From the Q&A session after Bernanke's speech.
The Federal Reserve is your one and only best friend, secretly passing you trillions, and you decide to complain publicly about stronger capital requirements and regulators who might actually be doing the job, of well, regulating. If it's a free market he's after, then let's be clear: there's no Federal Reserve, no discount window borrowing, and no bailouts.
Guess what that means, Jamie? There's no JP Morgan.
Goodbye and good riddance.
---
Details, quotes and a hero's welcome below.
From the WSJ:
In one of the very rare interesting moments of today’s Q&A session with Ben Bernanke in Atlanta, J.P. Morgan’s Jamie Dimon got a chance to ask Mr. Bernanke a question. Mr. Dimon took the opportunity to express his fear that too much bank regulation, and too much capital-holding, will hurt banks so much that it slows down the recovery.
“I have a great fear that somebody will write a book that the things we did in the crisis will slow down the recovery,” Mr. Dimon sniffled.
He ran through a list of the ways markets have changed since the crisis, saying “most of the bad actors are gone,” that exotic derivatives are gone, lending standards are higher, banks have more liquidity and capital, and boards and regulators are tougher.
Hey, Mr. Dimon seemed to suggest, enough is enough. And now on top of it all there are higher capital requirements and 300 new rules coming, and maybe it will all be too much for banks to take. Nice economy you’ve got there, he seemed to say. Shame if anything happened to it.
“Has anyone bothered to study the cumulative effect of these things, and do you have the fear, like I do, that when we look at it all, it will be the reason” why banks aren’t lending, he asked. “Is this holding us back at this point?”
“That list you gave me made me feel pretty good for a while,” Mr. Bernanke replied. “It sounded like we’re getting a lot done.”
Everybody had a good long laugh at that one.
Mr. Bernanke said he “can’t pretend” that anybody knows what the right balance of regulation and capital is going to be, but that they’re going to try to strike a balance that prevents future crises and keeps banks lending.
Update: Robert Reich has some issues with Mr. Dimon.
---
And now reaction to this somewaht bizarre exchange:
Snip from last link from Carney:
At one large midtown trading floor, there were cheers as Dimon spoke.
The clip of the video instantly made its way through thousands of email in-boxes inside the biggest financial companies.
One Wall Street executive described Dimon as “Our Pericles” in an email to associates. Pericles was an Athenian general who helped lead Athens into a golden age following the devastating Persian Wars.
Others are calling it Wall Street’s “Tea Party moment”—comparing it to the speech CNBC’s Rick Santelli gave that helped spark the Tea Party movement.