Peter S. Goodman

Business Editor, The Huffington Post

Not for the first time, Elizabeth Warren has spoken a simple truth, one that ought to be heeded: Jamie Dimon must surrender his seat on the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

The seat in question is part of a body that has god-like influence over the most crucial questions governing high finance. Like, for example, whether colossal institutions such as Dimon’s ought to be spared from collapse by taxpayer largess when bad things happen. And as Dimon’s bank has just helpfully reminded us, courtesy of its $2 billion-plus in losses on a bum trade, bad things happen all the time, especially when the financial lobby manages to keep fighting off any semblance of sensible regulation.

Yes, you heard right: The chief executive of JP Morgan Chase — the largest bank in the land, and the exemplar of a ‘too big to fail’ institution — is allowed to sit at the table with the people tasked with deciding when and how much of other people’s money gets earmarked for his rescue. This is not the fox guarding the hen house; this is the fox guarding the hen house while selling synthetic derivatives whose value increases with every hen he gobbles up, and who burns down the hen house so he can collect on his fire insurance policy, and then gets the government to build him a new hen house at taxpayer expense. And then, after that, he still gets to guard the new hen house.

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