Ward on Words

Joe Nocera's column takes a look at Jamie Dimon's "very long day." It was a "terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day" ( LOVE that book ! ) for Dimon because it included fines of more than $1 billion - $920 million to appease for overwhelming splash of the London Whale, and $389 in fines and restitution for "selling bogus services" to its credit card customers. FINALLY, a bank is forced to pay for its criminally foolishness behavior! But it's 2013 - banks have long been acting criminally foolish - why have there been no real fines up to now? (I simply cannot accept the $550 million fine $GS had to pay for the fraudulent Abacus deal as being a serious and significant fine for a company with $13.4 billion in profit that very same year.) So why so long before seeing a relatively serious fine for extremely serious infractions? Nocera attributes this to "unfortunate timing." Had the Whale flopped in 2009, the government would h...

My ire level is raised this morning - and if I had ever been able to absorb the color-coded messages of our national security alert system, I'd apply the most stressed-out federal color to my own particular sense of security right now. But in my mind, the colors of our national security alert system remain blended in a melange of beige; thus I'll label my color red. Not commy red (that's been out of style since The Wall came tumbling down) - not red-state red, though I'm on board, this morning, with their loathing of government. I'm seeing rage-red today. Flaming hot flickers of red hot rage. Enough to make me want to raise a fling a bunch of verbal pitchforks at people. My ire level is raised today simply because I made the mistake of perusing the news. Here's a sampling of what I've read: WaPo's Bonuses beat profits as bank industry imploded . A news story (but didn't we know this already?) informing us that the NY AG has determined...