Jamie Dimon on Bank Fees: Stop Vilifying Us!

Jan. 12, 2010— -- As Wall Street begins to hand out billions in bonuses and the White House considers placing huge fees on the nation's biggest banks, one executive says he's weary of the blame game.

"I am a little tired of the constant vilification of these people," JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said Monday at a health care conference. "This is not a casino."

Dimon may not be the only one with this reaction. Andrew Ross Sorkin, New York Times columnist and the author of "Too Big to Fail," said that Wall Street executives were "completely blindsided" by the news of $120 billion in potential fees in the Obama administration's February budget and will likely fight it.

"There was a lack of appreciation that the White House could even contemplate doing something like this," Sorkin told "Good Morning America" anchor George Stephanopoulos today. "And now I think there are real questions about what does this fee mean? How does it get assessed?"

The fee would likely come in the form of a special levy on the biggest financial institutions and would be designed to help recoup the losses resulting from the Troubled Asset Relief Program.

Administration sources told Stephanopoulos that the fees would not be a tax on bonuses and could instead be based on an assessment of the amount of liability taken on by the banks, but Sorkin said even if the fees don't target compensation, "I think the banks will still fight it."

"There's $120 billion that the Treasury is probably going to lose on TARP, effectively," he said. But from the Wall Street perspective, "most of that loss is coming from the automakers and AIG. Why are we going to pay it?"

The public and Wall Street are on different pages, Sorkin said, adding that Dimon and other executives he spoke with "are saying we paid back the money, we paid it back with interest. They don't know what to do."

Scott Talbott, chief lobbyist for the Financial Services Roundtable, a business lobbying group, said, "We are opposed to the possible levy. It will decrease a bank's ability to lend, thereby stifling the economic recovery. The TARP law doesn't trigger a possible repayment for another four years. Any levy now would be premature. TARP paid out $205 billion and $125 billion has been repaid with 8 percent return. When you combine the proposed levy of $120 billion and the $150 billion assessment for the House-passed proposed resolution fund, the government is collecting more taxes than was paid out under TARP."

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