This had to be the funniest thing Iād seen in months. āBack to the drawing boardā indeed. Assholes.
The schadenfreude, it burns!
You might think they would be pleased that the invisible hand of the market provided them with the list of questions that was appropriate. But I suspect in this case, as well as others, they donāt really believe in that.
They probably missed an opportunity. Often the best way to diffuse sarcastic and rhetorical questions is to address them as if they were sincere. Not that I donāt think theyāre a group of soulless demons, but they could have done better by not backing down. Also, other companies have tried and failed to do the same thing in the past, so they shouldāve been able to anticipate this outcome.
screw the invisible hand of the market, theyāre just pissed that congress didnāt ban criticizing them (the twitter version of a bailout).
Note: this is not saying āfree market capitalism would work if we had it,ā just saying āwe donāt have it and JPM wants it that wayā
No. Not these guys. You give them too much credit. They have removed themselves so far from what you and I would call ārealityā that they really didnāt see it coming.
While I get the joke, doesnāt basically the same thing happen in any āask us anythingā forum? Given that only a few questions can actually get answered, isnāt it expected that these will be questions that the answerer sees as on-topic and non-threatening? Iām surprised that they just didnāt just go ahead and answer a few of those and call it a day.
I think they were genuinely surprised and had no clue how to handle the situation any other way.
āBailout - thatās what weāre best at.ā
Complain all you want about her but Jaye P. Morgan was great on The Gong Show.
They say that nobody thinks of themselves as the bad guy, so maybe this is why they didnāt see it coming. But Iām not so sure. Many professions are aware they have an image problem (you know who you are, passengers on the B Ark) but I do believe bankers have no idea how much theyāre reviled.
I think this is exactly the most interesting aspect of this. Everyone lives in an echo chamber to some extent but itās astonishing just how disconnected you have to be from reality in order not have a sense that something like this was going to happen. Granted, my ārealityā differs from an JPM VC or even the PR maven who thought this up but I have to wonder how many people were shaking their heads saying āthis is a terrible ideaā right from the get go.
Lacking self awareness?
Serious question: why does it seem like people are now using ādiffuseā when they mean ādefuseā? Iāve seen this a lot even in professional journalism where you would think that not only would the journalists, but also their editors, know better. Seems to be a recent phenomenon, because I donāt remember seeing this before last year. I donāt mean to pick on you, but Iād be interested in knowing how you came to believe this is the correct usage/spelling.
Itās not always entirely wrong, though - you want whatever unpleasantness youāre dealing with to be ā¦ diluted; thinned out by your counterefforts; and eventually diffused into such a low concentration that it can be ignored. āDefusingā seems to imply a more concrete counteraction, while ādiffusingā kind of fits the ābarrage of low-content misdirectionā-tactic often employed.
I wonder if they do, in fact, mean ādefuseā or if somebody started using ādiffuseā to describe a somewhat different sort of problem-management strategy.
Purely off the cuff, ādefuseā carries the sense that youāve got a single, or small number, of discrete (and intense) threats that you need to neutralize individually before they really blow up in your face (metaphorically or literally).
If you are talking about some tens of thousands of snarky twitter posts, you could describe the situation in full, and ādefuseā that; but I could also see a valid metaphor in ādiffuseā if you are treating chatter on that scale like smoke or noxious dust: not something you bother dealing with particle by particle; but where you just turn on the extractor fans or ad-buys that somehow imply that JP Morgan makes happy puppies playing with smiling children possible until the concentration dips below unpleasant levels.
Iād take issue with anyone using them as synonyms, since they arenāt; but I could be open to considering two distinct metaphorical uses, for different classes of problemā¦
Has anyone gone looking on Linkedin for someone listing their current job as āSocial media at JP Morganā?
Theyāll probably respond well to an interview request, because clearly they donāt have a fucking clue about how the world works.
I had considered that possibility, but itās such a awkward usage of the word that itās difficult to believe, especially since itās more of a stretch to use it that way in most of the contexts in which I see it. I wondered if it wasnāt a symptom of increased use of speech-to-text, but I imagine the reality is that a well-coded algorithm would probably use ādefuseā in these contexts. Maybe itās just a commonly misused word like phased/fazed, reign/rein, cache/cachet, and shoe-in/shoo-in (all of which also annoy the heck out of me) that I had never noticed before.
Alternatively, it started as a mistake, but someone then thought it was idiomatic and started using it where he thought it fit.
Definitely not a session to handle via Twitter. I can see ways to make a public feedback session work ā including accepting some hard/rude questions, since as sr105 pointed out those can often be blunted and turned to advantage by giving them a more serious answer than they deserve ā but it would need to be filtered and aggregated, and questions should probably be submitted in private (rather than where everyone can see them) to keep it from becoming a self-fueling firestorm.
JP Morgan at least started by trying to use the bundled mortgage and resold risk concepts properly. They got sucked down the rathole along with everyone else, but that wasnāt where they started. Iām not delighted with them, but Iām less angry with them than I am with those who were pure quick-buck scam artistsā¦ or who believed the hype that aggregation of bad loans somehow made them better.
