JPMorgan and the House of Spin

Wow, talk about ironic biteback.

JPMorgan, with golden boy Jamie Dimon at the helm, has apparently lost $2 billion on bad credit derivative bets.

What's most revealing is how Dimon is furiously spinning the activities of the unit that screwed up. They were doing nothing more than hedging. Not proprietary trading, but hedging. Nothing to see here, just a few hedges that went bad, cough cough, move along people.

H-E-D-G-I-N-G.

(Insert eyeroll.)

So Dimon shows us how the banks have recast prop trading. Meanwhile, that silence you hear is the sharp knives going quiet in the next room, as those regulators and others busily gutting the carcass of the Volcker Rule pause in their labors, wondering what happens now.

Should be interesting.