I teach in Northwest Arkansas. Students here tend to feel that because they are from Arkansas and go to a small college that they are going to have trouble competing with students from name schools. I always tell them that they are just as smart as students from anywhere in the country. As evidence of this, I point to the litany of stupidity, overreaching and greed by these graduates of name universities in the banking industy.

Well today, I got a new quote to use:

It’s not a surprise that we know we have crises every five or ten years. My daughter came home from school one day and said, ‘daddy, what’s a financial crisis?’ And without trying to be funny, I said, ‘it’s the type of thing that happens every five, ten, seven, years.’ And she said: ‘why is everybody so surprised?’ So we shouldn’t be surprised…

This is from JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimion. That’s right. You heard it clearly. This financial crisis is just “the type of thing that happens every five, ten, etc.” Do you mean the financial crisis that destroyed a large proportion of the value of American homes, came within an inch of destroying the international banking system and has put millions of people out of work? That one? It seems to me the others were a lot smaller – much, much, much smaller. I hope he is better in other aspects of teaching his children. The story of Santa Claus has more validity.

Mr. Dimion has an MBA from Harvard Business School. You see, my students are just as smart as their students. The evidence is clear. I don’t think I could get any of my students to claim that the current financial crisis is a kind of “seasonal” phenomenon and that we shouldn’t be surprised when the elite educated bankers screw up on in a manner barely conceivable in fiction.

James Pilant

(First published in January of this year.)