What Jamie Dimon didn't tell you on 'Meet the Press'

Dimon continues to explain this trade away as a "hedge." It may not have been anything of the kind. First of all, a hedge reduces risk: If one investment might lose a lot of money if markets move in one direction, you create a hedge that will make money under those circumstances so your losses are limited.

Yet JPMorgan already is massively long corporate debt as a result of its normal course of business, which is lending money to corporations. A "hedge" that replicates that same position isn't a hedge at all. There's evidence that the department where the Whale worked was, in fact, replicating Morgan's real-life business of lending to corporations, but using fancy derivatives to do so -- creating a "synthetic" bank, as traders would say, without actually lending to corporate customers as real banks do.