The Five Dumbest Things on Wall Street This Week: May 25
1. Jamie's Pulp Friction
Chill the Volcker out all you JPMorgan Chase shareholders. Jamie Dimon is sending the Wolf.
Yes, like the Pulp Fiction scene when gangster Marcellus Wallace sends his fixer Winston Wolf to solve a highly time-sensitive and costly problem, JPMorgan's CEO is also calling in a specialist to extricate him from his "egregious" and "self-inflicted" troubles. On Tuesday, the bank reportedly hired former SEC enforcement chief William McLucas to help respond to regulatory probes of the firm's $2 billion trading loss.
Shoot Jamie. That's all you had to say. McLucas, a Washington-based partner at law firm Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale & Dorr LLP, led the SEC's enforcement division from 1989 to 1998. No stranger to Wall Street's dirtiest deals, he represented board committees in the collapses of both Enron and WorldCom. Moreover, McLucas won't be a lone wolf when he gets to JPMorgan either. JPMorgan's general counsel and most senior lawyer Stephen Cutler worked with McLucas at Wilmer from 2005 to 2007, before being money-whipped away by JPMorgan. Prior to that, Cutler had McLucas' old job, serving as the SEC's head of enforcement from 2001 until 2005. Oh man. Talk about the spinning turnstile between Washington and Wall Street. These guys went from chasing the market's bad guys to chasing Dimon's dollars in no time flat. Jeez Jamie, who needs a whale of a hedge in London to protect you when you have hired guns like these back home? Current SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro told a congressional hearing Tuesday, "The agencies collectively, including the criminal authorities, are working very hard to untangle what happened at the firm." Good luck tangling with not one, but two of your predecessors Mary. But don't take it from us if things don't turn out so well, take it from Marsellus Wallace himself: "Pride only hurts, it never helps." --Written by Gregg Greenberg in New York.Select the service that is right for you!
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