"Excess Is Out Of Fashion"

JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon commenting yesterday on his own bubble-making "we don't really make anything" short-term minded industry:

"One of the main root causes [of the crisis], and this has been going on for a long time, was the huge trade and global financing imbalances which fueled very low rates and excess consumption, and over a long period of time I do not believe you can run those kind of trade deficits..."

Here is what Talking Points Memo has to say about a country that loses its industrial base despite an insatiable unsustainable desire for perpetual growth:

"Dimon was getting at one of the root structural causes of the current crisis -- America takes, the world (China especially) makes, an unsustainable situation sustained above all by an increasingly usurous financial services industry. As the CEO of PNC Financial Services just pointed out, banking is the biggest sector of the American economy -- and it's been to the detriment of everything else.

...it was precisely Wall Street and corporate America that relentlessly lobbied the government over that very long period of time to enable those gaping imbalances to gape ever wider. What both Barack Obama and Jamie Dimon implicitly understand is that publicly traded corporations are not engineered to look out for their long-term interests. By allowing the financial sector to bloat "too big to fail", the country lost the kind of industries that are too vital to fail -- which is to say, manufacturing."

I hope we can establish more long-term answers instead of getting caught up in the short-term madness of news cycles and faux rage memes. Dimon's own call to reign in his own industry is a good start.

Source: TPM