House lawmakers spent Wednesday grilling Jes Staley about why he thought keeping Jeffrey Epstein as a JPMorgan client was a smart play. Staley defended Epstein. Defended him. Past tense of defend. A verb you typically use for innocent people or at minimum people who haven't been convicted of soliciting prostitution from a minor.
James Comer says Staley encouraged JPMorgan to retain Epstein despite internal red flags. Red flags is corporate speak for we all knew but nobody wanted to say it out loud because the guy had money. That's the thesis here. A banking executive looked at a sex trafficker and thought yeah this is the hill I want to die on. Client retention matters.
JPMorgan kept Epstein until 2013. Fifteen years after his first arrest. The risk management team at JPM must have been using technical analysis. Drew some trend lines on a chart of reputational damage. Found support at moral bankruptcy. Went long on plausible deniability.
Staley left JPMorgan in 2013. Became CEO of Barclays. Resigned from Barclays in 2021 after regulators started asking questions about his relationship with Epstein. Perfect trading strategy. Pump the resume. Dump before the investigation. Buy high. Sell never because you got fired.
Retail traders watched this testimony and immediately checked if there was a way to trade it. Searched for ticker symbol GUILT. Found nothing. Went back to losing money on 0DTE options while a former bank executive explained to Congress why he went to bat for a pedophile. The S&P closed up 0.3% because none of this matters and it never did.
Staley's defense strategy appears to be that he didn't know the full extent of Epstein's crimes. The full extent. As if there's an acceptable extent of sex trafficking that falls within JPMorgan's risk parameters.
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