JP Morgan is up to something and my stats

I will discuss my stats first. I am seeing a spike in readership for the most recent posts. I have checked the search terms that led them here and they do not match the posts that I have made recently. I believe some people are being redirected here by a browser program that hijacks your searches. For those who come here by accident, sorry, I have nothing to do with it. The last time this happened it was all because of one post and I deleted it as it was a meaningless one anyways.

NY Times - Break Up the Bank? It’s Not for You to Ask. Firstly I am going to talk about the article and then I will discuss why our corporations are no longer capitalistic or honest. The article is about how some shareholder in JP Morgan wants to have a vote on whether or not the company should be split along the lines required by the old Glass Steagle law which required commercial banks to be separated from investment banks. The article humorously (in my opinion) continues to insist that "JP Morgan" doesn't want to separate the activities and may not have to.

The corporation is one of the greatest things ever invented and is responsible for all the really great projects of the last 100 plus years. Two guys would want to share resources and make a partnership and would have to agree on what they would do in business and share in the return. You would hire your partners eldest son because he could end up your partner when his father died. As countries advanced they found that really large projects required large companies with lots of owners. Voting became more and more difficult and shares were given or sold to people outside of the community, that was the beginning of the real stock market. The owners began to give their voting rights to other owners who had the time to go to the elections and that they trusted. That is a proxy vote and that is what the article is about.

Now, what went wrong with proxy voting? Pretty simple, the people buying the stock became less and less interested in the companies and began to only focus on the return. They began pressuring the managers that they had hired to do anything they had to to turn a profit, that let in corrupt managers. Things got worse, when American companies stopped seeing as large a profit as they began to have to compete with low wage foreign companies, the stockholders began to only care about the stock valuation and that is when companies began getting split up just to be sold off. The people that actually cared about the business voted to give more and more power to the managers and gave up the right to vote on more and more control of the actual business. The response by shareholders who did not care about the underlying business was to pay CEOs and managers based on the increase in stock value. That was the final nail, now business owners no longer had a say in how the company is run and the managers get paid better if they increase the stock value regardless of how they do it, which led them to outsource and split up the company in ways that hurt the long term viability of the business but increased the immediate stock valuation.

I know there is a lot involved in that; but, I tried to keep it to the basics and in fact, the detail is not as important right now. The bigger issue has to do with JP Morgan itself. JP Morgan may be insolvent and fail. Over the past 6 months they have announced that they are getting rid of their commodities division (which has been very profitable), are laying off thousands of people although their profits are up, has had a number of suicides amongst it's highest levels and is being investigated for fixing the commodities and other markets. We could add to this the fact that in the last couple of years they have had to pay over $20 billion dollars in fines for corruption and fixing markets. There is one guy alone that lost the company over $5 billion, he was known as the London Whale and was one of their traders who did bad things.

Lets just say that it is possible that JP Morgan is preparing for when the bond markets fail and their bets get called and they go bankrupt, just like Lehman Brothers did. The leader, CEO, of JP Morgan is Jamie Dimon and he has recently left the head bank and become head of the companies "living will", that means that if the company went bankrupt, he would be paid to break up the company and split one part holding all the debt and another part holding all the assets. Bloomberg - JPMorgan’s Dimon Said to Relinquish Chairman Title at Bank Unit.

This all brings us back to the beginning or such. If the managers of JP Morgan believe the company will go bankrupt and they will be removed then why would they want it to split it's investment banks from it's commercial banking now. When the living will is activated they will be able to decide who gets the assets and who gets the returns without having to listen to the investors, you know, the real owners. The corporation is one of the greatest things ever created by man and has allowed us to advance even more than fire; but, the problem is how modern corporations ceased working for it's owners and was put under the control of managers who no longer reported to them.