June 2012

If there’s one idea that seems to resonate with a large swath of the American public, it’s a call for greater corporate responsibility. Banks operated in a zone of almost complete unaccountability until the economic recession hit in 2008. Car companies refused to stay relevant, necessitating a federal bailout. Mortgage companies handed out loans and investment companies began churning out credit-default swaps and when the entire thing collapsed there were handfuls of corporate executives shrugging their shoulders while employment spiraled. Of course, the Occupy movement and before the Tea Party movement both are aligned against this kind of rampant irresponsibility, and so is Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown.

Brown came out earlier this month, blasting JPMorgan Chase’s trading mess in which risky ventures cost the bank $2 billion in losses. Controlled by CEO Jaime Daimon, who was the financial super-start largely blamed with the staggering failure, Brown points to something else. A bank as large as JPMorgan Chase, which was one of the banks that received federal bailout money in 2008, may be able to absorb such an incredible loss. However, that says something in and of itself. In Brown’s words, “These banks aren’t just too big to fail, they’re too big to manage.” His logic is that if Jaime Dimon, who was an outspoken critic of the Dodd-Frank bill and is considered one of the best financial executives in the world, can’t manage one of these banks, who can?