I have no words

Bankers Seek to Debunk Attack on Top 1%

Jamie Dimon, the highest-paid chief executive officer among the heads of the six biggest U.S. banks, turned a question at an investors’ conference in New York this month into an occasion to defend wealth.

“Acting like everyone who’s been successful is bad and because you’re rich you’re bad, I don’t understand it,” the JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) CEO told an audience member who asked about hostility toward bankers. “Sometimes there’s a bad apple, yet we denigrate the whole.”

At a lunch in New York, Stemberg and Allison shared their disdain for Section 953(b) of the Dodd-Frank Act, which requires public companies to disclose the ratio between the compensation of their CEOs and employee medians, according to Allison. The rule, still being fine-tuned by the Securities and Exchange Commission, is “incredibly wasteful” because it takes up time and resources, he said. Stemberg called the rule “insane” in an e-mail to Bloomberg News.

“Instead of an attack on the 1 percent, let’s call it an attack on the very productive,” Allison said. “This attack is destructive.”

“Tearing down the rich does not help those less well- off,” said the chairman of New York-based WL Ross & Co. LLC. “If you favor employment, you need employers whose businesses are flourishing.”

Oh, wait, I do have words - well, William K. Black's words, anyway:

"I have an inherent duty as a CEO of a publicly owned company to get a return for my shareholders," Brian Moynihan [CEO of Bank of America] said.

None of the reporters asked Moynihan the obvious questions:

· Is that “return for my shareholders” supposed to be positive?
· Given that you and your predecessor (Ken Lewis) combined to cause your shareholders a 90% loss on their investments – nearly one-half trillion dollars, when can we expect your resignation and return of your compensation in accordance with your “inherent duty” to those shareholders?

I previously posted excerpts from Black's rant here.

Wildly self-indulgent but I enjoyed the hell out of it anyway

Buffy/Charles/Erik. You're welcome.