Trump Reaches Out To Jamie Dimon To Head Treasury

Donald Trump has reached out to Jamie Dimon, head of JP Morgan Chase, for top job at the Treasury. Per Reuters:

A senior person on President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team contacted JPMorgan Chase & Co Chief Executive Jamie Dimon to see if he would be interested in being U.S. Treasury secretary, a person familiar with the matter said on Thursday.

It is unclear how Dimon responded, said the person, who was not authorized to speak publicly. Dimon has said multiple times in the past that he is not interested in the job – most recently in September.

If you need to brush up on Jamie Dimon, here’s the milk and toast. Seems like a cool master of the universe for a libor rigging London Whaling kinda guy who sailed through the fallout of the Financial Crisis relatively unscathed. After finding out that Citigroup picked Obama’s 2008 cabinet, we have to scrutinize every single one of Trump’s picks. To that end, the Secretary of the Treasury is a very important job. Not only is this cabinet member the key economic advisor to the President, they automatically get a seat on the National Security Council, as well as 5th position in the line of succession. Assuming that tapping Dimon is in the vein of letting one of the guys involved in the credit crisis help clean up the mess, we need to consider the wisdom of Trump’s decision in the context of the unique and still vulnerable position we (the world) are currently working our way through. I can imagine several scenarios that would shatter the thin veneer of confidence in our banking system, requiring another round of extreme measures and stock broker suicides. If it all goes to hell, who do we want at the battlestation, on top of that situation?

Alliances are being formed right in front of us which will be crucial to pay attention to. We need to monitor and scrutinize every single Trump appointment – not only for market signals, but to see how the future is likely to unfold. People need to know what interests are being represented, historical statements and ideologies of key appointees, and as time goes on, how Trump appears to be managing his team (to the extent we can know). This movement, after all, was all about rejecting the Status Quo. That said, the “who better qualified” argument is absolutely legitimate when it comes to economic brain surgery. You generally want the guy who’s cracked a few skulls.