OK – and a $15billion stock buy-back.
JP Morgan could hardly wait. You can see them watching the post-FOMC minutes tick idly by before annoucing the ‘good news.’ And would I be overly cynical in wondering if their haste – pre-empting the Federal Reserve’s own planned announcement – wasn’t just a well executed piece of market timing?
At the very least it hints at where the power lies. And demonstrates how quickly we forget the lessons of 2008-2009.
In advance of meeting the <higher> 2015 Basel III ratios, Anat Admati, professor at Stanford University, provides a reality check: “Independent of these stress test results, the dividends are misguided, period. The banks want it but that’s not enough justification.”
And Dennis Kelleher, president of Better Markets, an organisation that campaigns for stricter financial regulation, sums up the short-termism of the Feds acquiescence: “The tests have been perverted into a mechanism for the biggest banks to pay out billions in capital, which makes them less likely to survive the next economic crisis.”
Market wants;
Banks get.
History repeats.
Dublin Calling 