On Topic: What have we learned from big banks?

Let the record show that more fun-loving rascals from JPMorgan Chase were back, a little more than a week ago, trying to look all chastened and grown-up, in front of the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

Douglas Braunstein, Chase's ex-chief financial officer, and Ina Drew, former chief investment officer for the mega bank's trading strategy, among others, were summoned to try, once more, to help the Senators get some sense as to how Chase lost $6.2 billion.

Their drop-by came a day after the subcommittee released a 300-page report that claimed the fiasco was the fault of Chase's top executives.

Moreover, the document contended, officers - including the previously untainted CEO Jamie Dimon - intentionally had “understated” to federal examiners last year the bank's 2012 first-quarter losses. (“Understated” is cordial choice of words.)

Investment chief Drew told the senators, when it came her turn at buck-passing, that “The number I reported (to the regulators) was the number that was given to me.” Drew had trusted those figures as they'd been compiled by “well-trained and well-educated Ph.D.s,” she offered.

She accepted no personal responsibility, and blamed the mess on a derivatives trader in London.

Sen. John McCain expressed the frustration of many who have followed the shenanigans of big bankers and Wall Street over the past half-dozen years when he asked what sort of punishment had been meted out to Chase big shots once these errors in judgment were discovered.

Braunstein replied that his own compensation had been “reduced.”

From what to what, prodded an exasperated McCain.

From $9.5 million in 2011 to $5 million in 2012, Braunstein answered.

McCain's nonverbal response, there for all to see on C-SPAN, was a mixture of incredulity and a near-loss of consciousness. He did not utter what he so clearly wanted to say.

The irony here is that this recent performance comes 80 years to the month after passage of the Emergency Banking Relief Act, pushed through by then-President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and 100 newly installed Democratic members of Congress.

During the grim, economically shattered days of the Great Depression and after a procession of bank failures, the Act enabled the president to seize “absolute control over the national finances and foreign exchange” in case of a national emergency. It also led the way for a later bill that established the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.

Many Americans then started dragging their money out from under their mattresses and putting it back into their local banks.

In his first inaugural speech, given only five days before passage of the Emergency Banking Relief Act, and with his hand on his family's Dutch-language Bible, FDR had declared that, “The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization.

“We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths: The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.”

Not everyone agreed with that philosophy in 1933, of course. And clearly a lot of folk have no intention of doing so today, either.