Jake DiMare calls out JP Morgan’s wealthy CEO, who claims newspaper employees are overpaid at $44,000 a year.
Rounding out the “Opposite of Good Men” list today…
Bloomberg news is reporting JP Morgan’s CEO Jamie Dimon says employees of the newspaper industry—who make an average of around $44,000 a year—are… wait for it… Overpaid.
Jamie Dimon earns approximately 23 million dollars annually.
According to Wikipedia, in 2004 the median household income in the United States was $44,389.
According to the Wall Street Journal, at this same event, an annual investor’s meeting, he went on to defend the pay for employees at JP Morgan, claiming:“We are going to pay competitively.” He also said, “We need top talent, you cannot run this business on second-rate talent.”
Poor Jamie Dimon. I can’t imagine how hard it would have been for JP Morgan to have played their part in crippling the world economy with ‘second-rate talent’.
I think it might be fun to show Jamie some solidarity on Twitter by pointing out other people we think are overpaid using the hashtags #poorjamiedimon and #wayoverpaid
Don’t forget to mention @goodmenproject in your tweets.
Photo courtesy Randy Le’Moine Photography
Mike- you asked a rhetorical question. Getting rhetoric in return kinda comes with the territory. Welcome to political/economic discourse.
No, Travis, I asked a specific question.
People are calling his salary “unfair.” That’s fine, I just want to know what would be fair. I have yet to get an answer.
Mike, (I jumped to this string because it seems you and I have found the limits of back and forth in the previous) I’m not going to go into the entire history of the sub-prime mortgage crisis here. Suffice to say, we’d probably disagree about why it happened. However, to explain my point, I see the sub prime mortgage crisis as the reason for the liquidity crisis which is the reason for the auto industry crisis, etc, etc, etc. You’re going to say I am crazy, but as far as I am concerned, this was all caused by greed on… Read more »
Mike: I apologize. I mistook your initial question for rhetoric, because I thought you were asking the question to make some point about how we can’t put a number on it and it’s all just emotional, knee-jerk reaction. Sorry, I thought you were partaking in the sort of nonsense that corporate apologists seem to pull out of their nether-regions when someone brings up a valid point. In any case, you seem more intelligent than that. But I’m sure you know in your mind that no one can come up with a hard number because there are too many variables. And… Read more »
Well said.
Sure sounds like he’s overpaid to me. That’s because I am much closer to the 44k than the 23 million, and of course I deserve more money. Then again, he doesn’t set his own salary. The shareholders and/or board of directors determine his salary and benefits package. If enough people were motivated to give him a pay cut, they would buy up stock and reduce his earnings or fire him for someone cheaper. Or, people would boycott banks or companies affiliated with JP Morgan in protest. I won’t hold my breath on that one. Tweets are not going to bring… Read more »
So repulsive I have no words. Tweeting, as requested.
Speaking of repulsive….check this link about about how the wealthy are suffering by having to consider taking their kids out of private school. I mean, no one likes losing money and lifestyle, but dropping for the super wealthy is would be like me gaining a socio economic status or two. Meanwhile there are kids in foster care, people out of work hard core, and poverty all over.
It’s a crazy mindset these guys seem to have to adopt. If you’ve seen “Margin Call,” there’s a great line from Paul Bettany’s character Will Emerson, who says to a younger colleague whose confidence he’s trying to nurse, “if you really wanna do this with your life you have to believe you’re necessary and you are.” (It’s also later followed by the callous, “F*ck normal people.”) That’s the game they have to play, I guess, where they genuinely believe their a superbreed, deserving of so much more than the rest. But it’s funny, one of the most successful people I… Read more »
Mark, Respectfully, if you think that “Margin Call” is in any way shape or form an accurate representation of investment banking, you REALLY have another thing coming. Many of my friends from college went into i-banking, because that’s what happens when you major in economics. I would be happy to tell you about their 80-hour work weeks that have lasted for years on end, the constant upbraiding from management that, no matter how well you perform “Maybe you don’t really belong here,” to say nothing of the zero-job-security that’s existed the past 4 years. “Margin Call” wants you to believe… Read more »
“to say nothing of the zero job security that’s existed for the last 4 years”
Cry about it. That’s what happens when your industry brings the world’s biggest economies to its knees. People lose jobs. As far as I’m concerned, your friends should be in prison.
Jake, should we also jail all the individuals who bought homes they couldn’t afford? Or are you just a hypocrite?
Well, if not them the banks that gave them the loans that it was clear they couldn’t support. And the credit card companies that start with a 6% rate of interest and then BAM up you to 18%. And certainly the consumer plays a role yes.
Julie, Banks give out loans (even the robo-signing ones) on a representation on the part of the borrower that they can pay the loan back. This is literally stated in every single promissory note ever. Are you arguing that the poor lack real agency? Should we prevent them from taking our loans at all? Are the poor genuinely less capable of making decisions than the rich? Is this really what you want to say? And if not, where does that leave you? No one puts a gun to your head and makes you take out a loan. No one threatens… Read more »
Again, all very true. I don’t think you’ll find may tax paying Americans (who didn’t take out loans they couldn’t afford, like me) complaining that those that did lost their homes. What I, and so many like me, are pissed about , is we, the taxpayers had to foot the bill. In the meantime, the finance industry pretends they had nothing to do with the problem in the first place.
In a free market if you extend a bad loan and you get burned, you lose. In America you win. That’s not a free market, that’s corporate socialism.
No, we should not imprison people who can’t pay their loans. We don’t have debtor’s prison in this country. However, we do imprison people for financial fraud.
By that same token, in a free market, if a bank extends a loan to someone who can’t pay it, the bank should be taking it on the chin. Not the taxpayers.
Jake, you seem confused about reality.
