JPMorgan and Goldman

Bloomberg's David Reilly has a provocative column on how Goldman is the target of all the public attention and outrage from the bank bailouts, while JPMorgan has been shielded "from questions about its own size, profits and payouts even as it reaps many of the same rewards as Goldman." The column is terrific as far as it goes, but it leaves mostly unexplored the question of why Goldman has gotten such a bad rap while doing a lot of the same things JPMorgan is doing -- making a lot of money while benefiting from taxpayer guarantees and money. One factor is the presence of former Goldman officials in posts such as Treasury secretary (Henry Paulson), White House chief of staff (Joshua Bolten) and chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (Stephen Friedman). That personnel overlap tends to support the Goldman conspiracy theories (for my general take on Goldman Sachs, see the long Goldman article). But if JPMorgan got essentially the same treatment without the personnel overlap, it tends to undermine those conspiracy theories. Not that one can't spin similar theories about JPMorgan -- Timothy Geithner used to work for Henry Kissinger at Kissinger Associates, and biographies of Mr. Kissinger disclose that he is a member of JPMorgan's "international council." The other factor worth thinking about is whether, or how, anti-Semitism plays a role in the public perception and treatment of the historically Jewish Goldman and the historically not Jewish JPMorgan. I don't have answers on that; I just find it worth raising in response to the Reilly column.