers the losses they have been charged for that didn't happen? Sure it does!
So this seemingly innocent story that everyone accepts silently hides two common vendor forms of theft that are protected by the legal system whose justices have enshrined an economic bias into law because they have subverted the Constitution from the goals the founding fathers wrote into it to the almost exclusive promotion of laissez-faire Capitalism. There are countless other similar unjust business practices that are similarly protected by the system.
Since we seem to have a tightly integrated finacial network that links all companies of significant size with each other, can a trading loss at JPMorgan be translated into higher prices for products in subsidiaries in which they may own controlling interest? If so, how can that be a "free market" filled with "competition"?
How will this $2B loss of theirs, of JPMorgans, be cost-shifted onto the rest of us?
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How will JPMorgan "wash" its $2B trading loss? (Original Post)
Trillo
May 2012
OP
no_hypocrisy
(46,037 posts)1. My first thought was how JP Morgan was going to handle their shareholders.
No dividend this quarter I'll venture to guess.
ieoeja
(9,748 posts)2. I can't get past the fact that they were trading to protect themselves from risk.
Everytime I think financial "experts" have shown the limits of their stupidity, they say something else even more ridiculous.
taught_me_patience
(5,477 posts)4. They weren't
They were trading to make money period. The are framing the language but make no mistake "synthetic portfolio" = "collateralized debt obligations".
I know a number of Wall Street traders and they all say that Jamie Dimon and JPM is running the largest hedge fund in the world.
HopeHoops
(47,675 posts)3. Obama's fault, obviously.