Jamie Dimon Says It’s All Good!
By Chris Clair
The fascinating part of this story on MarketWatch.com isn’t that Jamie Dimon thinks the credit crisis is mostly over. What’s the head of the third-largest bank in the country supposed to say to a bunch of mutual fund managers? That he thinks the worst is still ahead and that everyone should go to cash?
No, the interesting part here is the comments section. The suspicion and distrust of Wall Street executives is palpable.
Arguably this is a small and select sample, but by and large it doesn’t seem consumers who are running up their credit card balances to fill the gas tanks of their oversized, gas-sucking SUVs and pickups want to hear that the worst is over on Wall Street. Conversely, they also don’t want to hear Citadel’s Ken Griffin bemoan Wall Street’s troubles while giving the impression that everything on Main Street is fine.
Economic polarization is real, and it engenders distrust and anger among those collecting around the economically disadvantaged end of things. So we can laugh dismissively at comments like the one from “dryheavesdaily,” who writes “They should legalize pig hunting on Gall Street,” but the undercurrent of unrest there is representative of a broader dissatisfaction with “the way things are,” which is reflected in polls, including a recent one conducted by the Wall Street Journal and NBC News that shows 73% of Americans think the country is “heading down the wrong path.”
But it’s nice that Jamie Dimon thinks the Wall Street crisis is mostly over.
