Mr Cooper Group Inc (COOP)

[JohnnyWinter]

JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon eats banks for breakfast

Wall Street's new Master of the Universe is a grandson of Greek immigrants straight out of Queens.

Jamie Dimon, 53, is CEO of JPMorgan Chase, a man of big bold strokes who is betting that he can turn bank and brokerage junk into solid gold for his firm and his reputation.

Just hours after lender Washington Mutual went bellyup Thursday in the biggest bank failure in history, Chase gobbled it up. There were others interested in WaMu - Citigroup and Bank of America among them - but Dimon won out with a $1.9 billion bid.


The WaMu deal includes major debt - but monster assets as well, including WaMu's 2,200 retail branches around the country and cash deposits.

It was Dimon's second big swing at the fastball of busted financial services companies in the last six months.

In March, Chase swallowed investment bank Bear Stearns and its dazzling midtown skyscraper at what analysts consider a bargain basement price, $10 a share.

Dimon's play is that with shrewd management, big cuts, sales of assets, and some help from the government, the Bear Stearns and WaMu investments will be worth more than 10 times what Chase paid for them in a few years.

Dimon has done just that - with mergers and acquisitions - more than a dozen times over the last 25 years.

In fact, he's been at it since boyhood.



His grandfather, who emigrated from Smyrna, Greece, to Queens, was a stockbroker who took Dimon's father Theodore in as a partner.

While he was in school, Jamie Dimon worked during the summertime at their New York office.

After graduating from Harvard Business School in 1982, Dimon hooked up with a family friend, Sanford Weill.

Starting with a small lender - Commercial Credit Corp. - they built an empire, acquiring Primerica, Salomon Smith Barney, Traveler Insurance and Shearson, eventually buying Citicorp.

The risk now is that Dimon miscalculated in a foundering economy, that he paid too much for WaMu's portfolio of mortgages, loans and debt and that all will fall in value in a nose-diving housing market.

However, with those acquisitions, Chase is already in a virtual tie with Bank of America as the biggest bank in the United States with an eye-popping $1 trillion in cash deposits.


And Dimon, who likes fine wine in addition to the hurly-burly of high stakes mergers, is probably the No. 1 man in U.S. finance.

"He is a great deal maker, just brilliant, a guy who pays tremendous attention to detail, to the numbers, and he is terrific at valuing assets," said a manager at rival bank Citigroup, who asked to have his name withheld.

Not everyone on Wall Street loves him.

"He's taking advantage of other people's pain and he's ruthless," said a principal at Morgan Stanley, referring to the fact that countless shareholders of Bear Stearns lost almost all of their investments while WaMu shareholders were totally wiped out, not to mention the job losses.

Still, investors and mutual fund managers quickly applauded Dimon and the WaMu deal, sending JP Morgan's shares up 11% yesterday.

Dimon wasn't available for comment yesterday, according to a JPMorgan spokesman, who added, "This is a very busy time."

Busy, in fact, is Dimon's style - along with secrecy and fastidious attention to numbers and balance sheets.

Dimon and his top aides have been quietly going over WaMu's books and talking with the bank's top executives since March, the analysts said.

"That's the way Jamie works," said the Citigroup manager. "It looks like he makes a big move in a day, but in fact, he's been studying it and planning for months." "


http://www.nydailynews.com/money/2008/09/27/2008-09-27_untitled__dimon27m-1.html



That's pretty much Dimon in a nutshell, and imo, he's hungry for WMB NOLs, and he will get them.

crunch crunch CRUNCH