Risk / Reward

The meritocracy strikes again:

JPMorgan Chase, after a year marred by scandal and stiff regulatory penalties, has decided to award its chief executive, Jamie Dimon, $20 million in compensation for 2013, an amount that will further inflame the debate over the accountability of senior bank executives.

The award, announced in a company filing Friday, is 74 percent higher than the $11.5 million that Dimon earned in 2012. By approving a hefty raise, the bank's board is signaling that it remains firmly behind Dimon after 12 months in which JPMorgan suffered several bruising legal setbacks, including a record $13 billion settlement with the Justice Department over soured mortgage securities.

In justifying the $20 million package, which includes $18.5 million of JPMorgan stock as well as a base salary of $1.5 million, the board said that JPMorgan had advanced in many ways under Dimon. And to many on Wall Street, as well as some other long-serving chief executives, Dimon wholly deserves the raise. "I think he's worth more than that," Warren E. Buffett, the chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway, said. "Overall, I think the shareholders of JPMorgan and the American people should be happy that Jamie Dimon has been running the bank over this period."

Yes, peons, be grateful that your superiors have given the most visible member of their class an eight-figure sinecure of stock options, in exchange for paying record fines for hosing shareholders and banks. You would go to jail for such things, but in the other America, you get rewarded for risking other people's money.


Almost six years into Obama-dom, and the "sociamalism" drumbeat continues apace. Either that word no longer means what I thought it did, or he's pretty damned bad at it. If Obama's a socialist, then I'm Ron Jeremy.