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Adam Sorensen in Time on Jamie Dimon's credibility As lawmakers wrote the Dodd-Frank financial reform law in 2010, JPMorgan's Jamie Dimon lobbied hard against banking regulations, with his credibility buoyed by his firm's performance during the crisis. The $2 billion they lost on a failed bet last week changes that. "[W]hile the loss doesn't threaten the bank's stability, it has irreparably damaged one of the financial industry's most valuable assets: The credibility of Dimon himself." Sorensen discusses ways new and proposed financial regulations would or wouldn't have prevented the huge loss. Dimon, he says, recognizes he's given regulators ammunition, but doesn't cede their points. "'Just because we're stupid doesn't mean everybody else was,' he said last week on a conference call disclosing the bank's losses. But that's just the problem: Dimon and his team at JPMorgan, three of whom resigned on Sunday, were supposed to be the smartest guys out there."
Jackson Diehl in The Washington Post on Obama's Russia policy It's not clear why Vladimir Putin declined an invitation to attend this week's G-8 summit at Camp David, but he has been cool toward Obama's attempts to forge a strategic partnership lately. "Obama’s fixation on a nuclear deal has prompted a major turnaround in his treatment of Putin ... What’s striking about this strategy is its disregard for the biggest foreign-policy lesson of Obama’s first term. The Arab Spring showed that 'engagement' with autocratic leaders isn't wise if their grip is slipping." The Obama administration has lobbied against the Magnitsky Bill, a proposed rebuke to Russia for its human rights record. "Now that Putin has canceled, maybe it’s time to put human rights in Russia back on the agenda."