Let me help you out.
TARP was a loan program. The banks paid the loans back, with interest.
What “bill” are the taxpayers footing?
Incorrect. Not all of TARP has been paid back and you are forgetting the Maiden Lane transactions and the take over of Fannie/Freddie. The taxpayers are still footing the bill to this day.
However, even if we weren’t…even if TARP and everything else was paid back, that’s not a free market. A low interest loan from the public is still a public bailout. Goldman, AIG, JP Morgan, GM, Fannie/Freddie they would all be gone today. All these CEO’s would be living out their lives in shame or in prison.
Get your facts straight or troll somewhere else.
Jake, You specifically stated that *my* friends should be in jail, with no knowledge of who they are or who they work for. The treasury announced an $11 billion profit from TARP, so even if some of the loans failed, the reality is that there is no bill that the taxpayers are footing. Please take your own advice about getting facts straight. I don’t know why you’re bringing Freddie and Fannie into this. This is about one statement made by one CEO, once, who has nothing to do with either of those institutions. If you need to confuse the topic… Read more »
Like I said, get your facts straight or troll somewhere else. The Government may have announced a profit on one of the many sub-programs of TARP but the sum total of TARP “investments” has still been a net loss for the public. http://www.treasury.gov/initiatives/financial-stability/results/Pages/TarpTracker.aspx As for including the other transactions, my point has always been, the banks fucked up, and the people paid for it. And we continue to pay for it. As for your comments about the great depression, there is no evidence to support any claim that failing to bail out the shareholders of the banking industry would have… Read more »
Jake, you and I both know that if I post links on this site, my comments get lost “in moderation” for weeks on end. Look up the work of Mark Zandi and Alan Blinder on where the economy was headed without TARP. They were featured on PBS Newshour about a year ago, so they’re pretty easy to find. As for TARP tracker, please stop trying to confuse the issue. You specifically stated that my friends who worked at banks should be “in jail” please look at your own comment to confirm this. According to the very website you linked, $259… Read more »
Media agents of the plutocratic 1% occasionally try to float the concept that ‘American workers just have it too darn good,’ but somehow it never catches fire. Hard to believe, isn’t it?
That first link appears to be broken. Here’s one from HuffingtonPost: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/28/jamie-dimon-newspaper-reporter-pay_n_1307989.html
I’m sick of these sorts of attacks on CEOs simply because they are highly paid. Can someone define what a “fair” salary would be? Anyone can gripe, but real social commentary takes critical thought. And please don’t give me the usual tropes about “But they make 56x what the workers make!” or “But it’s so much!” give me an honest-to-God hard number that you will defend. And for conversation’s sake, in an age where the average newspaper article is about as well researched as the average blog post, yes, newspaper reporters are overpaid. If all newspapers read like the NY… Read more »
Someone calculated $23 million/year works out to be $10,000 an HOUR and nobody is worth that an hour. That’s not a salary, that’s a Powerball lottery jackpot.
Again, you have offered no hard numbers on what would be “fair.” It’s easy to complain, why not try coming up with a hard number based solution?
i would ask his $44k overpaid employees what they think he’s worth! They would have a better idea…what he does day to day and how other employees rank within the company…I’m sure they would be more fair in coming up with a figure.
No living person should win the Powerball lottery every year of their working life. These people need to go on the HOARDERS reality TV show and purge!
So, yet again, you are replacing a real answer with more rhetoric.
Seriously, what is he worth? How would you even calculate such a number?
Harping on how much he is paid is not an answer. I strongly suspect you don’t have a real answer.
Hey Mike, glad I was able to make you sick. It’s always interesting to me when millionaires read my work. I’m assuming you are a millionaire because anyone making less than $250,000 a year would have to be suffering from some sort of mental handicap to defend such outrageous inequality. Since you write fairly succinct sentences I assumed you are not a simpleton. I say you would have to be a simpleton because it always amazes me how even I, a high school drop out, can understand the problem of gross economic and social inequality. In case you’ve forgotten what… Read more »
Jake,
Thank you for writing 3 paragraphs and yet never managing to answer the very simple question I asked.
Please let me know when you have real answers.
Any time buddy. I don’t owe you anything, but I don’t mind you driving up my engagement numbers pretending I do.
You’re right Jake, you don’t owe me anything.
But I just wanted to point out that you don’t really have any answers or you would have shared them already.
Mike, as is the case in so many arguments the true, rational answer is: it depends. If you are really curious about the well documented problems of excessive executive pay I suggest you check out Rakesh Khuruna for further reading.
Anything further I’d have to share on this topic would be more of my opinion, which you’ve worked very hard to point out, you have no respect for anyways.
I’d say a Gini index of about 30 is a reasonable target, compared to our current national average of 45.
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2172rank.html
Other resources to understand why economic inequality is, in fact, disastrous for a society:
“Falling Behind: How Rising Inequality Harms the Middle Class”
http://www.amazon.com/Falling-Behind-Rising-Inequality-Wildavsky/dp/0520252527
“The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger”
http://www.amazon.com/The-Spirit-Level-Equality-Societies/dp/1608193411/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1330720498&sr=1-1
The point is not how much Dimon should make but that he made an issue out of how much other people make. I hate to make it sound like a schoolyard argument, but really–he started it, so let him defend his own salary. Don’t ask anyone else to do it. It’s the claimant’s job to defend his position, not mine or anyone else’s.
Juju,
You are completely correct, “he started it” is an argument children use. Please let us know when you have a better one.
Jamie Dimon gives guys named “Jamie” a bad name.
Here’s my tweet:
@poorjamiedimon Who else is #wayoverpaid – teachers? janitors? nurses? bit.ly/zjv3QI @GoodMenProject
I mean, really, what a douche this Jamie Dimond is.