The Man Who Considered It Appropriate

There comes a point in every life when you realize the people running the really important things are not, as you suspected in childhood, a separate category of person. They're just the same silly, flawed, leaky vessels as the rest of us, only with better letterhead.

I bring this up because the news has given us a fine specimen.

Jes Staley spent more than thirty years at JPMorgan Chase and later ran Barclays. In July he sat down with lawmakers to talk about his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein. The transcript came out Wednesday. And I want you to consider, as you read along, what it means when a man whose job was to guard the vault tells you he was just being neighborly with the man standing outside it.

Here's what Staley admitted to, under oath, in a closed-door voluntary interview. He shared confidential, market-sensitive information from inside JPMorgan with Epstein. Not casual conversation. We're talking about the bank's private communications with the Federal Reserve during the 2008 financial crisis. Forty-four billion dollars in private bank inflows over a two-week window. Details of pending deals. His own compensation. The state of play around his eventual move to Barclays.

Now, I've been thinking about Big Earl, who runs the grain elevator here in Chamberlain's Bend. Earl knows everyone's crop yields because he watches the trucks come in. He knows who's had a good year and who's about to have a hard winter. This is not information Earl solicits. It arrives on its own, the way weather does. And Earl, to his credit, does not go around telling other farmers what he saw on the scale. Not because anyone told him not to. Because there's an understanding.

The difference between Earl and Staley is that Earl didn't choose to know what he knows. Staley chose to share what he knew. And what he shared wasn't gossip about who planted too much corn. It was the kind of information that, in the wrong hands, could move markets and make a man very wealthy if he knew which way the wind was blowing before the wind got there.

Staley defended himself by saying he believed he had the authority to share information when he considered it appropriate. I've been turning that sentence over like a stone in my pocket. He considered it appropriate. Not his supervisors. Not the compliance department. Not the shareholders. Him. He considered it appropriate.

I think about Pastor Holmgren sometimes, and the way he explains certain failures of character to the confirmation kids. He says it's not usually the big dramatic thing. It's the small thing you talk yourself into. The thing that seems reasonable in the moment because you've already decided the rules don't quite apply to your situation. You're special. Your friendship is special. The normal lines don't apply to you.

Epstein had been convicted of sex offenses in 2008. The same year Staley was sharing Federal Reserve communications with him. The bank knew enough about Epstein to flag him as a high-risk client. Staley himself told Epstein about the bank's concerns over his large cash withdrawals. And yet the information kept flowing. Staley signed documents related to the Epstein trust in 2014, and a trust amendment in 2015, and was named as a trustee of the estate, though he later declined to serve because, he said, he didn't want to be associated with it.

I want to be fair. Staley says he didn't know about the crimes. He says the relationship was professional. And I suppose it's possible to sit next to a fire and not notice the heat. People do it all the time. But you can't sit next to a fire for fifteen years and then claim you thought it was a particularly warm rock.

The House oversight committee has been busy with this. They've talked to Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Goldman Sachs counsel Kathryn Ruemmler. That's a lot of important people with a lot of important memories about a man who, by every account, was either a financial genius or a man who knew where the money was and who to befriend near it. Possibly both. Probably both.

Here's what I keep coming back to. In a small town, when someone does something they shouldn't have, the community has a way of sorting it out. Not perfectly. Not even quickly. But eventually the truth surfaces, because there are only so many places to hide and everyone knows where you keep your ladder. In the world of private banking and nine-figure estates, the vaults are bigger and the ladders are longer. And the people guarding the vaults sometimes decide, all on their own, that the rules are more like suggestions.

JPMorgan declined to comment. Staley's lawyers did not respond to a request for comment. Of course they didn't. There's nothing to say when the transcript says it all.

I don't know what happens next. Congressional investigations have a way of producing heat and very little bread. But I do know this. The next time someone tells you the people at the top have special judgment, special reason to be trusted with the keys to everything, remember that one of them shared the Federal Reserve's private communications with a convicted sex offender because he considered it appropriate.

Aunt Vi would say that's not a system failing. That's a man failing. And then she'd say the system was built to catch exactly that, and didn't.

She'd be right, too. She usually is.

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