Jamie and the Senators: Not as smart as they think they are

JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon went before the Senate Banking Committee this week in what should have been a kind of ritual apology tour. Dimon has spent much of the last year and a half dismissing and belittling critics of Wall Street and harshly criticizing the major financial regulatory reform legislation that President Obama signed into law. The message has been: you guys in Washington don't understand our business, so you should keep to yourself and let the professionals like us, the smartest guys in the room, do what we do best.

Which is why it was more than a little embarrassing for Dimon when it was revealed that a single unit of JP Morgan Chase, indeed a single trader in a division of the firm that Dimon personally oversaw, had somehow managed to lose about $3 billion and counting on a huge bet on credit derivatives...

This is the specter that haunts us after the spectacle of what I refer to in my book as "the fail decade." The notion that we can't simply trust our elites, the big decision-makers like Jamie Dimon, to actually run their institutions competently. And we know that if they screw up, we're likely all screwed. Dimon opened his testimony by eating some crow, but what followed in the hearing was downright bizarre.

While Dimon was there to apologize, many of the senators-- Republicans especially, but not exclusively-- were there to apologize to him, to seek his wise counsel.