JPMorgan: Give Jamie Dimon a Break

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Reports out over the past couple of days indicate JPMorgan Chase(JPM) CEO Jamie Dimon looked like he wanted to vomit when told of his firm's now-infamous $2 billion trading loss. According to The Wall Street Journal Dimon "didn't sleep well for the next several nights ... and fought the anxiety by getting up very early to exercise and head into the office."

TheStreet contributor Susan Antilla did an excellent job discussing reports that JPM Chief Investment Officer Ina Drew, who is a woman, "tearfully offered to resign" and "cried -- a bunch of times" through the whole ordeal.

The entire debacle and the reaction to it, particularly these discussions of emotion, triggered me to think along a couple of different lines. First, like Antilla, I considered displays of emotion. And, second, I assessed misdirected emotion.

Don't blame Dimon or Drew for your mistakes

Investors have loads of outrage for Dimon, Drew, the "London Whale" and big banks once again. And, really, it's all kind of funny. Consider the following excerpt from a Bloomberg story on shareholder lawsuits filed against Dimon and JPMorgan: "The defendant Dimon went so far as to publicly and vigorously dispute that any investment safety regulation was necessary for financial institutions such as JPMorgan, because the company was purportedly so careful with its investments that no such regulations would be necessary," James Baker, a California resident, said in his complaint. "All of the individual defendants knew this was simply not the case."

Here's a classic case of blaming others for your own mistakes.