Senator Professor Warren Took Jamie Dimon to the Woodshed

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

27 May 21

"No matter how you try to spin it, this past year has shown that corporate profits are more important to your bank than offering just a little help to struggling families."

n the Senate on Wednesday, the heads of the Too Big to Fail banks stopped by the Senate Banking Committee to pat themselves on the back for how they responded to the pandemic by not being the completely greedy bastards they are in the normal course of business. (The fact that Wells Fargo, for example, hasn’t been shamed into a Van Alen belt for the swindles it pulled in the past is proof that there is no god.) One of the participants was Jamie Dimon, the boss of J.P. Morgan Chase. One of the senators was Senator Professor Warren. She Had A Plan for Dimon’s spleen, and it involved firing it out the window.

It seems that, while being granted overdraft protections from the Federal Reserve due to the pandemic, the big banks declined to waive their overdraft fees for ordinary customers during the national fiscal emergency. This was an obvious customer service, since millions of personal economies went up for grabs all at once. Senator Professor Warren had some questions about that.

The regulators recommended that the bank automatically waive the fee, the same thing the bank could do at the Fed, if it overdrew its account. Let me ask the CEO's of the four banks. Citibank, Bank of America, Chase, and Wells Fargo. The four banks that collectively manage tens of millions of checking accounts for customers. While you automatically and at no cost got complete protection from overdraft fees at the Federal Reserve, could you please raise your hand if you gave the same automatic protection to your customers and automatically waived all of their overdraft fees? I'm not seeing anyone raise their hand. That is because none of you gave the same help to your customers that the bank regulators extended to you…Mr. Dimon, you are the star of the overdraft show. Your bank, J.P. Morgan, collects seven times as much in overdraft fees per account and your competitors. How much did J.P. Morgan collect in overdraft fees from their consumers in 2020?

Undaunted, and armored by privilege, Dimon decided he would stick up for the fiscal legacy of Scrooge and Marley.

We waive the fees for customers upon request if they are under stress because of COVID.

Very bad move.

I appreciate that you want to duck this question. Do you know how much your profits would have been if you had waived as the regulators recommended? The answer is your profits would have been $27.6 billion. I did the math for you.

Here's the thing. You and your colleagues come in today to talk about how you stepped up and took care of customers during the pandemic and it's a bunch of baloney. It is about $4 billion worth of baloney. You can fix that right now. Will you commit right now to refund the money you took from consumers during the pandemic?

That got a flat “no” from Jamie Dimon.

That's right. Over the past year, you could have passed on the breaks that you got from the fed to your customers, but you didn't do it. Everybody else here, the other three bankers, will you agree to refund the overdraft fees that you collected? I didn't think so.

No matter how you try to spin it, this past year has shown that corporate profits are more important to your bank than offering just a little help to struggling families, even when we are in the world—in the middle of a worldwide crisis.

They’ll never change. They almost blew up the world economy and got rich selling off the wreckage. It is, however, still startling to see them state this all so plainly.