Jamie Dimon's Been Writing Letters Again

We found out a couple of months back that JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon had been asking fellow CEOs John Thain (Merrill Lynch) and John Mack (Morgan Stanley), among others, not to take avantage of the turmoil surrounding his acquisition of Bear Stearns by enticing away key staff. Well now, according to The Financial Times, Jamie has been personally writing to 'more than 30 clients, rivals and vendors', asking them to consider Bear staff if they have any appropriate open positions.

Well, we tried to get hold of a copy of the letter, but were unsuccessful. So we thought we'd compose something along the lines of what may have been sent. Here goes:

'Dear Johns (Thain & Mack),

This is not a 'Dear Johns' letter, so please don't ignore.

You may remember, a few weeks back, I had a quiet word with you and asked you to instruct your troops not to go trying to snatch away any of 'our' Bear Stearns brokers until we had worked out which of them were key to the future success of our operation. As I said at the time, having paid all that money for Bear ($1.2bn), I wouldn't want any of those valuable assets to be encouraged to walk out the door.

Well, we have now completed a thorough analysis of all Bear employees, and have identified those we don't want to keep. Do you want any of those we are going to get shot of ? I appreciate, of course, that you are currently going through your own problems (in fact your asset writedowns are significantly higher than ours, ha ha), but you'd be doing me a great favour by taking on some of these staff. We're getting so much stick because we're laying off thousands of them. It's doing my head in. Don't people realise that it's going to cost us around $9bn to put this deal to bed ? 

By the way, I just can't understand why everyone is saying that we got Bear for approximately the value of its Madison Avenue building ($1.1bn), that we'll save $3bn as we won't have to build an investment banking HQ in New York now, that Bear will add $1bn to our first-quarter profits and that the firm will strengthen our capital base by $11bn. What's that got to do with the price of Bear Stearns' shares ? People are so unreasonable. Why can't they understand that I rescued Bear ? So what if we get rid of most of the staff, change the culture and bag their best clients for ourselves ? Without me, remember, Bear just wouldn't have survived!

Anyway, I digress. So, if you do want anyone we don't, please let me know. I can be contacted via 'our' new Madison Avenue address (I'm just trying to work out if my new office is big enough).

Yours,

Jamie

PS Jim Cayne says that he's not interested in another job, so please don't bother to ask if he's available for a switch'.

In all seriousness, and to be fair to JPMorgan and Jamie Dimon, the firm has worked hard to compile a database of over 3,000 vacant positions across the financial markets industry, and is doing its best to find displaced Bear staff alternative employment.

To send this article to a friend, please use the 'E-Mail' button immediately under the title.