Another anecdote proving why Jamie Dimon

is the man:

The subprime call--literally, a call to the head of structured products who was on vacation--came from Dimon after a meeting discussing the performance of the retail bank. In October 2006, the mortgage servicing business was reporting that late payments on subprime mortgages were rising at an alarming rate. Dimon and his team concluded that quality control had slipped at the originator level and decided to slash its holdings of subprime debt. It was this leap from the granular details to the bigger picture that enabled JP Morgan to make the right call on subprime while so many others were still rushing headlong into what was one of the hottest businesses on Wall Street.

We can't help but wonder if there are, in the Dimon and subprime story, the seeds of an even greater story defending the efficacy of the mega-bank. After all, it was the fact from a retail business that tipped Dimon off to a strategic change at the investment level. A smaller brokerage or investment bank would not have had access to this data. Maybe its not the model of mega-banks that's broken, after all.