I’m boycotting congressional hearings, especially the ones where our elected officials pretend to be telling off the same companies that will be solicited for campaign contributions a few weeks later.
But this column isn’t a rant about campaign reform. It’s about the hypocrisy of our political system and the dangers that our elected hypocrites pose to everyone’s financial well-being.
Tomorrow JPMorgan Chase Chief Executive Jamie Dimon will go before the Senate Banking Committee to answer questions about his company’s $2 billion-and-counting loss on a complicated derivatives trade — a bet that shouldn’t have been made to begin with.
The blowhards on the committee will pompously ask questions of Dimon, who will answer with as much contriteness as anyone in his position can muster. There will be some journalists in the room, which was not filled to capacity when I checked recently, but not many others.
It’ll be the same scene that played out last month when there were expectations that JPMorgan’s annual meeting in Tampa, Fla., would be overrun by irate protesters demanding answers.
It wasn’t overrun, not even close.
You know the story of Chicken Little and the falling sky.
Well, Congress is a little chicken afraid to enact the kind of reform that might hurt its benefactors on Wall Street but keep the sky from falling.
And the public is understandably getting very tired of hearing about economic recoveries that never show up and changes to the creaky financial system that never happen.
At the very least, reforms of the financial system under the recently enacted Dodd-Frank law should be enacted quickly, before another bank has a catastrophe that affects the entire financial system.
And there’s a lot to be said for the days when banks were banks and brokerage firms were brokerage firms, and the two didn’t overlap. Wall Street couldn’t make as much money back then, but a law called Glass-Steagall (b. 1933, d. 1999) prevented the possibility that one crazy rogue trader could bring down the whole shebang.
I calculated that it would have cost The Post about $500 to send me to the Dimon hearing, not to mention a day out of my life. I also decided that it wasn’t going to be the paper’s money or my time well spent. The Senate Banking Committee’s show is getting old and certainly not worth that price of admission.
I’ll catch it on TV if there’s nothing else on.
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If Greece’s businesses have their way, Americans won’t just be consuming that country’s olive oil and yogurt.
Socrates Lazaridis, executive chairman of the Athens Exchange and head of the Hellenic Exchange Group, phoned me from Greece the other day to give his take on the situation in his country. And, Lazaridis says, companies on his exchange think that exporting is the country’s way out of its disaster.
As you know, Greece is a mess.
The country is holding its elections this Sunday, and a far-left political party that’s against a recently announced bailout is showing strength. This could complicate that country’s situation considerably.
And the deal that Spain got this past weekend from the European Union, which seemed to have cushy terms, could make it even less likely that Greece will stick to the terms it already agreed to.
The country has pledged to the EU that it will cut government spending in exchange for loans, a move that has angered many citizens and caused a political crisis.
Lazaridis says austerity in Greece and a lack of liquidity are hurting companies. “Many companies [have looked at] the opportunities of exporting” their products, he said.
Greece has already decreased its federal deficit by 8 percent and now needs “a path for growth,” Lazaridis added. He said austerity is only one part of the solution.
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New York City is shocked that tax revenue from cigarette sales has plummeted. That’s the story in last Friday’s Post.
And, despite what Mayor Mike Bloomberg might think, it isn’t because people have suddenly given up smoking.
It’s because retailers are cheating by selling either untaxed cigarettes or packs with counterfeit stamps, thus depriving the city and state of hundreds of millions in revenue.
I’ve done this story many times before, but here it is once again: state tax enforcement has all but ceased on illegal cigarettes sales. Albany, which is largely responsible for tracking down cigarette smugglers, gave up enforcement a couple of years ago for no reason that would make sense to a rational person.
You’d think the state would be beefing up enforcement now that it needs the money so desperately. But it hasn’t, partly because Albany is afraid of riling Indian tribes that are allowed to sell cigarettes cheaply on their reservations.
And one more thing: Mayor Bloomberg likes to say that his effort to curtail smoking is a great success.
Think about it: If people are smoking illegal cigarettes, then the city really can’t keep track of overall sales.
So the city and the mayor would also have no way of keeping track of the number of smokers.
The mayor is just kidding himself.