You would think after this and this and this that corporate honchos would get the idea that lavish spending after you receive government bailout money is just plain stupid. JPMorgan Chase is the latest victim of their own greed and arrogance.
According to ABC News, the company, which is "the recipient of $25 billion in TARP funds, is going ahead with a $138 million plan to buy two new luxury corporate jets and build "the premiere corporate aircraft hangar on the eastern seaboard" to house them."
And they have no idea why that is outrageous:
But on March 11, the chairman of JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon, said he could not understand why corporate America has such a bad image.Say what?
"When I hear the constant vilification of corporate America I personally don't understand it," Dimon said.
Dimon, whose 2008 compensation package, according to SEC documents, was worth more than $19 million in salary, stock and options, declined to speak with ABC News about the proposed plans.
The Sauce
Their PR team either has some bizarre form of corporate Stockholm Syndrome or are the most incompetent people on the planet. What more can we say that has not been said before on this very blog? We'll let Nell Minow say it for us:
"It's a remarkably boneheaded decision," said corporate watchdog Nell Minow, the editor and founder of The Corporate Library, a group that provides independent corporate governance research and analysis. "It's completely tone deaf."Oh yeah.
[...]
"There are going to be business school case studies for generations about exactly these decisions, and people will be learning forever about what incredible stupidity these executives showed," said Minow.
