NEW YORK — Jamie Dimon faces his toughest personal challenge yet in the aftermath of the bank’s $2 billion trading loss — JPMorgan Chase & Co. shareholders might strip the charismatic chief executive of his post as board chairman. NEW
NEW YORK — Jamie Dimon faces his toughest personal challenge yet in the aftermath of the bank’s $2 billion trading loss — JPMorgan Chase & Co. shareholders might strip the charismatic chief executive of his post as board chairman.
With the stock sinking 12 percent since the bank disclosed the loss last week, Dimon is to preside over the annual shareholder meeting in Tampa, Fla., on Tuesday as federal regulators and lawmakers mull tougher restrictions on Wall Street firms.
The fallout began Monday with the retirement of Ina Drew, the executive who oversaw the unit responsible for the trading loss.
“They took this major loss and the stock is tanking,” said Ken Steiner of Great Neck, N.Y., an activist investor. He isn’t traveling to Florida this year to voice his complaints because the meeting is too far from the bank’s New York headquarters.
“They’re running away from any tough questions from their shareholders,” Steiner said.
JPMorgan’s problems also mounted in Washington, where regulators have begun investigations. Senate Banking Committee Chairman Tim Johnson, D-S.D., said his panel would address the loss at hearings in the next few weeks on implementation of the 2010 financial reform law, although there are no plans yet to call Dimon or other bank executives to testify.
And President Barack Obama weighed in for the first time, saying the red ink stain on JPMorgan’s books showed the need for regulators to draft tough rules based on the law.
“JPMorgan is one of the best managed banks there is. Jamie Dimon, the head of it, is one of the smartest bankers we got and they still lost $2 billion and counting,” Obama said in an excerpt of an interview on ABC’s “The View” to be aired Tuesday. “It’s going to be investigated, but this is why we passed Wall Street reform.”
Dimon was considered to be one of Wall Street’s savviest bankers. There was even speculation he was being considered for Treasury secretary in the Obama administration.
Now he could have a fight on his hands in Florida as he tries to hold on to his job.
Dimon is expected to continue to be contrite about the losses from a portfolio originally designed to help manage risk. He acknowledged publicly that the bank was “sloppy” for allowing such risks on the bank’s trading books.
There are expected to be more resignations following Drew, who was one of the highest-ranking women on Wall Street and oversaw the bank’s chief investment office. Two other employees, Achilles Macris and Javier Martin-Artajo, who ran the London trading desk responsible for the loss, are expected to step down soon.
Among the proposals scheduled for a vote at Tuesday’s shareholder meeting is one by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees to require an independent chair of JPMorgan’s board. The proposal — submitted before the bank’s disclosure Thursday — aims to create better oversight of management.
“We don’t think that the CEO of any company should be their own boss,” said Lisa Lindsley, the group’s director of capital strategy. “It’s particularly important to have independent board leadership at financial services companies because, as we’ve all seen, the large financial institutions can bring down the whole economy.”
Given JPMorgan’s exposure to derivatives, the complex financial products blamed in part for the financial crisis, Lindsley said the union had become concerned about the bank’s risk management. The union owns 48,450 shares of JPMorgan.
The union’s proposal takes on more urgency since the bank disclosed the trading losses, Lindsley said. Votes to split the chairman and CEO titles have passed at other major companies, including three years ago at Bank of America Corp.
Todd Hagerman, senior banking analyst at Sterne Agee & Leach Inc. in New York, said investors are wondering: “Why should I continue to own your stock after seeing several billion dollars in market cap evaporate?”
Shareholders want an explanation of what happened, when the problem will be fixed and who is being held accountable, he said.
So far there have been few specific details about the trade. But Hagerman predicted Dimon would retain the chairman position, and the shareholder meeting would produce little more than a “few angry questions from shareholders.”
A spokesman for JPMorgan declined to comment.
But Dimon’s problems won’t end Tuesday.
Sen. Bernard Sanders, I-Vt., and Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren called on him to step down from the board of the New York Federal Reserve Bank. Dimon has served on the nine-member board since 2007 as one of three directors chosen by member banks to represent their interests. His term expires at the end of the year.
“The New York Fed is in charge of both regulating JPMorgan Chase and deciding whether or not to provide billions of dollars in virtually zero-interest loans to this too-big-to-fail institution if it needs another bailout,” Sanders said Monday. “This is a clear example of the fox guarding the henhouse.”
Warren, a former Obama administration official who helped launch the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, called such self-regulation “wrong and dangerous” and that resigning from the New York Fed board is one way Dimon could take accountability for the trading loss.
Dimon has met at least 10 times with regulatory officials since October 2010 to discuss implementation of the financial reform law, according to the Sunlight Foundation, which tracks meeting disclosures. Among those meetings was a sit-down with Warren in New York on Jan. 5, 2011.
Dimon also has met four times with Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner to discuss implementation of the financial reform law. And JPMorgan staff members have met 10 times with the Federal Reserve since September 2010 to discuss implementation of the so-called Volcker rule.
The provision of the financial reform law, which is still being drafted by regulators, is intended to stop banks from taking excessive trading risks for their own accounts, a practice known as proprietary trading.
The authors of the Volcker rule provision, Sens. Carl Levin, D-Mich., and Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., said Friday that the rule was intended to prevent such trades, but that draft regulations contain a loophole that would have allowed the JPMorgan transactions. They called for regulators to close the loophole before finalizing the rule in July.
