What should Jamie Dimon do with his $8.5 million raise?

I was really worried about Jamie Dimon. The JPMorgan Chase CEO had his pay cut in half for 2012 – from $23 million to only $11.5 million. How did he manage? One shudders to think.

But not to worry. JPMorgan has now raised his pay for 2013 by 74 percent, bringing it up to $20 million. We can all breathe a sigh of relief for Jamie.

I know I will as I check my bank balance and try to figure out how to pay my heating bill, my rent, and a few other things and not have the checks bounce.

In 2012, when poor Jamie had to make do with $11.5 million, the median wage in the U.S. was $27,519 ((that means half of Americans earned more than that and half earned less!). That was down $980 from 2007. And median household income was $51,017. That was down 8.3 percent from 2007.

2007 was just before the economic crash, in which the subprime mortgage bubble created a flood of “underwater” homes and people losing their homes to foreclosure. I do seem to recall that Dimon’s JPMorgan was one of the prime architects of the subprime mortgage thing.

Oh yes, in fact, JP just reached a record settlement with the U.S. Justice Department over this – agreeing to pay $13 billion in fines for selling those deceptive mortgages. That follows a series of other settlements over JP’s misdeeds. The New York Daily News commented:

“On Dimon’s watch, JPMorgan has paid out an unprecedented $20 billion in legal settlement and penalties for banking violations that stretched from improperly gorging on the sub-prime mortgage crisis to abetting Bernie Madoff’s vast thievery.”

I guess JP has plenty of money left over to bump up Jamie’s pay by $8.5 million. Do you have suggestions for Jamie on what to do with it? Post them in “Comments” below (no vulgarity, please), or email us at contact@peoplesworld.org.

Photo: Jamie Dimon’s 2013 Christmas card, showing him and his family cavorting in their luxurious home, got a lot of flak on the Internet. Via Twitter