Which leads us to the ongoing JPMorgan fiasco. (You know it's a busy news week when the story of a $9 billion trading loss gets relegated to the ninth paragraph.) When their initial $2 billion trading loss on credit derivatives was announced in May, CEO Jamie Dimon was predicting that number could double as the bank unwinds the trade and clears its position. That number may actually be closer to $9 billion. The new figure comes from an internal report from last April that showed a worst-case scenario of the loss could mean the bank will lose much more than it bargained for. The real test comes next Friday when they release their second quarter results. The smart money is on the bank losing as much from the trade as they made in profit in the quarter.

But as if that's not enough, now Dimon and the boys at JPMorgan face a fresh scandal. J.P. Morgan Ventures Energy Corp. is being sued by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission over allegations that Morgan had tried to manipulate energy prices upward in California and the Midwest. Now a federal judge is ordering the company to explain why it shouldn't turn over emails that will shed light on its role in the scandal. Another week, another black eye for the JPMorgan crew.

And in some ways that's the point. What better sign of the bankster nature of those in the hot seat than that they take beating after metaphorical beating in full view of the public, from rate-fixing scams to historical trading losses to market manipulations and yet nothing ever seems to change? The “investigative journalists” get a chance to break a big story, they play it out in the back pages of the newspaper for a few months, politicians get on their high horse and make wonderful sounding speeches about the need to rout out the rot at the heart of the system, a gold star panel is appointed to look into the problem, an ineffectual and toothless new regulatory regime is rolled out to placate whatever of the general public still remembers the problem in the first place, and everything is patched over until the next scandal erupts. Who else but organized criminals with bought-and-paid for “regulators” in their back pockets could possibly get away with such crimes?