THOMAS FERGUSON, thomas.ferguson at umb.edu
Ferguson is professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, Boston and a senior fellow of the Roosevelt Institute. He just wrote the piece “Senate Banking Chair Calls Jamie Dimon to Testify: But JPMorgan Chase is His Biggest Contributor!” about Senate Banking Committee Chair Tim Johnson of South Dakota announcing his panel would call JPMorgan Chase Chair Jamie Dimon.

Ferguson said today: “Four years ago, the failure of Lehman Brothers precipitated a world wide financial collapse. Now policymakers in Europe are weighing whether to let not a bank, but a whole country — Greece — go down the drain. We have been repeatedly told that American banks have so carefully hedged their European exposures that there is no reason to fear contagion from such a disaster. The JPMorgan Chase case raises fundamental questions about these breezy assurances and whether American bank regulators truly understand what our Too Big To Fail Banks are really up to. We cannot afford another expensive policy failure by our money-driven Congress: Senator Johnson’s committee needs to start posing searching questions not in weeks, but immediately, before American banks and their regulators are once again overtaken by events.”

Also see Ferguson’s piece on Congress and money in the Financial Times.

See Johnson’s information from the Center for Responsive Politics at OpenSecrets.org