JPMorgan Chase Needs to Stop Discriminating Against Republican-Owned Businesses

PO Box 130

West Shokan, NY 12494

June 29, 2019

Jamie Dimon, CEO

JP Morgan Chase

383 Madison Avenue,

New York City, New York 10017-3217

Dear Mr. Dimon

Since May 1 JPMorgan Chase stock has fallen from $115 to $112 while the S&P 500 has gone up from $292 to $293.  As an owner of 40 shares of JPMorgan Chase, I am naturally concerned about your stock's underperformance.  As well, as a holder of a Chase credit card, I am keen to do business with responsible firms.

I recently read a CNBC piece that was published in March that said that JPMorgan Chase has adopted a policy to stop giving loans to prison firms. The decision was in response to left-wing protests.  My guess is that you do not know whether any of the protesters are depositors or investors in your firm, nor is it clear to you whether the protesters represent as much as one percent of the American population. 

In general, decisions to discriminate on the basis of unrelated criteria (e.g., political belief or doing business with unpopular administrations) lead to suboptimal performance.  Gary Becker showed this with respect to racial discrimination, but the same is true of discrimination on the basis of political opinion. Hence, the weak performance of JPMorgan Chase stock since you've made the decision may be related your decision to favor Democrats over Republicans.

Moreover, this is a broader assault on the principle of privatization.  How can government services be privatized if banks choose sides in partisan battles?  The use of detention centers is a policy that the Trump administration continued from the Obama administration, but the policy had gone unprotested during the Obama years.    

Finally, because you may be harming the stock price,  the policy may amount to a breach of fiduciary duty.  For all of these reasons, I urge you to rescind it.

Sincerely,

Mitchell Langbert, Ph.D.

The Banking Interests Behind the New Deal

In 2014 Nomi Prins wrote this piece in Fortune about the bankers behind the New Deal.  The New Deal was a banking revolution. The social aspects, cherished by the Democratic Party, were window dressing. Franklin Roosevelt had been a Wall Street fund manager, and he gave the American monetary system to Wall Street. That was the main point of the New Deal. 

Prins's story leads to Winthrop Aldrich, uncle of Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller and David Rockefeller.

Aldrich's father, Senator Nelson W. Aldrich, was the architect of the Federal Reserve Bank.

Incidentally, Bush's great grandfather, Samuel P. Bush, had served on the first board of the Cleveland Federal Reserve Bank. Samuel had been the president of Frank Rockefeller, John D. Rockefeller's brother's, company, Buckeye Steel.

FDR's great great grandfather, Isaac Roosevelt, had been Alexander Hamilton's partner in founding the Bank of New York, now part of Mellon. There's documentation, including a court case, that a bank for which Prescott Bush, Bush's grandfather, served on the board had helped fund Hitler.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt's uncle, Frederic A. Delano, was a Hong Kong-based railroad tycoon who served as the first vice chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank in Washington in 1914.

FDR represented the open control of America by elite financial interests that his cousin, Theodore Roosevelt, had put into play. Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act, but Wilson would not have been elected if TR had not run as a third party candidate. The funder of his party, the Progressive or Bull Moose Party, was George Perkins, a close assistant to JP Morgan and former president of International Harvester.

Frank Vanderlip, who was present at the famous Fed-planning session at Jeckyll Island in 1910, was also a personal friend of Woodrow Wilson because of their work on shaping the modern American university system. Wilson, who had met JP Morgan because Morgan was a donor to Princeton, dropped Vanderlip as a friend and associate at the point at which Wilson entered the 1912 race. Vanderlip talks about that in his letters. No one knows the reason for sure, but it seems obvious.