(
)
Wall Street’s best-paid banker is taking a huge pay cut for dropping the ball.
The board of JPMorgan Chase slashed Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon’s compensation in half, citing management failures that led to the bank’s embarrassing $6.2 billion loss on a massive wrong-way derivatives bet.
Dimon will take in $11.5 million for his work last year, down sharply from $23.1 million in 2011.
That’s despite a record year for the bank, with fourth-quarter profit surging 53 percent, to $5.7 billion. Revenue in the quarter also rose 10 percent, to $23.7 billion.
Dimon’s pay cut was in response to a 129-page report the board released yesterday detailing the infamous “London Whale” debacle along with the blowout results.
The report heaped most of the blame for the disastrous trade on other execs and traders who have since left the bank, including Ina Drew, the former head of the bank’s Chief Investment Office. But it took Dimon to task for relying on his underlings when he should “have better tested his reliance on what he was told.”
“With respect to the losses incurred in [the] CIO, the board views the losses as a serious mistake by the firm,” according to the scathing report.
In a call to discuss results, Dimon declined to comment on the pay cut and seemed eager to put the entire episode behind him. He also batted aside questions about further losses stemming from the Whale trade, describing them as “not material.”
“We’re not going to give you any detail [about the trade],” he told analysts on the call.
Dimon, who dismissed initial reports of the bungled trade as “tempest in a teapot,” suggested that he and the firm had learned their lessons.
“Some things scared us and we fixed them across the company, but we will use the lesson to make us stronger, better, smarter and tougher,” he said.
The bank’s robust results helped hammer home his point. The bank reported record annual profit of $21.3 billion, driven by mortgage lending and an unusually active fourth quarter — which is typically a weaker quarter for Wall Street.
JPMorgan, the No. 2 home lender after Wells Fargo, said home-loan origination was up 33 percent in 2012 to $51.2 billion.
Total revenue for the bank hit $99.89 billion — relatively flat with last year.
JPMorgan shares, which rose 1 percent to close at $46.82 yesterday, are up 15 percent since the Whale trading losses were first disclosed in May.