Occupy Wall Street To March To Jamie Dimon's House!

The Occupy Wall Street protesters are headed uptown. According to reports, protesters are planning to take their grievances straight to the homes of the bankers (and other rich folks). CNN is reporting that "organizers are planning a march on Tuesday that will visit the homes of JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, billionaire David Koch, hedge fund honcho John Paulson, Howard Milstein and News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch." Whoa! The organizers are targeting these millionaires and billionaires because of a "willingness to hoard wealth at the expense of the 99%." This is an interesting development, although I am not sure how they came up with their list of targets. Some, to be sure, appear to be more deserving of criticism than others. Jamie Dimon, for example, is probably the least wealthy of this group, but the most culpable. He is the most powerful banker in the United States, and as such, has been working to fight against much of the regulatory legislation that has been passed in the wake of the financial crisis. To be fair, Mr Dimon is basically just doing his job, but he certainly is no friend of the people given the fact that J.P. Morgan

was able to consolidate its power as a result of the financial crisis. He is a major part of the Too Big To Fail banking cartel, and it is no surprise that the Occupy Wall Streeters aren't too pleased with him. John Paulson, on the other hand, who is one of the wealthiest people in the world, seems like kind of an unfair target despite the fact that he made billions on the housing collapse. Let me explain. Hedge funds, in the grand scheme of things, are very far down the list of the blameworthy as far as our economic situation is concerned. Yes, some managers make absolutely obscene amounts of money, but the hedge fund business model is one of voluntary exchange and free choice. No one is forcing or coercing endowments, pensions, wealthy people, etc. to give their money to a particular hedge fund to manage. If they want to pay the hefty fees that many of the top funds charge, that is their choice. It is totally voluntary, and also merit based. If you don't do well in the markets, your clients pull their money and you don't do too well financially either. Conversely, if you make good investment decisions, it is possible to pull in more assets and make more money. Hedge funds do not benefit from bailouts, monopolies, and Too Big To Fail status. They aren't quasi-backed by the government like the big banks are. When you screw up running a hedge fund, your fund closes down. When you screw up at Citigroup

, you get bailed out and get to keep your millions in bonuses that came from excessive risk taking. There is a big difference. While it is true that Paulson made billions of dollars on the housing collapse, it is hard to fault him. He was one of the few people who realized that the housing market was about to collapse, and he profited from it by betting against mortgage backed CDOs. He is not the one who created the mortgage securitization market. He isn't the one who rated bonds filled with sub-prime mortgages AAA. He didn't make any predatory loans and he didn't dupe investors worldwide into buying crappy mortgage bonds. At some point, however, he did realize what was going on and came to the conclusion that it was going to end badly. Subsequently, he did what anyone would do and attempted to make money off of his insight. For this, I don't think that we can fault Paulson. Everyone thought that he was crazy when he was making these bets. A lot of the banks who were selling him insurance on sub-prime CDOs thought they were duping him. If anything, we should have had more John Paulson's leading up to the crisis. If there had been more people saying "this is crazy, this is going to end very badly and here is why..." it is possible that something could have been done before the entire mortgage market imploded. Essentially, Occupy Wall Street should try to make some distinctions between certain individuals and institutions in showing their displeasure with the state of affairs in the United States. Furthermore, it is not really productive to demonize specific individuals, although some clearly deserve it. Rather, the focus should be more on the framework which has allowed the ultra-wealthy and big business to infiltrate every facet of government and influence legislation and regulations to their benefit at the expense of everyone else.